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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

This is tremendously foolish reasoning. You're basically saying, "after we burn everything down, people will naturally come to the obvious conclusion that my politics are the Objectively Correct ones".

Which... no. What people want first and foremost is safety and stability, and after everything burns down, the easiest way to get that is by putting an authoritarian strongman into power. Which, historically, has been the outcome of almost every large-scale revolution except the American one.

(As an aside, I don't know if you're American, but if you are, I will note that an unfortunate effect of the American Revolution is that it tends to give Americans a very optimistic view of how well revolutions work out. They don't really realize that theirs is a miraculous outlier; it's almost the only revolution which didn't put an authoritarian government into power for years or decades)

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Maybe if America hadn't gotten that optimistic view from a 'good' revolution, America would not be the dominant superpower but the world as a whole would be better off.

For instance, I am starting to think it was a mistake to 'solve' the ozone hole problem in the 1980s so quickly and decisively. I've heard some people try to dismiss climate change with remember all those other things that were going to kill us but didn't like nuclear war and the ozone hole. Maybe if it had gotten bad enough that the effects were obviously terrible and it left a generational scar on humanity, then we'd have an easier time negotiating bigger problems, like climate change mitigation.

If the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, then it seems likely to me that an even greater tragedy would have been struck later. Maybe it was the only thing that kept us from an actual nuclear war.

I've been trying to figure what makes America the outlier. One could say egalitarian Enlightenment values, but that didn't prevent the French Revolution from turning into a bloodbath and eventual authoritarianism. Do you know of any theories to explain the difference, well-accepted or not?

I've thought about it a lot and seen lots of theories attempting to invoke this or that historical/material/philosophical reason, but honestly I think America just got lucky with George Washington. Apparently after his second term, lots of people wanted to make him a permanent ruler (which would indicate that post-Revolution America as a whole wasn't really any more resistant to authoritarianism than anyone else), and he refused. After that, the hero worship of him established a social norm against tyrants which became part of the country’s foundational mythos.

It's not exactly a pleasant thing to contemplate, because it basically means the American Revolution was a fluke, but none of the other explanations I've seen are more compelling.

Simple: disparate group of elites that realized monarchy has too many pitfalls and so they worked to create a better system where no one group could so easily dominate the others.

The war itself went well due to the huge geographic separation and the support from countries that wanted to end British dominance. Local governments were already in place, nothing local was "burnt down" except the British tax assayers office, roughly speaking.

I don't disagree, but that somewhat kicks the ball down the road: why didn't a similar disparate group of elites do something similar in France, or any of the other myriad instances of failed revolution? (As an ignorant layperson, I'm sure there are revolutions in recent history that successfully cloned the separation-of-powers model, but there have still been countless revolutions in the past two centuries that skewed authoritarian rapidly, whether or not they wore democratic costumes.)

And the obvious corollary that motivates the question: if one wanted to maximize the odds of a positive outcome to the next revolution (independently of whether one thinks that's a good thing), what ideas/technologies/institutions/etc would we want to promote or enact now, either from within the revolution itself, or in the surrounding cultural ecosystem?

Because France didn't have America's "empty" land...

Re America: that sounds like exceptionalism to me. It's not an outlier. A bunch of rich dudes wanted to avoid taxes (fair enough), and to continue slaving and stealing indigenous land.

Plenty of countries that used to have dictators (absolute monarchs) were able to limit them to merely symbolic figures, and bring in constitutions and strong parliaments. Some of these were also revolutions. See most of Europe and their colonies. Yes some have since regressed, but there's nothing particularly special about the USA besides the fact that it didn't have quite as much entrenched power, at first, and virtually unlimited ability to expand. So it was special in terms of it's early flexibility, but ever since it expanded to fill all its available space, seems to be pretty non-special.

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