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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The interesting one to watch out for is how often democracies form with the support of an existing democracy - I only have a loose understanding of the history but France seemed to have an outsized role in the US becoming what it is today. The failures (USSR, Republic of China for example) where democracy doesn't take on a wide scale are probably also interesting studies.

The key problem in setting up a democracy is that people are, on average, pretty dense. Doing things by vote doesn't cause stupid people to make good decisions. There is a real cultural element where the people involved have to be strongly against solving domestic problems with force, for evolution over revolution and also big believers in general liberty (otherwise you just get two factions fighting to use the big stick of government against the other).

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Re: France and the United States, you have the timeline mixed up a bit. France & the French intellectuals of course played a large role in the American revolution, but it was America that became a democracy first. Lafayette, one of the key players in the French Revolution, served under Washington and lead troops in the US before coming back to France and playing a key role in the founding of the First Republic.

I don’t think France successfully became a democracy at all during the Revolution; the First Republic quickly fell into the mass murdering reign of terror under Robespierre, who was ousted by the Directory, who remained in power for four years until Napoleon’s coup. Lafayette himself was basically driven out of France by the radicals.

On the other hand, Britain itself was already fairly democratic by 1776, and the thirteen colonies had their own representative government institutions. The point of complaint was that the British were simply ignoring those institutions and flagrantly violating the traditional rights that Englishmen were entitled to. And a lot of the British were sympathetic to this viewpoint so there wasn’t the political capital to crack down on the rebellion as harshly as Britain would do in various other colonies at other points in time.

And aside from Lafayette, the French monarchy—the same absolute monarchy the Revolution sought to overthrow—was the regime that supported American independence, mostly out of “enemy of my enemy is my friend” considerations.

Just to go further down the historical-nuance rabbit hole: France had been an absolute monarchy, under Louis XVI's grandfather. Both Louis XV and Louis XVI were reformers (which arguably created the conditions for revolutionary sentiment to coalesce), and XVI accepted (more or less willingly, depending on your point of view) a role as a constitutional monarch modeled on the British crown. That whole governmental model / regime fell apart, of course, and cue the reign of terror, but the First Republic was an attempt by most of the power bases in France at something more enduring.

> The interesting one to watch out for is how often democracies form with the support of an existing democracy

The more interesting one is how often a democracy can survive against democratic superpower wishes. I.e, during the cold war era, the US helped taking down more democratic governments than the USSR itself. That is a bit of ironic remark. People tend to forget that the US didn't like democracies outside its sphere of influence in the last century.

I am sure this legacy gets blind eye when people usually talk about democracy and why many people doesn't like it. The scars are still alive til this day (Iran is the prime example here).

Iran had already ceased to be a democracy by the time the coup happened. That was actually one of the precipitating causes for the coup, which had a ton of popular support at the time. Mossadegh was essentially a dictator ruling by means of emergency powers at the time he was overthrown, and even before that point, he had also interfered with the 1952 parliamentary election by stopping the counting of votes once the minimum quorum of MP’s had been elected.

> That was actually one of the precipitating causes for the coup

Are you suggesting that the CIA was worried about democracy in Iran so they ousted him to give the absolute power to the king?

They just happened to ignore the fact that mossadegh nationalized oil right before the us and uk led the coup

No, and if you hadn’t disingenuously quoted me out of context, that would have been obvious. The complete sentence you should have quoted was: “That was actually one of the precipitating causes for the coup, which had a ton of popular support at the time.” By which I meant popular support within Iran.

It turns out that Iranians have agency of their own and don’t just do whatever the CIA tells them to do. In fact the role of the CIA in the 1953 coup has been deliberately overstated by multiple sides, including the CIA itself: https://web.archive.org/web/20150603235034/https://www.forei...

But even if you still want to blame the CIA, they still needed enough supporters inside of Iran who were angry at Mossadegh, and one of the reasons they were angry at Mossadegh is because he had turned himself into a dictator.

I quoted the important part of your point. Adding that it did have popular support is a fact that is not established. The CIA and US media propaganda spread false reports about the situation then and still to this day. i.e this article you attached is a pure piece of western propaganda. And even if that was a reason, the reason why US abd CIA involved is much more obvious. It is the oil right getting nationalized. All other points are just cover up.

Edit: I replied before you edit your comment

I’m not arguing about why the US and UK supported the coup. I’m pointing out that Iran was no longer a democracy when the coup happened regardless. I’m also pointing out that if Iran had remained democratic, the shah and the military would have had no reason to carry out the coup whether or not the US wanted it to happen.

> The CIA and US media propaganda spread false reports about the situation then and still to this day. i.e this article you attached is a pure piece of western propaganda.

That claim is completely inconsistent with the CIA and US government repeatedly and publicly claiming responsibility/taking credit for the coup.

>> The interesting one to watch out for is how often democracies form with the support of an existing democracy - I only have a loose understanding of the history but France seemed to have an outsized role in the US becoming what it is today.

I'm not sure that you could say that France was a democracy in the late 18th century (1770's, 1780's) - the critical time for the creation of the US and its form of government.

ROC is a democracy today (although it was a one party state with the KMT for a long time), do you mean the PRC or am I misunderstanding your comment?

you forgot the word People's

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