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?
