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Lots of good points in the article, a few I take issue with. The author very properly points out that the difference between the American, French, and Russian revolutions is that the American one wasn't a social revolution; that is, those classes making up the country ended up pretty much intact afterward. I prefer "War of Independence" for precisely this reason. The objectives of the American revolution were precise and sharply-defined. We didn't have a clergy or an aristocracy to butcher (that part we confined to opposing native tribes and our fellow citizens). Our realignment of government was, in fact, far more subtle - crown colonies became state governments, which came gradually, and many would say too much so, under the sway of a central federal government. Nothing like that happened in France or Russia.

I think that too little attention has been paid to what, precisely, the settlers of the New World were running from. The history of Europe was one of nearly constant warfare from the earliest days - what the Pilgrims fled would become the Thirty Years' War shortly after they bade farewell to their old countries, in the meantime hoping to avoid religious conflict in the Netherlands, of all places, itself embroiled in 80 years' warfare against the Habsburgs which would not be settled until 1648. At which point England would plunge into its own civil wars. By comparison, unsettled wilderness populated by "savages" looked pretty good.

It didn't stop there. The French and Indian War was, in fact, four wars, each of which started in Europe: King William's war (that would be the same William of Orange who was the victor in the Glorious Revolution in 1688), Queen Anne's war, King George's war, and finally the Seven Years' War whose New World tendrils sent a young George Washington riding toward Canada. These were, respectively, the War of the League of Augsburg, or Nine Years' War, the War of Spanish Succession, the War of Austrian Succession, and the little problem Frederick the Great had with Maria Theresa of Austria.

The point is that there was a very strong element in simply having done with European complications by 1763 - none of those wars were started in the New World and the complaint in the Declaration of Independence that King George III had armed savage tribes against the settlers was not only true but only part of the whole story. The English taxation was, in part, to recover costs they had incurred in the Seven Years' War; the American resentment was that they had fought in it as well and didn't owe any outsiders a dime. When the very minimal Stamp Act was instituted the British rightfully considered it a token, and the Americans the same - it was truly taxation without representation, and that's all it took. Pitt knew this. And so, in the end, did George III, who was no monster but had to look to the validity of crown power at a time when that was to be challenged as never before. This was little more than a century since an English King lost his head, after all. It was no game.

That it ended the way it did is a credit to all involved, I think. The French never did solve it, vacillating between various Louises and Napoleons until late 19th century. The Russians solved it by killing everyone and embracing a new aristocracy more authoritarian than the old. The Americans squabbled about the proper relationship of citizen to state, state to federation. It was in no sense the same thing.

The reason for it all, I suggest, was twofold: first, a sense that Americans really were a separate people even if we were by no means homogeneous, and second, that a group of men with simply astonishing political acumen stepped forward to lead the thing. I am by no means being chauvinistic in observing that such minds as Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, Mason, Henry, both Adamses, the list goes on and on, were something as refined as anything the Old World could offer at the time and without the strictures of an existing class structure that had to be broken in blood elsewhere. Some of this was a product of the New World society that engendered it, most of it was sheer luck. God has been very good to us.

All IMHO and I should, as always, be grateful for correction.

I look at those Founding Fathers and don’t see a single political leader today, of either party, who’d be worthy to be a footman for one of those men. All seemed to have a grasp on human nature—it’s fallibility and capability—which no one has today.

It’s telling that neither party insists on the checks and balances in new legislation—which all of the Founders took for granted (and which have allowed our republic to last so long...).

Unrestricted government power—the very thing our constitution so carefully tried to subvert—is slowly (and not so slowly) coming in full force.

One party, with the Media and the Academy loudly cheering and propagandizing, gleefully rushes into tyranny, while the other party dim-wittedly goes along with it—so as not to look stupid.