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Bill Sloman
Guest
On Monday, March 30, 2020 at 5:57:51 PM UTC+11, whit3rd wrote:
Revolutions do tend to develop into dictatorships. The French fought their revolutionary war while they were working on their constitution, and the victory at Valmy in 1792 emboldened the more extremist factions, who executed Louis XVI in January 1793,and got more rabid as Napoleon chalked up the victories that eventually let him stage his coup.
The American paper-pushing was a moderate enlightenment exercise. Every constitution since then has been based on radical enlightenment ideas, which meant they got the fundamentals right, which does help.
And of course they've been able to look at the bits the US got wrong, and do them better. My secondary school lessons on what the Australian constitution was designed to do had quite a bit on why it was different from the American one.
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Bill Sloman, Sydney
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 8:09:11 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
The US constitution is a venerable antique. It should have been revoked - and replaced with something better - quite a while ago. The one you've got was a second try anyway. It replaced the original articles of association, which were even worse.
But in the same time period, France reorganized using the Terror, followed by imperial Napoleonic militarism. The paper-pushing was ultimately a more satisfying way to proceed.
Revolutions do tend to develop into dictatorships. The French fought their revolutionary war while they were working on their constitution, and the victory at Valmy in 1792 emboldened the more extremist factions, who executed Louis XVI in January 1793,and got more rabid as Napoleon chalked up the victories that eventually let him stage his coup.
The American paper-pushing was a moderate enlightenment exercise. Every constitution since then has been based on radical enlightenment ideas, which meant they got the fundamentals right, which does help.
And of course they've been able to look at the bits the US got wrong, and do them better. My secondary school lessons on what the Australian constitution was designed to do had quite a bit on why it was different from the American one.
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Bill Sloman, Sydney