The Great American Paradox

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Many people believe that the United States got freedom and democracy, liberty and justice for all from the violence of the American Revolution.

There are several problems with this belief. Perhaps most important is that it suggests that the American Revolution is different from nearly all the other violent revolutions of human history, which rarely contributed to democracy.^[1]

Why does the American Revolution seems so different from other violent revolutions like the French, Latin American, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Algerian, Vietnamese, Laotian, and Cambodian revolutions, each of which arguably replaced one brutal repressive system with another?

How was the US so lucky to have gotten George Washington and not someone like Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot?

The land claimed by the 13 British colonies in America that declared independence from Britain on July 4, 1776, was roughly a third of that of the contemporary Spanish colony of New Spain, most of which became Mexico in 1821. Since then, the US grew substantially, while Mexico shrank. Why?

Simón Bolívar, the acknowledged “Liberator” of much of Latin America complained shortly before he died in 1830 that,

"America is ungovernable ... . He who serves a revolution plows in the sea. ... This country will fall unfailingly into the hands of ... tyrants".^[2]

How did the US avoid the level of internal conflict that contributed to the dismemberment and disturbingly slow economic growth that plagued Mexico and other countries after independence?

By some accounts, these differences can be explained by three things:^[3]

1. Advanced democracy before the revolution: The British colonies that rebelled in 1776 already had possibly the most advanced democratic culture on the planet at that time:^[4] Almost 60 percent of adult white males could vote in 1776, and the Revolution did not change that.^[5] By comparison, the British Prime Minister in 1765 said that less than 5% of the population of Great Britain itself was directly represented in Parliament.^[6]

1.1. This democratic culture made it easier for the leaders in the early United States to settle their disagreements in ways that maintained their cohesion.

1.2. Research by Chenoweth and Stephan identified 55 major successful violent revolutions in the twentieth century. These revolutions on average had no substantive impact on democracy. Similarly, the American Revolution had no impact on democracy.^[7] In this regard, the American Revolution was not different from other violent revolutions.^[8]

2. Citizen-directed subsidies for news: Citizen-directed subsidies for newspapers provided by the US Postal Service Act of 1792 helped limit political corruption and encourage literacy, both of which contributed to the cohesion and economic growth of the brand new United States of America.

3. Washington did not win the Revolution: George Washington knew that he did not win the American Revolution.^[9] His role was keeping an army in the field, irritating the British enough to keep them doing stupid things. Washington was almost captured on Manhattan island.^[10] He was perpetually short of supplies. His own state of Virginia often could not send their allotment of troops, because they were needed for slave patrols.^[11] Many in Washington's army often did not have shoes. This made it hard for them to move, especially in the winter, because the British could easily follow the blood in the snow.^[12] It's difficult to know in war how much support each side has among the population. However, by 1778 the British had lost several battles in the north and decided they had more support in the south.^[13] In late 1778 they captured Savannah, Georgia.^[14] And in 1780 they defeated continental armies at Charlston and Camden, South Carolina.^[15] Washington sent General Nathanial Greene into South Carolina to collect the remnants of the defeated continental army and organize the partisans. Greene adopted a guerrilla war strategy, nipping at the heels of the British army, then running away. This pulled the British beyond their lines of supply. To continue pursuing Greene, they took what they needed at gun point from the locals, manufacturing recruits for Greene and Washington in the process. After winning several battles in South Carolina, the British General Cornwallis decided he could no longer stay there and retreated to North Carolina, where the pattern was repeated. Cornwallis continued winning battles and manufacturing enemies faster than he could neutralize them. In 1781, he left North Carolina for Yorktown, Virginia.^[16] The French Navy then bottled up the Chesapeake and prevented Cornwallis from being resupplied or evacuated while the French Army paid Washington's army to come with them to Yorktown and defeat the British.^[17]

But there were also nonviolent actions at that time^[18] that threatened the financial and social status of the colonial elites.^[19] The destruction of property in the Boston Tea Party increased support for hard liners in London,^[20] who then passed the so-called "Intolerable Acts". These included placing Massachusetts under martial law. Nonviolent protests all across Massachusetts closed the King's courts, which prevented creditors from confiscating property of debtors.^[21] Demands for greater power sharing continued into the writing of state constitutions that followed the Declaration of Independence, at least in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.^[22] Democracy threatened the aristocracy in both the brand new United States and in Britain.

John Adams, a leader of the American Revolution and the second President of the US after Washington, wrote later, "What do we mean by the Revolution? The war? That was no part of the revolution; it was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected from 1760–1775, in the course of fifteen years, before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington."^[23]

Beyond that, there were 26 British colonies in America at that time, and only half of them rebelled.^[24] If the Quakers and other pacifist groups in the colonies at that time had managed to limit the violence initiated by Washington and others, the British aristocracy might have had bigger problems in the colonies that did NOT rebel and among the more than 95 percent of the population of England that was not represented in Parliament.

It is impossible to know what would have happened if the American Revolution had stayed nonviolent.

• However, we know that in Chenoweth and Stephan's study of all the major violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts of the twentieth century, 53% of the nonviolent campaigns were successful, while less than half that, 25%, of the violent revolutions succeeded.^[25]
• More importantly, the nonviolent campaigns on average helped improve democracy, unlike the violent campaigns.

Let us now compare the US experience with New Spain and its successors, primarily Mexico. They had neither (1) a comparable tradition of local self governance nor (2) a comparably subsidized and diverse adversarial press, discussed further below, nor (3) a chief executive with the understanding that George Washington seemed to have had of the limits of his own abilities.

These three points provide a plausible explanation for why the US grew by a factor of more than four while Mexico shrank, losing territory to the US in the north and to new countries between Guatemala and Venezuela to the south.^[26]

This is also consistent with the database of all the major violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts of the twentieth century created by Chenoweth and Stephan, previously mentioned.^[27]

In general, gratuitous violence -- collateral damage -- strengthens the will of the opposition to resist and drives people off the sidelines to support the aggrieved opposition.

More recently, in the US war in Vietnam and now in the War on Terror, the US has arguably followed the British strategy for victory in the American Revolution.

It is hard to win people's hearts and minds by killing them.

This did not work for the British in the American Revolution nor for the Americans in Vietnam.

And it has not so far worked in the War on Terror.

We next look more closely at the US Postal Service Act of 1792.

The US Postal Service Act of 1792 is not well known but may be the single greatest achievement of the men who organized and led the American Revolution: Under this act, newspapers were delivered up to 100 miles for a penny, when first class postage was between six and twenty-five cents depending on distance.

• The revolutionaries who passed that act were upset that King George's postal service censored their mail.
• They believed that this new experiment in republican government would likely NOT succeed without an informed electorate.^[28]

These were citizen-directed subsidies for media. As such they make it difficult for government bureaucrats and others with power to censor the information available to the public.

They amounted to roughly 0.2 percent of US Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to media scholars McChesney and Nichols.^[29] With average annual income (GDP per capita) in 2017 of roughly $60,000, a subsidy of 0.2 percent would be $120 per year per person, which is roughly what McChesney and Nichols recommended.

This subsidy for newspapers seems to have impacted the evolution of the US political economy during its first 70-100 years in two important ways:

• It limited political corruption.
• It encouraged literacy.

Both of these factors tend to increase economic growth.^[30]

Comparing the post-revolutionary experience of the US with that of the other violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts mentioned above suggests the following:

• Democracy, liberty and justice for all would likely have advanced quicker if the American revolutionaries had limited themselves to nonviolent actions.^[31]
• The citizen-directed subsidies for journalism provided by the US Postal Service Act of 1792 and the relative democratic character of the new US likely made substantially greater contributions to extending democracy and justice for all than the violence of the American Revolution.

Why have so many other revolutionaries been more likely to follow Washington than Gandhi?

A partial answer to this question appears in research in recent decades into how people think and make decisions, led by Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for inventing many ways of documenting how people think. He's a psychologist, not an economist. He won the prize in economics for establishing that standard economics models of the “rational person” do not adequately describe how people actually think.

In particular, people make most decisions based on what comes most readily to mind -- the “fast thinking” in Kahneman's (2011) Thinking, Fast and Slow.^[32] Humans are capable of conscious deliberation, searching for alternative evidence, etc. -- Kahneman's “slow thinking”. However, we rarely do enough of that when we should. This has profound implications for understanding virtually every aspect of human behavior.

• For example, in violent conflict, collateral damage that “they” commit proves to us that “they” are subhuman or at best criminally misled and must be resisted by any means necessary.
• Meanwhile, collateral damage that we commit is unfortunate but necessary -- from our perspective. But, of course, it proves to “them” that we are subhuman or at best criminally misled, and must by resisted by any means necessary.^[33]

The implications of this analysis of “The Great American Paradox” are substantial. Most obviously, it affects the inferences that potential revolutionaries everywhere might draw from US history. For example, how might the world be different today if more of the violent revolutionaries of the twentieth century tried to follow Gandhi rather than Washington?

This article also has more subtle implications for gun control and for foreign and defense policies of countries like the US. There are also implications for how media organizations should be funded and governed. Further discussions of these questions are beyond the scope of this article.

• Erica Chenoweth; Maria J. Stephan (2011). Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (in en). Columbia University Press. Wikidata Q88725216. ISBN 978-0-231-15683-7. . For their data see, Chenoweth, Erica, NAVCO Data Project, Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security & Diplomacy, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver, retrieved 2017-03-17. For further discussion of this work, see Winning the War on Terror.

• Resistance, Politics, and the American Struggle for Independence, 1765–1775 (in en). Lynne Rienner Publishers. 1986. Wikidata Q7315585. ISBN 978-0-931477-75-1. OCLC 13008252. .

• McChesney, Robert W.; Nichols, John (2016), People get ready: The fight against a jobless economy and a citizenless democracy, Nation Books, ISBN 9781568585215