It seems to me that Americans’ support for revolutions is entirely misplaced. To begin with, as a status-quo power in the international system, the U.S. has little geopolitically to gain from the instability and large-scale changes that are the hallmarks of modern revolutions.

More importantly, even the normative considerations that undergird Americans’ support for revolutions are based on misperceptions. For example, many Americans look favorably on revolutions today because America itself won its independence from England in a war that became known in the U.S. as the American Revolution. Since the American Revolution is unanimously seen as a positive, many Americans assume that revolutions today will also improve the societies in which they occur.

Despite its name, however, the American Revolution was not a revolution. At most, it was a war of national liberation. For the better part of a century before the war, American colonial elites effectively ruled the colonies under the British policy of salutary neglect. As England’s fiscal woes worsened following the French and Indian War, the Crown tried to crack down on the colonies in order to extract more benefits from its ownership of them. Most of the colonial elites objected to these policy changes, such as having to pay higher taxes to the monarch, and eventually convinced most of the colonial population to fight a war to free them from England’s increasing demands. Following the independence war, however, the same elites who governed under salutatory neglect effectively resumed ruling the now independent United States. Little of the underlying socioeconomic order was changed by the war, save for England’s nominal overseer role. And in the years that followed the American elite created a socioeconomic order that in many ways was modeled on England.