# Why was democracy a given after the American revolution but not after the English revolution? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 23, 2015, 8:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334 "2015-09-23T20:13:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![RadicalPi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/radicalpi/32/9806_2.png) [@RadicalPi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RadicalPi)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2015, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334/21 "2015-09-24T21:33:10Z")
> [@Sage\_Rat](#): > > Technically speaking, that chart is incorrect. Getting rid of the electoral vote still wouldn’t make the country a Democracy. It would just be a more Democratic, Democratic **Rep** ublic. The actual law making and voting would still be done by elected **rep** resentatives. The “rep” of republic has no etymological relationship to the “rep” of representative. It’s just a coincidence. ---
**Author:** ![Sage\_Rat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sage_rat/32/399_2.png) [@Sage\_Rat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sage_Rat)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2015, 11:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334/22 "2015-09-24T23:06:20Z")
> [@RadicalPi](#): > > The “rep” of republic has no etymological relationship to the “rep” of representative. It’s just a coincidence. Well that shows me for making assumptions. 🙂 Works out handily though. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [September 24, 2015, 11:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334/23 "2015-09-24T23:51:02Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > That’s just a semantic nit-pick. Yes technically the US is not a democracy. In the same way as a myriad is exactly 10000 of something. > > In modern English a “democracy” is a country where the leaders are chosen for a fixed term by an electorate of most of the populace in a fair election. That may not be technically correct, but it is what almost everyone means when they use the term. It is technically correct. There is no requirement that democracy mean “direct democracy.” And one can have a non-democratic republic. In fact, that pretty much describes all republics prior to the U.S., as it was apparently Madison who came up with the idea of a democratic republic and defined it to mean a representative democracy. All that is required for a republic is that you have some political body that is supposed to represent the people, voting among themselves on how to govern. It is not required that they be elected. The Roman Senate was originally appointed by the king or consul and were just the heads of the the important families. Yet we call the government where the Senate had primary legal power the “Roman Republic.” The U.S. is an indirect, representative democracy that takes on the form of an liberal democratic republic. It was effectively an experiment by its founders, as that particular form of government had never existed before. That’s why it didn’t happen back in England. This [new type of democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy#Origins) just had not been considered. It is, as someone else pointed out, an idea that came out of the Enlightenment. ---
**Author:** ![MrQwertyasd](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/9d8465/32.png) [@MrQwertyasd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrQwertyasd)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2015, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334/24 "2015-09-25T01:04:43Z")
> [@Grey](#): > > You missed a revolution. > > The Civil War brought Parliament into near equal standing with the Monarchy; the _Glorious Revolution_ brought about its supremacy. > > You also have to consider how the evolution of Presbyterianism (helped by the Civil War) drove the emerging Scottish enlightenment which produced Adam Smith and David Hume and then throw in John Locke down in England and you have the foundations of the American Republic. > > Which they specifically built as a republic and not a democracy. What’s the link between Presbyterianism and the enlightenment ? ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2015, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334/25 "2015-09-25T02:38:00Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > It is technically correct. There is no requirement that democracy mean “direct democracy.” And one can have a non-democratic republic. In fact, that pretty much describes all republics prior to the U.S., as it was apparently Madison who came up with the idea of a democratic republic and defined it to mean a representative democracy. > > All that is required for a republic is that you have some political body that is supposed to represent the people, voting among themselves on how to govern. It is not required that they be elected. The Roman Senate was originally appointed by the king or consul and were just the heads of the the important families. Yet we call the government where the Senate had primary legal power the “Roman Republic.” > > The U.S. is an indirect, representative democracy that takes on the form of an liberal democratic republic. It was effectively an experiment by its founders, as that particular form of government had never existed before. > > That’s why it didn’t happen back in England. This [new type of democracy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_democracy#Origins) just had not been considered. It is, as someone else pointed out, an idea that came out of the Enlightenment. Government by elected official, rather than by hereditary ruler was not. Even if the modern idea of a liberal democracy ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2015, 10:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334/26 "2015-09-25T10:14:42Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > Government by elected official, rather than by hereditary ruler was not. Even if the modern idea of a liberal democracy It was there in the ideas of the Agitators and other radicals in the English Civil War \*That the power of this _[a regularly-elected, fixed term, parliament] \* and all future representatives of this nation is inferior only to theirs who choose them , and doth extend, without the consent or concurrence of any other person or persons, to the enacting, altering, and repealing of laws; to the erecting and abolishing of offices and courts; to the appointing, removing, and calling to account magistrates and officers of all degrees; to the making war and peace; to the treating with foreign states; and generally, to whatsoever is not expressly or impliedly reserved by the represented to themselves._ (An Agreement of the People, October 1647). But the argument that won (because Parliament had the power, the money and the generals) was that stability demanded representation only of those with a fixed property interest - and it seems from previous posts that that idea clung on in the young United States. It is noticeable that the radicals of the English Civil War did not envisage a separately elected President, merely a Parliament. What did for the Commonwealth regime was that it did not provide for its own renewal through electing a new parliament, because it insisted on such a degree of ideological purity that it did not allow free elections. And it would seem no-one could envisage a regime without some sort of powerful leader, but in the end there was none obviously to hand but Charles II. ---
**Author:** ![Malden\_Capell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/malden_capell/32/5274_2.png) [@Malden\_Capell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malden_Capell)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2015, 11:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334/27 "2015-09-25T11:43:53Z")
There are many reasons why the English Civil War broke out and one of the most significant is religion. The Church of England was a broad house at the time and incorporated many differing opinions, the King and Laud being the Arminian, high church, Anglo-Catholic branch, and parliament having a health strain of energetic, low-church presbyterians. Religion permeated _everything_ - there were riots and fights over what direction altars were facing, for Pete’s sake - including sports, economics, and foreign policy. One of the reasons why the English never got involved in the Thirty Years War was because the King favoured the Spanish (who let the English mint his silver, meaning lots of cash for London), while most others wanted an alliance with the Dutch and French. Anyway, the chief bone of contention vis-a-vis democracy in the English Civil War (and the Scottish, for that matter) was about democracy in religion. Religion was such an enormously important and all-encompassing matter that everything was viewed through that prism. They had concerns about public control over secular institutions too, but it motivated them far less than public influence into their own faith, Anyway, Cromwell’s New Model Army tipped the scales in Parliament’s favour, but in doing so tapped into the power of the ordinary folk. In the desperation of 1643-44, when Parliament lost nearly every major battle, it was forced to innovate in ways it would never have contemplated before, and to commit outrages worse than the king had been condemned for. In the process, parliament ignited a new radicalism - the Independents. For many in England’s army in late 1648/early 1649, the king represented all that had gone wrong in England in the 1630s and 40s, and he had to die. But that’s as far as the radicalism of some MP’s radicalism went. The republican Commonwealth’s founding fathers were, arguably, the least enthusiastic republicans in history. But the army, which had grown powerful, radical, and political, held parliament at its mercy, and it demanded the king’s death. It was also mostly dominated by Independents, with Cromwell at its head, and so religious liberty was a cornerstone of their demands. Beyond that - demands of political liberty and the right to decide their own government - there were as many points of view as there were people. They simply could not agree on what the Commonwealth was _for_. And so, by sheer inertia, and the shock victories in the Third English Civil War, the Commonwealth endured until Cromwell dissolved it in 1653. Cromwell became Lord Protector, but while radical in religion, he, like the overwhelming majority of Englishmen, was a political conservative, although prone to poorly-considered bouts of religio-political radicalism at rash moments (Rule of the Major-Generals, anyone?). When he died, the one thing that held the regime together faded away with him, and shortly after all the arguments and disagreements that had been stilled by Cromwell came back to the fore. For all the monarchy’s faults, at least it gave firm direction, was one of the reasons why the monarchy was restored. Basically, Parliament wasn’t that interested in political freedom initially, but was forced to consider it by the army, although it did its level best to drag its heels on the issue as much as it could. ---
**Author:** ![PatrickLondon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/patricklondon/32/4422_2.png) [@PatrickLondon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PatrickLondon)\ **Post date:** [September 25, 2015, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334/28 "2015-09-25T14:29:04Z")
> [@PatrickLondon](#): > > =What did for the Commonwealth regime was that it did not provide for its own renewal through electing a new parliament, because it insisted on such a degree of ideological purity that it did not allow free elections. And it would seem no-one could envisage a regime without some sort of powerful leader, but in the end there was none obviously to hand but Charles II. I got that slightly wrong. At the end of the interregnum, there were contenders for the strong man/Lord Protector job, the chief bone of contention being that the government was in debt, mainly for Army pay, the Army wanted a continued say, and Richard Cromwell, as a civilian who hadn’t exactly been a powerful figure in his father’s time, simply wasn’t rated by the Army leaders. There were parliaments in these last years, and more than one Army general who made a bid for power, but they couldn’t agree among themselves who should be in charge or with what objectives, and in the end Monck and his army simply forced the issue. ---
**Author:** ![Malden\_Capell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/malden_capell/32/5274_2.png) [@Malden\_Capell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malden_Capell)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2015, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334/29 "2015-09-29T23:14:14Z")
Hey OP, I just started reading _The History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate_ by Samuel Rawson Gardiner, published 1901. The opening words seem to sum up why the English Commonwealth was a failure pretty succinctly: > [@](#): > > The execution of Charles I - the work of military violence cloaked in the merest tatters of legality - had displayed to the eyes of the world the forgotten truth that kings, as well as subjects, must bear the consequences of their errors and misdeeds. More than this the actors in the great tragedy failed to accomplish, and, it may fairly be added, must necessarily have failed to accomplish. It is never possible for men of the sword to rear the temple of recovered freedom, and the small minority in Parliament which had given the semblance of constitutional procedure to the trial in Westminster Hall were no more than instruments in the hands of the men of the sword. Honestly as both military and political leaders desired to establish popular government, they found themselves in a vicious circle from which there was no escape. No government they could set up would be strong enough to remain erect unless the army were kept on foot, and if the army were kept on foot popular support would be alienated by its intervention in political affairs, and by the heavy taxation required for its maintenance. Every serious attempt to rest the government on the voice of the nation itself would inure to the benefit of the young prince who had not offended as his father had offended, and who appealed to those whom he claimed as subjects on other grounds than the disposal of an armed force. > > Anxious to liberate a people which still clung to its fetters, the leaders of the mutilated House of Commons could but wait for better times, contenting themselves with the establishment of some makeshift constitutional arrangement, which might serve their turn till the day - not far distant, as they fondly hoped - when the misguided people should come to a better mind. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-was-democracy-a-given-after-the-american-revolution-but-not-after-the-english-revolution/732334.md?page=1)