The American Revolution's impact on American society

American Revolution for American Society

The American Revolution: A Revolution of Political Proportions

In truth, the American Revolution was a process that would have inevitably taken place regardless of the oppression by the British monarchy. Years prior to the United States declaring independence, the French rebelled against their aristocracy. In Eastern Europe, nobility fast approached its end hundreds of years later, because even the once-vast Austro-Hungarian Empire began its downward collapse. The American Revolution may not have been the initial spark, but as far as the idea of democracy, it was certainly a catalyzing event, one that would further expand the American system to its modern-day political backbone.

As the American Revolution took place, many countries sat back and not so much turned their noses down; in fact, some accounts portray the many sympathizers garnered not only in the French and the Spanish, but also in the English as well. "[As] the Americans revolted not to create freedom but to maintain it, the rest of the world (including many in England) applauded" (Toth, 1975). In this revolution, the colonial peoples spoke out against a major political power: the monarchical hierarchy and the political parties that ignored "off-worlders." The problem with the colonial establishments was that representation had been negligent; the political parties of England did not care to represent colonial causes to the higher-ups. This ultimately led to the colonial expression of "no taxation without representation," a phrase most commonly connected to the famous Boston Tea Party, wherein colonials vandalized English goods as a protest for negligence. When the severing of bonds between the colonials and the British government finally took place, needless to say that the Americans wanted to be able to protect the "rights of man" (Toth, 1975). In this way the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America were born.

How does all this relate to the impact of today's American politics? For one, the United States functions now on a tri-partite governmental system. In order to maintain a proper "checks and balances" system, the fathers of the Constitution set forth three branches of government: the legislative, the executive, and the judicial branches. Within these branches, a separate set of authoritative figures are managed in a way that allows representation within the peoples of the country. This can easily be seen not so much in the judicial branch -- for the law is a much more complicated verse of politics -- but in the legislative and executive branches. Legislation undergoes a series of processes that usually takes time; in-so-doing, representatives are responsible for acting on behalf of their states (or city or town, etc.) in the creation of law (Gardner, 2007). Meanwhile, electoral processes are held for heads of state government, which thereby brings the importance within the executive branch. The President of the United States is ultimately a representative of "the people," in an idealized setting.