The Very Revolutionary United States Constitution
The American revolution was a revolution, but it wasn’t revolutionary; what was revolutionary was the United States Constitution.
Vince Coyner | January 2, 2026
During college one of my professors in Political Philosophy said that the only real revolutions in modern Western civilization were the French and the Russian. He was right, but I didn’t quite get it at the time. I do now.
While the American revolution was ostensibly a revolution, in reality it was more of a divorce where the kids kept the same parents, they just lived with their Mom. Their Dad was still their Dad, but they didn’t have much to do with him. In contrast, the French and Russian revolutions were basically the children taking their parents out back and shooting them….
The American revolution was a revolution, but it wasn’t revolutionary. But what was revolutionary was the United States Constitution.
For the first time in history, a government was formed by a written constitution that described rights that were inherent from God (as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the constitution of most of the original 13 states) upon which the government could not impede. What’s more, the entire thing was created for the specific purpose of limiting the power of government. This was made clear by the Bill of Rights, which—beginning with Massachusetts—became the quid pro quo for getting the Constitution ratified. And in case anyone missed the point, the last of the ten amendments that make up the Bill of Rights states
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”That was every bit as revolutionary as the French sending King Louis XVI to the guillotine or the Bolsheviks shooting Tsar Nicholas II and his entire family in a basement. But what’s more, unlike those other two revolutions, the American Constitution didn’t result in rivers of blood and a collapse of society. On the contrary, it set the American experiment on its slow but methodical march to revolutionize the world and unleash the potential of man.
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https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/01/the_very_revolutionary_united_states_constitution.html
