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The American Revolution in Global Retreat

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The American Revolution in Global Retreat The American Revolution in Global Retreat More so than at any point in the last century, U.S. independence now seems like a parochial affair. In 1899, against the backdrop of the Second Boer War, F.W. Reitz, the Afrikaner State Secretary of the South African Republic, issued A Century of Wrong. Primarily authored by Jan Smuts, who would later become the fo...
The article presents a provocative thesis: the American Revolution’s global significance has collapsed, reduced to a "parochial affair" by institutional decay, racial regression, and unchecked elite power. At its strongest, the narrative highlights real contradictions in U.S. history—the tension between revolutionary ideals and settler colonialism, the mid-century expansion of rights under Cold War pressures, and the current erosion of democratic norms. It effectively steelmans the case that Ame...