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Originally Posted by sopas ej
Reading more and more books about American history, I am totally learning about the myths of the creation of the US, and the history I was taught in school. For example, at least with the French Revolution, they initially wanted to create a classless society in principle, even though that's not what happened. But when the US was created with the "American Revolution," there wasn't even a pretense to want to create a classless society; the American Revolution was more about getting rid of the British monarchy's control, and keeping the American property owners' ruling class the status quo without British government interference.
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The French Revolution was a disaster in most respects and gave fuel (along with the Oliver Cromwell period) to Royalists in England in the 19th century. When a royal family is killed off and the aristocracy emasculated, bad actors eventually fill the power void. Miraculously, a democracy took root in the U.S. after our revolution and it has stuck around. Disastrously, the French revolution led to Napoleon and the Russian to Stalin.
The period when English descendants attempted to establish and operate and English-style aristocracy (but without a monarch) in the United States was pretty brief. The forces of industrialization were too intense and the sort-of Southern aristocracy fell less than 100 years after the revolution.
The "American Dream" was very real for the hundreds of thousands of Europeans who went from being peons in the old country to owners of their own farms in the United States in the 1800s. But this period was also very brief as the mechanization of farming in the 20th century meant the percentage of citizens working as farmers fell from something like 40% to 3% 1900-2000.