re: #218 Nojay UK

Britain has been, in constitutional terms, governed by a democratically-elected Parliament since at least 1688. The weirdly ahistorical figure you Americans make King George III out to be, simultaneously an autocratic tyrant mastermind and at the same time a deranged madman and ajudge him responsible for all the supposed ills heaped upon the nascent American colonies was a ruler who had in reality little or no political power and only limited powers of patronage, in fact much less than the first Constitutional Presidency of the United States since that property-owners wishlist effectively gave the officeholders of the Executive the powers of an elected autocrat.

I wonder how many Americans know who was actually Prime Minister in Britain in 1776? (Answer, Lord North, the man who oversaw the 1773 Tea Acts legislation that was one of the sparks for the First Slaveholders Treasonous Rebellion.)

There are other representative political assemblies that could claim to be older than Britain’s Parliament, Iceland’s Althing springs to mind. American exceptionalism is, like many things American, only exceptional in American eyes and American history classrooms.

The funny thing is, the American Revolution likely would have been avoided if they simply gave the colonies seats in the House of Commons. There would have inevitably been a fight over slavery still, so it might not have worked anyway, but still