By Paul Weiser
One great question of modern history, not yet answered definitively, is what caused the extreme difference in results between the American and (first) French Revolutions. One factor which deserves serious consideration is the great contrast between speed of news propagation between the two.
In the American founding, news traveled slowly. Settlements were small, roads murderously bad, big printers few. Sailboats traversed the coast at a blazing eight knots, but the interior remained weeks behind. The biggest cities - New York, Philadelphia and Boston - were too small for competing mobs (Boston had one - the Sons of Liberty). When it came time to refine the Articles of Confederation into a Constitution the process took years, with more to debate, refine and ratify. As with Cromwell's Putney debates of the previous century, there was time for emotions to cool, radicalism to lose its venom.
In France, roads were good and the whole relevant political nation was the city of Paris with its many printers, newspapers and competing armed mobs. Without delay for consideration the loudest, most radical voice set the tone every day - leading to a bloody Terror that coursed through the nation and all Europe. Nor has the French form of totalitarian revolution ever ended, for it continued in Russia, Germany and Italy and rushes on today in Africa, South America and elsewhere.
Fast mass communication enables mob violence with totalitarian dictatorship; delay inhibits it (so does an armed citizenry, a true militia that can quell the no-account mob "popular" dictatorship requires). As we look back to "ghetto" mob violence, and forward to more idiocy, more premature resignations from the presidential nomination process by adults who can't be heard over the static of instant radical rabble- rousing, we must fear for our nation unless some moderating delay can be induced in the news/political cycle.
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