More Important to Modern Western Liberalism:1776, 1789, 1848

[HoreTore]

The USA's great contribution was to institutionalize political liberality

Yes.

....Unfortunately, it was only for a part of the population. Which is quite frankly nothing new, the nobility have had plenty of institutionalized freedoms for ages, the american constitution only expanded that to include a few more people than before.

It wasn't until 1968 and Martin Luther King that full freedom was achieved.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Yes.

....Unfortunately, it was only for a part of the population. Which is quite frankly nothing new, the nobility have had plenty of institutionalized freedoms for ages, the american constitution only expanded that to include a few more people than before.

It wasn't until 1968 and Martin Luther King that full freedom was achieved.

I'm not opposed to restrictions on the suffrage. Basing those restrictions on utter irrelevancies such as biological plumbing, epidermal melanin content, or the the number of orbits completed by the planet since you vacated the womb is a bit idiotic, however. I'm glad we've gotten past most of the worst of these silly restrictions.


As to the timing, I'd note the following. The institutions and cultural mind-set (along with a good dash of economics) engendered by the foundation of the US republic combined to remove the formal prohibition against suffrage based on race after less than 9 decades as a polity; to remove the prohibition against XX-chromosome types voting within 14 decades; and to bring about political parity in less than 20 decades. By contrast, the English didn't really start getting past the "part of the population" enfranchised by Magna Carta for more than 40 decades. We bled quite a lot to expiate the sin of slavery, more of us having died in that conflict than in all of our other conflicts combined.