Democracy or What's Right?

[Rhyfelwyr]

Specifically Leftist revolutions have generally imposed Tyrannies though. What usually happens is that the Left/Right Tyranny is eventually overthrown by a democratic revolution, which is when people get fed up with ideaology and decide they'd rather the State leave them alone, thank you very much.

I think this pretty much sums everything up, the whole leftist/rightist argument here just seems like petty point-scoring.

Quite true, though Toryism should really be seen as Constitutional conservatism, and the maintainance of an ordered society. The fact that this favours the established elite is (partly) co-incidental.

The odd things about the Tories with the talk of constitutions and conservatism, is they they were actually pretty radical. I think their problem was that they had such a romanticised view of the past (a remant of the 'wrong but romantic' Royalists in many respects I suppose). They clung to their view of the old paternal, benevolent Stuart monarchs as the head of the ordered society you mentioned, yet ironically, the Stuarts had of course been quite radical in their absolutism, and all the social and political change going on which the Tories opposed was really a result of the programme of centralisation led by the Stuarts.

While I think you're glossing over Cromwell's brutality in putting down rebellions I broadly agree. However, this rather proves my point; Cromwell became a dictator in order to force a "progressive" reform program. what he didn't do was expand the franchise in order to break the Puritan hold on Parliament; or offer an amnesty and incentives to allow the more religiously liberal Royalists to come home and participate in power.

The brutality is another bone of contention (like with the 2,700 slaughtered at Drogheda Irish nationalists keep going on about... guess how many English Royalist soldiers were stationed at Drogheda). But as for the dicatator bit, he did believe in democratic government as well as individual liberty, and he did make several attempts to get a Parliament functioning that wouldn't work as a tyranny of the majority.

Having studied a bit about his personal life and his character as well, I think the problem is he went a bit... mental. When Parliament was being given 70 members to model the Sanhedrin, and Jews were being brought over from the Netherlands to the Godly Commonwealth to make way for the second coming... it became pretty clear that the religious element had taken precedent over the previous constitutional issues.