I think that’s a shallow view, and we are standing so high atop the shoulders of giants, we don’t notice them. I recently listened to Ken Burns, he makes a very valid point on just how amazingly impactful the American revolution is to human history once we think about it!

It radically changed how we think about human governance, (some) people became citizens with unalienable rights and freedom, not peasants and subjects of a king. It took centuries of enlightenment thought about the rights of man, and distilled it into an intensely radical new form of government, based on:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, are endowed with unalienable Rights, Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it”

Quothe Ken Burns directly:

The second sentence of the Declaration is the most important sentence, second most important sentence in the English language after ‘I love you.’ I mean, there’s nothing better than that sentence, and it says: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.’ There is nothing self-evident about these truths! They’ve never been introduced in this way, quite this way before, that all men are created equal.

Nobody knew how this would shake out at the time, and I think just dismissing the immense sea change that created our modern idea of what humans deserve is unfair. The American Revolution radically changed the world for all of humanity, don’t take it for granted!