Societies should evolve slowly over time. The main difference between the evolution of British democracy that culminated in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and the violent redesign of French society in 1789 is the relative bloodlessness of the first versus the violence of the second. This resulted entirely from the fact that Britain's movement away from feudalism started under Henry VIII.
Unfortunately, leftists and progressives idealize the French Revolution, its spirit of class hatred, its redesigning of society, and its massacre of nobles and the wealthy.
Edmund Burke imbued Aristotle and Cicero's vision of a society as a cooperative effort for the mutual benefit of all. Like an organism, it cannot be taken apart and reassembled. As Burke writes in Reflections on the Revolution in France, "This necessity [revolution] is no exception to the rule; because this necessity itself is a part too of that moral and physical disposition of things to which man must be obedient by consent or force; but if that which is only submission to necessity [again, revolution] should be made the object of choice, the law is broken, nature is disobeyed, and the rebellious are outlawed, cast forth, and exiled, from this world of reason, and order, and peace, and virtue, and fruitful sentience, into the antagonist world of madness, discord, vice, confusion, and unavailing sorrow (p.195, Penguin ed.)."
Burke knew Irish society had been warped and distorted by English dispossession and religious oppression. No society ever needed reform more than eighteenth century Ireland, and no one knew that better than Edmund Burke. Rather than an effusion of violence and blood, what Ireland needed was for Britain to take baby steps towards respecting the Irish people and their faith. Instead, Britain imported German colonists, continued to let its nobility profit off of the peasantry, and finally let millions of Irish die of starvation .
The American progressive wishes for nothing to remain fixed, usually using America's supposed racism as an excuse. They have a totalitarian wish to rewrite American history as a list of oppressors and their crimes. Thus, even Abraham Lincoln isn't even pure enough for their Jacobinical redesign of America. Their revolution is emphatically not about survival, but about choice, the ultimate weasel-word of leftism.
