[quote=@Robeatics]
Jesus, where did I find the time to argue with people over hypotheticals on the fucking internet.
[/quote]

It's like we're 18th century modernists in the coffee houses or taverns of Britain debating Newtonian logic and progressive government reform and the idealism of the Republic. Or much the same but further in French coffeehouses, cafes, and salons in Paris.

A liberal Republic was just as experimental then as a communist state is now, with much the same historical models to operate on (a roughly twenty-thirty year span of the Roman Republic namely, but also oligarchical republics like that of Venice or the impoverished confederate republic of Switzerland, and always the looming specter of revolutionary failure that is Cromwell).

Gee, if some of these same arguments were abided by then as they are now, we would be in a totally different world.