The word "revolution" is probably the most deeply ironic one in the whole of the English language. You fight and die to overthrow the oppressor only to end up back where you started.
The only exceptions are revolutions guided by good ideas and solid values.
Just "overthrow the current leaders and then (??? magic happens here ???) and then we get a better society" doesn't work. You end up where you started or worse because usually the ideas haven't changed.
Intellectual revolutions must precede political ones.
This is why I'm kind of a dull boring centrist politically. I dont support any major attempt to rock the boat because there has been no intellectual improvements that might guide such a thing.
Most revolutionary thinkers don't think replacing the existing leaders will "magically" lead to a better society.
They have grievances with the existing systems, reason to believe those in power won't address those grievances, and reason to believe replacing those in power with people more sympathetic to their grievances will address them.
Also, there has been a boatload of revolutionary thought about how to make a better society over the last century or so. There are clear ways that our system is imperfect and clear ideas of how it could be improved. I'm not sure why you claim there are no "intellectual improvements" over the status quo.
> They have grievances with the existing systems, reason to believe those in power won't address those grievances, and reason to believe replacing those in power with people more sympathetic to their grievances will address them.
So they are doing exactly the same as those in power, which is taking care of themselves.
> The only exceptions are revolutions guided by good ideas and solid values.
Those are mostly not exceptions; successfully uprooting an existing power structure takes more than good ideas and solid values, and replacing it with something that will stably sustain itself both during the revolutionary emergency and afterwards without either falling apart or enabling a power hungry would be despot to exploit it to create an authoritarian regime takes far more than that.
The US “Revolution” was a regional separatist movement led by the local elites and local governments that did not upend the basic local social, economic, or political power structure save for severing the latter from a remote central government (and the resulting new central system was replaced with something more closely approximating, and deliberately modeled on, the old one very shortly after the Revolution in the face of widespread perception of imminent failure otherwise.)
In other words, it mostly wasn't revolutionary and in the one way that it was it mostly failed.
It was a liberal revolution, but not a social one. It definitely shifted the power and I think calling it a revolution is justified. A bit of a side note, but I wholeheartedly recommend https://www.revolutionspodcast.com it starts with the English revolution, then moves to the US, then back to Europe for the French Revolution. There are a lot of episodes on the revolutionary XIX century in Europe and how the “question” slowly changed from the political one to the social one.
