The American Revolution was not really a revolution; it was a war of independence. Ignorance of this fact has deluded many subsequent European revolutionaries into believing the creation of a liberal, republican society is much easier than it actually is. At the time of the founding, American society already mostly had these qualities outside of the slave-holding states, and the values of the new government were "held to be self-evident" and Common Sense - a claim that a French revolutionary would have been foolish to make, as it was obvious he was surrounded by people in violent disagreement.
What really constitutes the American revolution, with a small r, is the development of American society over the long-term, from the colonial period onwards. America is a democratic country that never had to undergo a democratic revolution; Americans were, in De Tocquville's words, "born equal, without ever having to become so". This makes America almost unique in the world and hence almost as uniquely useless as a model for the development of liberal societies elsewhere, as the latter have to achieve by painful reform what the former had already nearly achieved in the cradle.
The absence of a true social revolution, and hence of a counter-revolution, means that American politics has had a much narrower scope than those in Europe, a fact that usually comes to the attention of Europeans via the absence of American socialism (the absence of fascism, they rarely notice). Looking over the Atlantic, Europeans can't help but wonder if American consensus doesn't show some smallness of mind, or lack of depth; and Americans, looking back, reckoning consensus worth the price, remind us what we found at the bottom of those depths, not so long ago: the Shoah, and the gulag.