Great political ideas come, not from committees or from random samplings of the uninformed or semi-informed masses, but from intelligent and forceful leaders who can think them through thoughtfully, who can articulate them in a way that resonates with people, and who can set out an agenda to carry them into effective action.
Great leaders? Resonating with the masses? That sounds more like a primer on how completely awful (in the gas chamber/gulag/killing fields sense) political ideas come about.
Most of the tolerable governments of the world have come about from a process of centuries of gradual refinement and consensus-building. Great leaders tend to screw things up more often than not. Great Britain made its way from monarchy to liberal democracy on its own and without the help (and occasionally with the hindrance -- I'm looking at you Mr Cromwell) of any "great leaders". The US constitution was just a somewhat refined offshoot of the British system.
I agree. For a democratic system that is completely at odds with the US or UK one, take a look at Switzerland. While in most ways it operates as a republic, for their executive branch, they don't have one head of state. They have the Swiss Federal Council, which meets weekly, in secret, and has not been replaced since it was formed in 1848 (individual members have retired and been replaced in that time, of course).
They also have direct democracy, where any citizen can trigger a referendum if they gather enough signatures in a certain amount of time.
This sounds like a recipe for disaster, yet Switzerland has one of the most stable governments and most prosperous economies in the world. It works because they are stubbornly conservative (little-C conservative, in the sense "if it ain't broke, don't fix it") and slow to change. In general, it works for them, even if it has some anachronisms. Women only got suffrage in 1971, for example, and there's no guarantee of religious freedom (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minaret_controversy_in_Switzerl...)
tl;dr - there's more than one way to run a country, and it's better to err on the side of not changing what works. But if you take this approach, you have to be mindful that just because you suppressed certain peoples' rights in the past doesn't mean you should in the future.
The prohibition of minarets does not have anything to do with religious freedom. You can build as many mosques as you want and you are free to pray to anyone you like. It's only the minarets (the towers on top of the mosques) that most swiss people dislike because they just don't fit in the landscape.
Of course, this prohibition is an overreaction (there are only a handful of minarets already and building restrictions are strict in general), but I can understand that people think that "Heidiland" isn't supposed to look like ... e.g. Istanbul.
Probably not in general, but concerning architecture I would tend to say yes. Isn’t it an important part of “postmodern architecture” to melt premodern/traditional designs with modern ones? So, conservative ideas/values seem to have some influence.
> The US constitution was just a somewhat refined offshoot of the British system.
I think it's important to point out that there is, in fact, very few similarities between the U.K. government, especially at the time, and the U.S. government.
The U.K. uses a parliamentary system of government without a written constitution. There is a single, essentially all-powerful, legislative body with no separate executive. They can literal change the structure of government by passing a law due to the lack of a constitution. The government is structured as it is due to tradition.
The only real similarity is that they also use the "Winner Takes All" voting system, in which the person that receives the most votes wins, as opposed to a proportional system used in other countries.
Other than that similarity, they're basically entirely different.
Oh, I think there are other important similarities. You've got to remember that the UK was (basically) a representative democracy at a time when the number of representative democracies in the world was... what, three-ish? Important similarities include:
1. A bicameral legislature (commons + lords vs house + senate)
2. The idea that representatives should represent individual districts
While I think you're right to say that bad ideas have been given more traction than they deserved by having an effective leader promoting them, I don't think this is a counter-argument to the grandparent.
Choosing the country's goals certainly should be democratic, but in an imperfect political system, it still takes tenacious leaders to navigate the rough political landscape to realize those goals.
Great leaders? Resonating with the masses? That sounds more like a primer on how completely awful (in the gas chamber/gulag/killing fields sense) political ideas come about.
Most of the tolerable governments of the world have come about from a process of centuries of gradual refinement and consensus-building. Great leaders tend to screw things up more often than not. Great Britain made its way from monarchy to liberal democracy on its own and without the help (and occasionally with the hindrance -- I'm looking at you Mr Cromwell) of any "great leaders". The US constitution was just a somewhat refined offshoot of the British system.