I'm guessing this is one of those things that goes unchallenged, because the founding fathers were pretty much the embodiment of Jesus, but better because they were American, so their word must be super-holy...
I would disagree in that I can find things the Founders said that would make many Americans blanch.
A good thing to remember is that everything, from the Declaration onwards (Declaration included), was basically compromising on an imperfect solution that nonetheless remains the accepted standard simply because no one wants to compromise long enough to change it. Churchill had an excellent point when he said "Americans always do the right thing, after they've tried everything else". We tried a thing before the Constitution, didn't work at
all, grit our teeth and made a better thing, and that thing has been the law of the land ever since. No one wants the endless fighting that another attempt at compromise would bring. That is how most things here work: We coast on former precedent, and it has somehow worked for 200 years.
Hell, the phrase "liberal" and "conservative" here refer to the degree to which you are expansive or strict in your interpretation of the liberties granted by the constitution, respectively. I mean, if we just
changed things, all sorts of bad shit would happen. National Chaos. And as Aquizzar points out, we did do ok for 200 years of country based on the same framework. I mean we had a constitution before it was cool, but also before there was experience in making constitutions.
Wasn't the entire point of your crappy two party system that you can't really fit all ideology into two categories, therefor it is pretty much a certainty that within any one group you will have conflicts for the throne? Heck I'm surprised both your parties aren't in a constant state of civil war.
Neh. The closest to a point the parties have is that since they represent a wide expanse of ideological thought (if one wrapped up in a desire to win), compromise is achievable. When they fail at that, bad things happen. But few Americans actually support all of their parties positions (Hands up, who here supports everything that democrats in general support? Anyone?) but they compromise to work together and get some/most of their positions. It would be really awesome if they could somehow do that without fighting a different party at the same time (which enforces ideological rigidity), but such is life.