[Sailor Steve]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Have you ever cared to check whether it really is so unique - by comparing it to others? The German Basic Law, first 20 articles, for example? I did.

On the other hand the US Constitution predates all of those.

I would claim that it also is inevitable in a democracy, for it carries the seed of its own destruciton within itself. the reason is power accumulation, democracy fostering and turning into socialism unavoidably, the forming of elites who monopolise their political and economic power, the destruction of money, and the pinciple of voter bribery that dominates democracy from all beginning on and turns everybody participating in it into a complice in crime.

I would agree. It was Thomas Jefferson who pointed out "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground."

One of the early US presidents said that once people find out that they can vote their money, it will be the beginning of the end of the republic.

The quote is "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.", and it's attribution is to a British subject (Scottish), Alexander Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee. The attribution itself is false, the first known use of the phrase coming from Elmer T. Peterson in 1951.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alexander_Fraser_Tytler

That said, it's a good quote and arguably true.

I also want to remind of that in the founding era of America, the concepts debated amongst the intellectual elites on the Eastern coast, not really were originally American, but all based on and led further concepts forethought by French thinkers.

Not all, certainly. While writers like Descarte were influential, so were British philosophers like John Locke.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/amer-enl/

It's often claimed that America were the cradle of democracy, well, not only have a I problem with democracy itself, but also with the historical truth of that claim.

I agree, but disagree also. While the ideas of the American Founders were born in the writings of others, it was here that they were put into action.

[quote]The US owes more to French thinking, than the other way around.
Also true, but the French owe their Revolution to the one that took place here, and not the other way around.

While we can argue about the way things are today, the fact is that the American Experiment, as it was know worldwide, was indeed unique at the time, since others had talked about it but no one else had actually tried it. The Dutch had a Democracy before we did, but it was an outgrowth of what had come before. The American ideal was a conscious experiment, intentionally designed to be an Enlightenment Government.

I do agree that things today are not as the Founders dreamed, and not what they should be, but there are many here who still remember what was said and written, and who still believe in that dream.