I know it can feel like this is so, but if we look objectively over different parts of the world and over several thousand years, it looks very different to me. Pagan society in the BCE centuries was very often ruled at the whim of the overlords who did whatever they liked as long as they had military might behind them. The big civilisations such as the Roman Empire, and ancient China, were a huge step forward from this and as far as I can see both of them invented and implemented the first societies based on widespread rule of law. The major world religions that were founded in those days added codes of ethics that transcended the political structures of those days, and that was also incorporated into the formation of civil law - for example the principle of the relative primacy of the individual over any collective.
People are morally ambiguous, so of course these were not adopted in a clean sort of way. It's been a process of evolution, and a flowing and ebbing of tides over the following thousands of years. We can see the same sort of thing happening in the French Revolution I referred to earlier which started out by defining some of the great universal humanitarian principles of our times, then they blew it all. But then the American Revolution learnt from their experience and the American Constitution and State founded on principles derived from the French was much more successful and has resulted in a very stable society that has weathered storms that would have destroyed other states. And in many ways these were inheritors of the outcome of the English civil war and which changed forever the balance between monarch and Parliament.
Of course there will always be folks who try to use the institutions of state for their own gratification, in terms of power and wealth, and some of these will be evil people. But a well constituted democracy is better able to resist these that the other forms of government that we are familiar with. We only have to look at the quality of life in the major countries with governments that do not depend on the measured will of their people to see this. That doesn't mean that all's well in democracies - just that usually on the whole it's better than the alternatives. There's a good reason why half of the third world is trying hard to come and live in Europe and the USA. They don't seem to be queuing to get into Russia or China in the same way.
It seems to me that a lesson from history is that creating a government around a fundamental change to a prescribed and new constitution in one bound is almost always doomed. A society is just too complex for this to be successful - this has become an order of magnitude more complex and difficult in modern times. It seems to me to be a gross error to suggest that right wing / conservatives want only to preserve the past. There will be some who want that, but it's like wanting to go back to your childhood - I think it's much more that change needs to take place incrementally, a bit at a time. Precipitous change leads to all sorts of unanticipated problems, economic and political instability, even the chaos which destroys governments eventually and brings very great suffering to the people.
