First of all, I am a lefty, modern liberal, whatever. That means that I like to tax and spend, grab guns and support Clinton (well, actually I don't, but I love to pander to stereotypes). The main problem here is that the left-wing instinct of protecting and "empowering" the weak in order to realize a desire for real equality and true freedom for all (an instinct I support) can be and is a threat to the structure of an open society and a liberal democracy.
We have two different levels here. One is the superstructure of an open society. That is the structure of democracy and liberty. That includes a constitution in which the powers of the state are limited and structured in manners that avoid excessive concentration of power. Then it includes a pretty strict list of civil and human rights that guarantee the protection of individuals against attempts to use power against them, be that power from the state or from private associations/individuals. Those rights are there not just to protect individuals, but also to guarantee the operation of an open social order. A bill of rights is given not only for the protection of individuals, but for the protection of institutions that make a society work in an open, unhegemonic manner.
That is particularly true of the basic civil rights, like free speech. That guarantees that individuals cannot be held liable for their beliefs and opinions, only their actions. That also guarantee that there cannot be instituted system of beliefs apart from those which are "temporarily" encoded in the law, provided that that law is always and in all cases OPEN TO DEBATE. We destroy that basic system and the rest comes tumbling down like a house of cards.
The basis of a democratic system is perpetual dissatisfaction, incompleteness. No-one gets to win, no-one gets to get their dream, their vision realize. We all compromise, end up with half-deals, not-quite-what-we-wanted. No vision can be allowed to dominate and destroy all other. Now, that point has been one of the mainstays of leftist thought since the days in which "the left" was John Stuart Mill. I am a bit aghast that stuff like elimination of all censorship, openness of government and serious mistrust of the state organs of control of repression have become issues of "the right", in America in particular. I cannot, for the life of me, think why the days in which the "left" maligned Hoover's FBI as a mechanism of oppression while the right defended it as a bulwark against a threatening ideology have been reversed so totally.
That is the point. The liberal superstructure of society should not be the demesne of any of the various ideological currents in an open society. The "content" ideological debates must always be under the basic protection of a system of liberty and equity (and there is, indeed, plenty of scope to interpret and debate what that protection entails) So, your points. 1) That is the "Godel paradox"*, as it was (famously) remarked upon by Kurt Godel the day he was being sworn as an American (he almost didn't make it, Einstein had to come in and assuage the judge's misgivings!)
We set up a society in which the consent of the electorate is the source of all sovereignty. So we have the risk of a majority of the electorate using that sovereign power in ways that are heavily damaging to a minority and prejudicial to the overall structure of the democracy. We could have had the USA electorate voting for the immediate internment of all communists and pinkos in 1952. We had the pretty solid support of Southerners for Jim Crow. We would have solid support for illiberal laws like banning flag burnings or erosions of civil rights for the sake of anti-crime measures (oh Britain, poor Britain).
But the solution of that paradox is not trying to "fix in stone" virtue, by banning certain debates and foreclosing certain political paths. That is for religions, not for constitutional systems. There are two solutions, well rehearsed and proven. One is constitutions and the inertia of changing those. Make the constitutional hard to change, and allow the Keynesian "animal spirits" of excited electorates to calm, which gives time for the for the second big element of protection of liberty to kick in: the self-regulating force of a democratic debate.
There is a very strong tendency for moderation in a well-set liberal democracy, where power is always transparent and accountable to someone, and where debate is not skewed or deflected by official ideologies. All democracies, US included, have long lists of abuses, mistakes, horrible cases of oppression. All this simply underline the soundness of the system itself. Liberal democracies, from the American individualistic style, to the Swedish corporativist style, all have exceedingly good records of NOT massacring and oppressing their own citizens.
Power respects only those it is accountable to. Democracies collapse, sometimes from the inside, but mostly, democracies with strong social institutions supporting them will not voted themselves into dictatorships. In a functioning democracy, we accept that the possibility of a 2/3 majority voting for the establishment of a dictatorship must be accepted, in the knowledge that this is both highly inimical to the system itself, and in the knowledge that is an enormously unlikely outcome.
Incidentally, all the American libertarians and conservatives, heavily concerned that tyranny is at hand, still "put up" with that annoying result of a democracy. You may heavily disagree with the outcomes of democratic system (in the form of elected presidents and duly legitimate legislative acts), but he obeys them. Absolutely one right we DON'T have is the right NOT to be offended. The protection of the first amendment is exactly, PRECISELY for offensive, annoying, riling, disgusting speech. ALL societies accept "good" speech, what we need to protect is the speech that drives people up the wall. For example, if I claim that Christ was a minor Jewish prophet, one of hundreds who happened to get lucky, and that the New Testament was mostly written around 100AD and heavily expurgated by the Nicean Council; I have seriously offended around 80% of Americans! It is exactly heresy, blasphemy, flag-burning and holocaust denial that free speech protects.
There are technocratic solutions to social problems, and then there are more open democratic, market, etc. solutions. The right mix is hard to determine. You are in for a surprise if you assume that if you get only PhDs in Sociology as ministers you'll get good government. The point is that you control power by splitting it and having all parts of the process accountable. You get three heavily trained professionals, insiders of the system (judge, and the counsels), and you off-set them with a group of amateurs. Overall, the jury system works pretty well, and no, it doesn't end up with more miscarriages of justice that the Three Judges system favored in some European countries.
* Godel's Incompleteness Theorem points out that the following statement is a part of the system: a statement P which states "there is no proof of P". If P is true, there is no proof of it. If P is false, there is a proof that P is true, which is a contradiction. Therefore it cannot be determined within the system whether P is true.
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