folk get too tied up in defending or promoting their position for me to enjoy seeing political discussion in the particular.
Probably because they believe their position to be universally true. I think most political issues would disappear by simply abandoning the concept of universal moral and political truths.
Let a given group with shared views and values govern themselves in a small community according to their local truth. Such communites are naturally small for obvious reasons and cannot hold their own in conflict with larger ones.
Central government could be reduced to guarding the peace between the communities and dealing with foreign policy (Think of a refined and modernized version of the Holy Roman Empire with extreme local autonomy). The current system tries too hard to find concensus where there is none. Viking pillagers and Irish Monks had mutually exclusive interests. Having them vote for the course of action would have led to anything but an acceptable compromise.
A less transformative possibility:
A lot of the conflict resulting from elections could be avoided by awarding seats in a parliament to citizens by chance. This strategy would reproduce a better representation of the population in parliament than the election of career polticians. David van Raybrouck wrote an interesting book about this strategy "Against Elections". I think that most people confuse elections with democracy. Maybe a demoractic process that is not based on elections is the solution to the current crisis of democracies.
