Submission to authorities, part 2

I suspect that not many people were convinced by my blogpost which set out my view that the authorities to which we should be submitting are not any particular political party, but the whole political system under which we find ourselves.

As supporting evidence, I would like to point out some of the people who we Christians tend to think of as heroes of the faith.

William Wilberforce
Martin Luther King Jr
Dietrich Bonhoffer

All of those would be cited approvingly from non-conformist pulpits. There are also non-Christians (or people whose faith is less overt) who we tend to regard positively in the same way, such as:

Nelson Mandela
Mahatma Ghandi

All of them challenged the political system in which they found themselves.

Had we been there, would we have been saying to them, "You need to submit to the authorities - in other words, you can't challenge the ruling parties!" Because that's pretty much what Christian conservatives are telling us today. But with the benefit of hindsight, we look back on what they did and say that they were absolutely right to challenge what they faced.

So, on what basis can you say that they were right and those people challenging the Tories or the Republicans now are wrong to do so? Would we have been wrong to have aligned ourselves with them?