> Voter coalitions are just parties in their earliest proto-stage. Coalition politics necessarily requires some amount of tit-for-tat and trust building, which forms long-term connections, which lead to organizations like parties over the long term.

The difference is that the majority coalition changes with every election, which prevents ossification. The positions of Democrats and Republicans are fairly stable over time; the positions of a majority coalition will depend entirely on its membership.

> Any single candidate, however, is effectively a packaged bundle of policies on all those orthogonal issues. That bundling is the problem.

The bundling is a feature, provided that similar but not identical candidates aren't suppressed by the voting system. It allows the candidate to find the compromise on each issue that best satisfies the district, or lose to someone who does.

> I think that any claim that representative democracy somehow does not also lead to "unchecked populism" has been disproven by experience of the past century or so. All this stuff about how it lets you have wise, even-handed leaders that "temper the mob sentiment" was ultimately just wishful thinking - it turns out that those kinds of leaders generally tend to lose elections to populists.

This happens when the representatives are all just proxy votes. The degenerate case is where you elect someone to represent you for the vote on a single bill and then elect a new representative whenever there is a new bill. Obviously that isn't going to act as much of a check on populism.

But now consider the original structure of the US Senate. Senators were appointed by state legislatures across staggered 6-year terms. In order to enact a populist federal policy, you have to capture a majority of state legislatures, then you had to hold that majority for six years to replace the majority of Senators. In order to enact a populist policy expanding federal power, you had to overcome the tendency for state legislatures not to appoint Senators favoring the expansion of federal over state power. It actually worked pretty well until the 17th Amendment broke it by causing Senators to be directly elected. After that populism was unavoidable whenever the majority party in the House matched the one in the Senate. By no coincidence did this then happen immediately.

Adopt a cardinal voting system so there are more than two viable parties and go back to Senators being elected by state legislatures and see what happens.

> But when you get to that level of decentralization, direct democracy works pretty well beyond just serving as a check on representative bodies, and can itself be made more deliberative with fewer people involved.

If you make the jurisdictions small enough then direct democracy works okay, modulo some constraints on what policies can be enacted so you don't have towns coming up with ways to abuse non-constituents, e.g. by imposing extractive tolls or fines on anyone who has to pass through. Or to pick an existing major problem, zoning to price out existing non-residents. But the hyper-local laws aren't usually the problem to begin with, because then people can viably vote with their feet and the jurisdictions are under significant competitive pressure. The main problem is what to do about federal laws.