Comment by jessicest

This is true: in general the best fix for US democratic systems is to learn from more functional systems from overseas.

US is running on beta version democracy; it was wonderful for a trial run and we learned a lot from it, but unfortunately the country has been stuck without upgrades for a while. It'd be like trying to connect a Xerox PARC desktop to the modern internet.

Obviously it's absurdly nontrivial to shift it at this point but I do agree that age and term limits both seem to be stopgap solutions due to the challenge of implementing more effective strategies.

Consider Australia: of 226 parliamentarians, there's one aged 75+: Bob Katter.

I'd say there's three features of the au system that keep us relatively free of the absurd incumbency advantages in USA:

1. Compulsory voting makes it harder to solicit votes from a subset of the populace.

2. The Australian Electoral Commission is highly trusted as a neutral body, so Gerrymandering is rare.

3. None of our voting systems use First Past The Post; it's all ranked choice, babes!