> Parties are a naturally emerging phenomenon in representative democracies, though.

My main point is about putting party affiliation on ballots. I have less of a problem with the existence of parties than I do as making it the only deciding factor in a person's decision to vote a certain way.

I want people banding together over ideas rather than labels. While this may be the intent of parties, we can observe that in our current form, labels are more important than ideas. So my point is about adding a rather minimal amount of friction between the two. So that we can better distinguish labels from ideas.

> Simply put, if you can band together to pool votes somehow (e.g. by agreeing to disagree on some matters to some extent), you consistently win over those who do not.

This leads to coalitions, not necessarily parties. And then the coalition changes as a result of elections, because a different combination of blocs can form a majority.

It also doesn't necessarily have to be the same set of people even within an election cycle. Suppose you have (representing ideologies rather than parties) 40 democrats, 40 republicans, 15 libertarians and 5 greens. The greens wouldn't have enough seats to do anything, and the democrats and republicans together could do whatever they wanted, but so could the libertarians and either of the democrats or republicans.

Then in the same session you might have a bill that eliminates mandatory minimum sentences favored by the democrats and libertarians, another that lowers taxes on small businesses favored by the republicans and libertarians, and a third that creates a new Medicare benefit favored by democrats and republicans.

Then in the next election one of the major blocs ends up with 48 votes, which is very different, because now a majority coalition is either them and anyone else including the smallest bloc, or not-them but all of the other blocs together.

> There's simply no way a single person in the House can meaningfully represent 750k diverse people (especially with crude grouping by location) in the first place.

There is no way for a policy to represent any plurality of distinct individuals, because they'll each want different things. But a representative can try to balance their interests as best they can, and an election using a less defective voting system than FPTP would actually impose consequences on pissing off significant parts of the district, because a candidate which is similar but different along that dimension could plausibly replace them in the next election.

> direct democracy (seems more viable with the state of instant communication these days)

Direct democracy is best when it's used to repeal or veto things or otherwise bind the government, acting as one of the checks and balances against corruption. Using it to create new crimes or spending programs leads to unchecked populism.

We have enough trouble with that as it is because we made it too easy to pass national laws without broad consensus. What you want instead is "laboratories of democracy" where different localities try different things and then everyone can see how each of them goes and make their own decision, and continue that way until the right answer is clear enough to achieve consensus and go through a much more deliberative process to pass a national law. Or, for that matter, just let each of the localities separately pass the law there is now consensus should exist.

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. You can't ignore human mass psychology here; working together towards a common goal is not something that can just be completely disregarded in the next electoral cycle.

There's no way for policy on one issue to represent a plurality of distinct individuals, but most issues are broadly orthogonal and not particularly strongly related in and of themselves. Any single candidate, however, is effectively a packaged bundle of policies on all those orthogonal issues. That bundling is the problem.

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. If you're really lucky, you get someone who runs on a populist platform and then turns around and does the whole sage king thing.

We're in enough trouble as it is because we shoved most politics up to national level. On that level, any way to enact extensive policies will be problematic simply because broad consensus doesn't scale well to that level. I agree that the solution to that is indeed "laboratories of democracy" where highly localized decisions can be made tailored to the local wants and needs, and where people can easily vote their feet - somewhere around the municipal level is probably fine-grained enough for that, I think, although large metropolitan areas would need further breakdown (which is not a problem with multi-level federalism). 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.

I also agree that it's generally too easy to pass "will somebody please do something?!" type legislation, but that is true in either representative or direct democracy, and so there need to be checks on that either way. Supermajority requirements & automatic sunsetting can help a lot there, especially if the sunsetting term is proportional to the amount of votes the law gets - so e.g. if it can barely pass, then it needs to be re-enacted every year, while something that has near unanimous support is kept around for decades.

> 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.