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That's what bicameral legislatures[1] were meant to address.

Ideally, the lower house are representatives elected from the common people, and the upper house are the career politicians that understand how the government works.

In the U.S., the 17th amendment[2] changed that, for better or worse (probably both).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_U...

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Ideally, the upper house is gradually stripped of its powers, as it's undemocratic by design.

IIRC it's actually somewhat rare to have a bicameral legislature where both houses have roughly symmetrical powers.

"Undemocratic by design" applies to the whole Constitution, since everything in it requires supermajorities to change. A legislature is undemocratic in that it restricts voting to representatives. Due process is another constraint on democracy. This is to say that "undemocratic" is not necessarily a bug, since pure democracy is rule by the whim of the mob.

Is that ideal for a bicameral legislature's ability to mitigate the risk of populist takeover? Or a step on the way to the ideal of direct democracy?

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