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Doug Bandow /

Fixing a Failed Political System

Congressional term limits would lessen incumbency advantage and yield better legislators.
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Illustration by Noah Hickey/The Dispatch (Photos via Getty Images).
In our polarized era, there are fewer and fewer spaces where people who disagree can do so productively and in good faith. The Dispatch’s Debate Series aims to be an outlier: a regular feature where two writers with opposing views can hash out some of the thorniest political and cultural issues roiling the national conversation. If you have an idea for a future topic, please let us know at debates@thedispatch.com.

The United States political system is failing. Expanding political divisions have been exacerbated by the machinations of a political class unwilling to sacrifice its prerogatives, irrespective of the nation’s desperate needs. For a time, the gerontocracy controlling political affairs in Washington seemed to mimic that in Moscow prior to the Soviet regime’s collapse.

Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author of "The Politics of Plunder: Misgovernment in Washington and Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire."

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