Is the problem that politicians are too good at debate or is the problem that voters lack the critical thinking skills to recognize that they're being played? I'd lean much more towards the latter. In watching public policy debates during election cycles, I always notice how little it resembles the debates I did in high school. Politicians, debating the way they do for voters, would lose in high school debate competitions. If anything, debate taught me to recognize nonsensical arguments that were, none the less, somewhat convincing. I wonder what would happen if more voters were acquainted with the experience of having won an argument based solely how you argued rather than the substance of your position.

> Thomas Jefferson was on to something when he said we should rewrite parts of the constitution[0] once a generation

Ah...but now you've just created a meta game that controls the actual game. The Machiavellian players, as you put it, would just figure out how to control the rule rewriting process to achieve their necessary victories once the game starts being played. The only thing that makes the rule changes in debate work for a while is that the rules are written by impartial people who are trying to fix a broken situation and, crucially, are ineligible to play by the rules they create.

Gerrymandering: states are precisely "cracked and packed" to maximize the number of expected majority-red districts in a state and minimize the number of majority-blue.

Partisaned primaries: optimization of campaigning and stumping is done thru visiting specific states that vote early in the primary. Most people don't vote for the best possible candidate, they vote for the candidate they dislike the most that they think can win. The biggest states (CA, TX, NY) are traditionally vote only a few weeks before the end of the primary while NH and IO vote extremely early, and thus, have outsized influence on who most people get to vote for.

Electoral college: Republican candidates don't spend any real effort in deep blue states and Democratic candidates don't spend any real effort in red states.

These are the extreme optimization of quirks in our "democracy" in the same way modern fencing is an extreme optimization of modern fencing rules rather than training for real-world sword fighting battles.

This definition of gerrymandering makes it sound like only Republicans do it, but in fact both major parties do it. For example https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/how-dee...