The unpopular choices that need to be made in America are the centrist ones.

One of them being "whether it's left- or right-aligned, let's not engage in your social agenda on the federal level for a while"

>where a person can't be a candidate to a position more than one level higher than the highest one they were previously elected for

For much of the time in the Roman Republic they also had this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_honorum