How in God's name is it possible that in a nation of 330 million souls, most of them decent and kind, our only choices for our next president are a doddering old crook and a blowhard bully?
(Well, there is a third, I suppose, a man who believes multiple crazy things, perhaps most notably that Sergey Brin's ex-wife is a fine and fitting candidate for vice president.)
Glad you asked. I'll explain it to you. Let's start with two facts that will elucidate the root cause.
A recent Gallup poll revealed that 49 percent of American voters are now independents. As Mike Green of Axios AM wrote, “By far the dominant U.S. party isn't Democrats or Republicans. It's: 'I'll shop around, thank you’."
There are 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. At this moment, there are 218 Republicans, 213 Democrats and four empty seats. There are no independents.
These figures illustrate the great predicament in which the American political system currently finds itself: Electoral politics in the U.S. is in the sole control of two parties that together represent just half of all voters.
A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 70 percent of American voters believe Biden shouldn't run for re-election. Approximately 50 percent of the poll respondents were Democrats. Reuters also reported that, “Fifty-six percent of people responding to the poll said Trump should not run, including about a third of Republicans.”
How has the two-party system produced two candidates who are widely distrusted, if not despised, by the majority of the electorate?
The simple answer? That is the nature of political parties. Expecting something good to arise from political parties is like expecting diamonds to drop from the alimentary system and is just as unnatural.
This is hardly a fresh insight. In his farewell address (drafted by James Madison), George Washington, our first President, famously warned the nation against the rise of political parties.
Less famously, so did John Adams, the second President. He was even less measured in his criticism than Washington:
There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our constitution.
The best and most detailed of all the critiques belongs to John C. Calhoun, who served as Vice President 50 years after the signing of the Declaration. Calhoun's words, belonging as they do to a champion of slavery, are rarely visited. Moreover, their astonishing prescience is marred by his Nineteenth Century fastidiousness.
But let's visit them anyway. See if any of this sounds familiar:
The conflict between the two parties ... tends necessarily to settle down into a struggle for the honors and emoluments of the government; and each, in order to obtain an object so ardently desired, will, in the process of the struggle, resort to whatever measure may seem best calculated to effect this purpose.
The adoption, by the one, of any measure, however objectionable, which might give it an advantage, would compel the other to follow its example. In such case, it would be indispensable to success to avoid division and keep united — and hence, from a necessity inherent in the nature of such governments, each party must be alternately forced, in order to insure victory, to resort to measures to concentrate the control over its movements in fewer and fewer hands, as the struggle became more and more violent.
This, in process of time, must lead to party organization, and party caucuses and discipline; and these, to the conversion of the honors and emoluments of the government into means of rewarding partisan services, in order to secure the fidelity and increase the zeal of the members of the party.
The effect of the whole combined, even in the earlier stages of the process, when they exert the least pernicious influence, would be to place the control of the two parties in the hands of their respective majorities; and the government itself, virtually, under the control of the majority of the dominant party, for the time, instead of the majority of the whole community — where the theory of this form of government vests it.
Thus, in the very first stage of the process, the government becomes the government of a minority instead of a majority — a minority, usually, and under the most favorable circ*mstances, of not much more than one-fourth of the whole community [Emphasis added. According to Gallup, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party each now constitute 25 percent of American voters.]
But the process, as regards the concentration of power, would not stop at this stage. The government would gradually pass from the hands of the majority of the party into those of its leaders; as the struggle became more intense, and the honors and emoluments of the government the all-absorbing objects.
At this stage, principles and policy would lose all influence in the elections; and cunning, falsehood, deception, slander, fraud, and gross appeals to the appetites of the lowest and most worthless portions of the community, would take the place of sound reason and wise debate.
After these have thoroughly debased and corrupted the community, and all the arts and devices of party have been exhausted, the government would vibrate between the two factions (for such will parties have become) at each successive election.
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Do you know, dear reader, what a political party is? Bet you don't -- even if you follow political news assiduously. You may even be a proud, life-long registered Republican or a Blue Dog Democrat. But I'd still wager you don't know. The odds are greatly in my favor.
You don't know because these things tend to work better when people don't know what they are pledging their allegiance to. So let me tell you who owns the American political system lock, stock and barrel:
The Republican Party is a private organization established under a specific section in the Internal Revenue Service rules (IRC 527). Just like an LLC or a 501(c)(3). And just like an LLC or a 501(c)(3) it is run by a very few people. The same is true of the Democratic National Committee.
Just like LLCs and 501(c)(3)s, these organizations run for the benefit of their boards of directors and executives.
That is their only purpose.
(If you believe 501(c)(3)s operate for the benefit of the poor and downtrodden then you have either never served on the board of one or have never filled out a grant application.)
What is the purpose of both the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee?
In both cases it is exactly the same: to seize political power and to grow it. That's why they exist.
You may believe that as a party member you are supporting the expansion of immigrant rights, or their diminution. You are not.
In the same way the AARP uses your membership to advance its for-profit interests, the parties use your membership to advance their own narrow interests. The National Rifle Association also uses your often little-more-than tacit support to promote the policies and laws that advance their cause.
But compared to the Republicans and Democrats, the NRA and AARP are pikers. After all, virtually every one of the most powerful lawmakers in the nation belongs to one or the other, and they recognize that their interests are tied to their party.
Indeed, the U.S. President is also the titular head of his party (which is, as I mentioned, a private club). As the recent reorganization of the leadership of the GOP shows, even a presumptive nominee for president has nearly complete authority over his party, including the power to force out the chair of the national committee and to then install his daughter-in-law as a new co-chair.
That's why lawmakers have passed so many laws to ensure the two major parties hold a continuing monopoly on the U.S. electoral system. (Self-serving laws are as common as dirt. There is no possibility of lawmakers banning insider trading by their members or putting into place term limits -- despite the preferences of most voters.)
You've heard of “closed primaries”? In a closed primary you have to register with a party in order to choose a candidate you can then vote for in the general election. Very often that means you're voiceless unless you are a registered Republican or Democrat.
But the rules for primaries are notably weird, with different systems allowed within each state and within many local jurisdictions. The common element is that all are designed to suit the powers-that-be.
For example, if you want to vote in a local, state, or national office primary in New Jersey, you must declare a political party affiliation when you register to vote. But there's an odd proviso: In congressional and state primaries, independent voters can simply choose a party while at the polls. If you vote for a Democrat or a Republican, the state automatically enrolls you in that party and requires you to follow a complex procedure to be released.
Each state also has its own party organization, usually run by state and local elected officials who also use the party mechanism to their advantage. But here's the kicker: Though the state organization isn't officially a subdivision of the national party (in theory it's largely independent), the national committee ensures compliance through a wickedly pragmatic mechanism -- by picking and choosing who shares in the vast amounts of money it collects. This includes special favors for especially obsequious state organizations.
The primary job of the DNC and the RNC is to choose the party's candidate for President, which includes holding the conventions every four years. But in their ambition (and desire for power), they go much further, including creating and coordinating campaigns against potential and existing third-party candidates.
This game was largely formalized in 2000 when in concert with their state partners the DNC threw up logistical and financial barriers that bogged down any energy and momentum the Ralph Nader campaign might have managed to create. Arizona was particularly flagrant, with the Democratic state chairman declaring, “Our first objective is to keep [Nader] off the ballot.”
These days the logistical hurdles remain. In a recent edition of his podcast, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said “As everybody knows, since I've declared my candidacy for the presidency of the United States, the big question has been, 'Can we get on the ballot?'”
Kennedy says there is a “legitimate case for making ballot access difficult … to keep frivolous candidates from flooding the ballot … .”
He's right, of course. As we have seen, if you loosen up the rules too much you end up with Grand Dragon David Duke on the gubernatorial ballot in Louisiana as the legitimate Republican candidate. But Kennedy also says too many recent party machinations have turned ballot access into “a weapon for keeping everyone off the ballot except for the major, corporate parties -- the uniparty of the Republican and Democratic parties.”
Ballot-access and third-party expert Richard Winger says Texas currently has the worst laws regarding ballot access for presidential candidates. “Texas is a nightmare. It's not only a huge number of signatures [on a required petition], there's a very short time to collect the signatures and people can't sign if they voted in the primaries in March.”
In practical terms, that means this year Kennedy must collect by the second week of May approximately 115,000 signatures of registered voters who didn't vote in the March 5 primary.
Other states Winger cites as difficult for independent candidates include California, New York, and Florida. All four of the most populous states are on Winger's short list.
(In a bit of a twist – purely foreseeable if you understand politics – landing on a presidential ballot is often far easier than signing onto a local or state ballot. Winger says that's because the local folks – the ones who write the rules – aren't nearly so concerned with who becomes president as who might take their job.)
Of course, the efforts extend beyond cozy legal impediments. Often it's just personal. Consider this warning uncovered by the indispensable journalist Matt Taibbi. Taibbi reported that when a group of prominent politicians and political activists, including recently deceased former Sen. Joe Lieberman, met with “multiple advocacy groups aligned with the Democratic Party,” they were told:
Through every channel we have, to their donors, their friends, the press, everyone – everyone – should send the message: If you have one fingernail clipping of a skeleton in your closet, we will find it … If you think you were vetted when you ran for governor, you're insane. That was nothing. We are going to come at you with every gun we can possibly find. We did not do that with Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. We should have, and we will not make that mistake again.
Fortunately, Semafor managed to get a copy of the audio of the meeting. In his review of this and other efforts by the Democrats to tar other candidates, Taibbi asked, “If this is how Beltway insiders talk about how to keep Joe Lieberman and [former head of the NAACP] Ben Chavis out of politics, imagine what they say about Trump?”
To some degree we don't have to imagine. We have examples, including the recently repudiated effort by the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Trump from the state's 2024 presidential ballot. Or you can watch the courtroom circus now underway in New York, the one ring-mastered by state Attorney General Letitia James.
But enough of that. Books have been written about the dirty tricks employed by both parties. More books will be written. To my point:
As government grows larger and more powerful, the kind of people it attracts to office grows worse and worse. So do the parties.
Those of my vintage (I'm 70) likely recall that in olden days there was very often bipartisan support for this bill or that one.
Writing recently in Salve, a publication of the Pell Center, Katie Langford Sonder noted, “Congress has a long history of passing bipartisan legislation. In the last decade, however, the Senate and House have hit record highs for the percent of partisan legislation passed. In the 117th Senate (2021-2022), 54 percent of the legislation passed in Congress was partisan, meaning the majority party forced through over half of the legislation. This was the highest percentage of partisan legislation recorded in the Senate between 1945 and 2022.”
Citing Marist and the Morning Consult and Bipartisan Policy Center, she further writes, “These high percentages of partisan legislation come at a time when most Americans, regardless of their political party, want government officials to compromise to find solutions to America’s most pressing issues. Over 85 percent of Democrats and Republicans want Congress to pass bipartisan legislation on the economy, healthcare, immigration, and criminal justice.”
Unfortunately for American voters, the calculus in Congress doesn't often concern itself with what they want. That's why Congress has an approval rating of 12 percent, which is just below pubic lice. Members of congress prefer to ask, will it serve my party leaders, thereby serving me? That's why Congressmembers have a re-election rate of 94 percent, which is just below Vladimir Putin.
Sometimes party loyalty means taking a bullet to the foot if the second round ends up in the other fella's heart.
For example, the Republicans declined to participate in the congressional investigation into January 6, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pulling his nominees following a dispute with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He and other Republicans hoped their removal would reduce public confidence in the proceedings.
That maneuver nicely set up Pelosi for an end-around, which she immediately took advantage of by appointing to the committee Republicans Meghan McCain and Adam Kinzinger. The fix was then well and truly in, with the mainstream media supporting the “bipartisan” committee's finding, including an insistence that the riot was an “insurrection.”
Removing the Republicans from the committee only made it easier for reporters to provide accurate, “objective” reporting on the committee's activities with stories that met their own partisan goals.
As for what is best for the American public?
Consider the staggering crime our lawmakers are currently carrying out against the people: We are now accruing $1 trillion in new debt every 90 days. Government spending is now seizing a percentage of the Gross National Product not seen since World War II. That spending isn't funding a world war, but rather is used to create false growth, which is simply a more expensive way of purchasing votes.
The parties clearly benefit from this, and are abetted in this larceny by the media, whose intellectual and moral failings range from stupidity to ignorance to dishonesty, with no lunch breaks allowed.
As Taibbi often notes, the mainstream media is largely a sub-unit of the Democratic National Committee (there they are again). That’s why they each time unanimously declare third-party candidates weird or comical.
Often they're correct (Kennedy, Nader, Perot). But sometimes it's just a knee-jerk reaction because among their many intellectual failings, they are also the most reactionary collection of human beings in America. You may recall they giggled en masse when presidential candidate Steve Forbes declared his support for a flat tax. While never presenting a countervailing opinion, they managed to poison this very reasonable topic of conversation for a quarter-century and counting.
The illness that infects both parties extends beyond fraud, of course. They have both utterly abandoned the political philosophy that was at one time their selling point.
For example, Donald Trump is not a conservative. Indeed, his record shows he is anti-free trade and is perfectly willing to use the government to implement social ends. Younger readers may find those definitions of conservatism confusing. Where did those ideas come from?
Their confusion is understandable. In April 2021, University of Pennsylvania professor of political science Daniel Hopkins was part of a team of researchers that conducted a study of voter attitudes toward U.S. senators, asking each participant to choose which of two senators was more conservative or more liberal.
“By April 2021, when we did this survey, Donald Trump had, even for these political activists, largely redefined what it was to be conservative around support for Trump and his style of politics."
Disposing of a long-held philosophy isn't always a matter of conscious decision-making, of course. Upton Sinclair nailed the career benefits long ago when he noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” It's a matter of survival for many public figures, including, very notably, conservative talk radio hosts, who turned on a dime and now are unanimously pro-Trump.
I would only add that it's even more difficult to understand something when this something offends your faith – your belief without proof. In a brilliant recent essay in Tablet (today's indispensable read), Liel Liebowitz described the difficulties she endured in making “The Turn” away from the Democratic Party, which formerly, she believed, reflected her leftist views.
Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or seriously considered. But what we saw there -- and in the newspapers we used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so proud – was terrifying.
However we tried to explain what was happening on “the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or that it was something we still truly believed in. That is what The Turn is all about.
The Turn brings with it the sort of pain most of us don't feel as adults; you'd have to go all the way back to junior high, maybe, to recall a stabbing sensation quite as deep and confounding as watching your friends all turn on you and decide that you're not worthy of their affection anymore.
Liebowitz's comments provide an excellent entry to the heart of the matter. In the same poll that showed independents now constitute 49 percent of American voters, Gallup indicated that since 2004 the percentage of Democrats fell from 35 percent to 25; Republicans from 33 percent to 25 percent.
Who are these 25 percenters who maintain their party membership? They are the tribalists. They are the ones who lack the intellectual withal or the emotional strength to cry Basta!
The parties are quite aware of this and they use it to their advantage. They know their remaining membership can be counted on through thick and thin. And they know that policy and political philosophy play virtually no role in the minds of these loyalists. It's crazy, but real-world accomplishments mean virtually nothing – and besides, they're hard work. On the other hand, getting these people to hate the other tribe is easy. That's the strategy.
The Democratic Party has become the party that bans free speech; meanwhile the party's loyalists within the EPA partner with industrial giants. Big Pharma, now loved by Democrats, controls the health agencies and, indeed, the entire medical industry. None of this matters because (listen to me now!) the Democrats are the good guys.
How do Democrats know that their party, and by extension, they, are the good guys? It isn't because of the party's principled stands; they don't have any. They know the Democrats are the good guys because they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Republicans are evil. Don't believe it? Turn on MSNBC tonight.
The Republican Party does exactly the same, of course, with exactly the same result. If a Republican candidate says his is the party of fiscal responsibility and small government, the partisans continue to believe it, one hundred years of history notwithstanding. It is a matter of faith. Indeed, the Republican Party has no philosophy at all, except for the fevered rants issued each day by Donald Trump on Truth Social. Don't believe me? Tune in to talk radio.
That's the circ*mstance we find ourselves in: Two parties whose total membership will soon be in the minority of American voters hold every key position in the nation. Each party's membership is made up of the blindly loyal and morally malleable who are not moved and persuaded by the accomplishments of their party but rather by their hatred of the other tribe.
Let's recall now what I said earlier. Just like LLCs and 501(c)(3)s, political organizations run for the benefit of their boards of directors and executives. The benefit they seek most assiduously is the acquisition and expansion of political power. (Fortunately for the various individuals, money has a way of following hard upon power.)
So, back to the question: how have we ended up with Biden and Trump?
As the kids would say, Biden and Trump OWN their parties.
Trump seized the Republican Party through sheer force of will and personality. Those who had remained loyal Republicans were the true believers – the ones who, despite a hundred years of history, still believed the Rs were the party of fiscal propriety.
More importantly, the Republicans were suddenly the party of “not Democrats,” because Democrats are, they will tell you, evil. And they were sick and tired of electing Republicans who didn't get it.
Trump came along at just the right moment. To everyone's shock and awe, he overwhelmed the party principals through a combination of bluster, hyperbole, and most of all, a brutal near-wit. He has kept the party in his pocket since via the same mechanisms. For example, consider his response to the recent Ronna McDaniel saga. McDaniel, picked by Trump in 2016 to lead the party, was in March forced out of her position as chair of the Republican Party -- by Trump.
She was then hired by NBC as a political commentator, a position she held for a matter of hours. Anyone with a touch of class would have been supportive, or at the very least silent. Not Trump. He immediately posted on Truth Social, “Wow! Ronna McDaniel got fired by Fake News NBC. She only lasted two days, and this after McDaniel went out of her way to say what they wanted to hear. It leaves her in a very strange place, it’s called NEVER NEVERLAND, and it’s not a place you want to be.”
As I said, anyone with a touch of class would have been appalled by this comment, but the Republican Party as presently constituted is a cult — a nasty one. They define themselves as Republicans first, thus differentiated from the old guard who are now referred to as RINOs (Republicans in Name Only).
How they came to power is just another iteration of the ongoing shifts that take place within a two-party system. In order to hang onto power, and perhaps to expand it, the Republican powers-that-were had sought for years to convince the party members of their conservative bonafides, using every method at their disposal – except implementing conservative policies, such as cutting the size of government and reducing spending. Instead, they mostly served as loyal members of the tax-and-spend uniparty.
At a certain point principled conservatives wandered away from the party, leaving only those whose first political priority is hating the Democrats.
Enter Trump, exeunt class, and anyone who sees its value.
Hillary Clinton attempted to seize on the same dynamic within the Democratic Party, with a campaign aimed at energizing the declining number of Democrats to do battle against the Deplorables. She was abetted in her cause by underhanded steps taken by then-DNC chairman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who subverted the campaign efforts of Bernie Sanders in order to ensure Hillary's primary victory.
Fortunately for Hillary, the media and the other powers-that-were in the Democratic Party ensured the stink stayed stuck to Wasserman Schultz, and for reasons that defy logic (except for campaign logic), Hillary came out smelling like a rose. Right up to the fateful night.
It was on that night -- Tuesday, November 8, 2016 -- that Hillary's and the Democratic Party's future was determined.
As with the Republicans, the Democrats would jettison common sense – and the voters who believed in the old ways. Through the recent Biden years, one million Democrats have moved to the Republican Party, with even more simply changing their registration to reflect their new independence. Most told reporters and pollsters they had no particular affection for the Republicans but were simply driven out by the expanding craziness of the Left.
Biden was elected on the widely held belief he would return a sense of normalcy to a Trump- and Covid-weary nation. Alas, it was not to be. The inmates had seized the asylum, and they were celebrating every nutbag notion that arose. And they had found the perfect overseer for the mental ward the party was happily becoming – a doddering old crook who could be counted on not to be counted on when it came time to wash the feces from the walls.
Today, any reasonable Democratic candidate – for example, one who would deny a man can become a woman by changing his mind -- would likely wipe the floor with Trump in the general election. But the party is in the hands of the radicals and they like their sock puppet just fine.
And that is why, ladies and gents, when November 5 arrives, the doddering old crook and the blowhard bully will battle it out. And Americans – half of us, at least -- will hang our heads in shame.
Mark St.J. Couhig has been an award-winning writer, editor and publisher for more than 40 years, with his professional years spent in Louisiana, New Mexico, Washington and now, Texas. With the exception of his freelance writing and tavern tours, he is now mostly retired.
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