This is a follow-up to my piece on Enshitification, and here I’ll discuss how the same process of power agglomerating to the “producer” reduces competition and effectively reduces the share of value received by the “consumer”.

For a lot of this, I’ll use data/history from America as there are some great sources, graphs and stories, but the trends are overarching trends are similar in many major democracies globally.

So lets get into the politics…

I’m going to make 3 intial statements about the state of politics and share a few graphs to back these up to start this article off. They are not proof, but they highlight my argument.

1 - Politics is increasingly polarized

2 - As a result, politics is increasingly non-functional

3 - As a result, the public is increasingly unhappy with the state of our politics

So, again:

Politics is more divided than ever → Politics is less functional than ever → People are less satisifed with the product of “politics” than ever.

My argument…despite things looking more competitive than ever, this is largely a result of the major parties conspiring together to keep things within the control of the leading 2 parties, creating a situation very similar to a monopoly.

But how is this like a monopoly if there’s clearly such a fierce competition?

In a world that’s increasingly divided between 2, the irony is that the enemy is in many ways our best friend.

Think of Pepsi and Coke. By focusing on fighting each other and keeping people thinking about them fighting, they can both intensify the feelings around each side of the fight (so polarization = deeper engagement) and distract from the fact that there are actually incredibly few people they’re fighting over because so few people are switching sides. Not to mention, they can have us so focused on fighting each other, we don’t think about fighting both of them (should we really let sugar drink companies run the planet and increasingly own our water too?)

Duopoly, like monopoly, benefits the producers first and foremost and despite being slightly less advantageous than a monopoly, sometimes the cover provided by some competition makes it even more advantageous in the longrun, as it makes the outcome more durable.

A history lesson, how did 1968 create modern America?

To understand how politics became so polarized and how the duopoly solidified itself so firmly, it’s worth looking at a pivotal moment in U.S. political history, perhaps the final time that someone stood a chance to overturn the duopoly, the election of 1968.

This was a year (years really) of deep social unrest and political upheaval. JFK was killed not long ago, the US was still in a deeply unpopular war in Vietnam and LBJ, the sitting president, opted not to run. His vice president, Hubert Humphrey, took the democratic nomination from McCarthy (an anti-war candidate) after Bobby Kennedy was assassinated while campaigning (the father of the now famous RFK Jr). Earlier that year, riots had occurred in several cities - including in Chicago, at the democratic convention - and Martin Luther King Jr was also assassinated. The disharmony was palpable and was a thin veil on rising racial tensions.

Enter George Wallace, the former Alabama state governor. He ran as an independent under the banner of the American Independent Party, emphasizing a platform of segregationist and populist policies (a backlash to the hippy movement and race riots of the last few years). Wallace’s candidacy peeled off significant support from disaffected Democrats in the South, reshaping the political map - into a recognizable shape, as this is now republican heartlands. That is because Nixon saw what was happening and positioned the Republicans as the major party to align more closely with George, to capture the “silent majority” through what was deemed his “southern strategy”.

Anyway, how did outsider, George Wallace, do?

• Wallace won 46 electoral votes, winning Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. This makes him the last third-party candidate to have won any electoral votes to date.

• He captured 13.5% of the national popular vote, receiving nearly 10 million votes.

Though he didn’t come close to outright winning, his performance terrified the two dominant parties, who saw the real danger an independent candidate posed to their shared grip on power. This fear sparked a series of changes over the following decades, designed to make it harder for third-party or independent candidates to gain traction

What changes followed to tighten the duopoly?

In response to the threat of an outside competitor (shown by George Wallace and later Ross Perot, who got 19% of the popular vote in 1992 but 0 electoral college votes), the Democrat-Republican duopoly instituted several policy changes over the last 50+ years to make it increasingly harder for anyone to compete. Most of these policies are across the 2 parties and to some extent required agreement between the two.

• Closed Primaries
  Closed primaries became more common in the 1970s and 1980s as a way to consolidate party control over the nomination process. By restricting voting in primaries to registered party members, states limited the influence of independents and minor-party voters.

  • For instance, New York has long required voters to register with a party months in advance to participate in its primary. In 2016, this excluded over 3 million unaffiliated voters from the Democratic and Republican primaries.

  • As of 2024, 14 states still use fully closed primaries, while others have semi-closed systems that are slightly more inclusive but still disadvantage outsiders.

• Ballot Access Laws
  Ballot access requirements have become progressively more stringent since the mid-20th century. Following Wallace’s success in securing ballot access in all 50 states in 1968, many states introduced higher thresholds to limit such challenges. We saw this with RFK jr recently, he wasn’t even an option in many states (prior to dropping out).

  • Example: Texas introduced a law requiring independent candidates to gather signatures equal to 1% of the previous gubernatorial election’s total votes. In 2016, this meant over 79,000 valid signatures were needed, making it one of the toughest thresholds in the country.

  • In North Carolina, candidates must collect signatures equal to 1.5% of the votes cast in the previous election, and signatures must come from at least four congressional districts.

• Presidential Debate Access
  After Ross Perot’s impressive performance in 1992 the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) introduced stricter rules.

  • In 2000, the CPD set a 15% national polling threshold for debate inclusion, making it nearly impossible for any independent or third-party candidate to meet the requirement. For comparison, Perot’s polling before the debates in 1992 hovered around 7-10%, but his debate performances were pivotal in boosting his numbers.

  • This rule ensured that in 2000, Ralph Nader (Green Party) and Pat Buchanan (Reform Party) were excluded, despite representing significant voter bases.

• Campaign Finance Laws (MOST SIGNIFICANT)
  The Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), passed in 1971 and amended in 1974, introduced public funding for presidential campaigns but with a catch: candidates must have received at least 5% of the vote in the previous election to qualify for federal matching funds.

  • This rule created a cycle where new third-party candidates, like Jill Stein (Green Party) in 2012 or Gary Johnson (Libertarian Party) in 2016, struggled to compete financially, while established parties continued to receive federal subsidies.

• Fusion Voting Bans
  Fusion voting, which allows a candidate to appear on the ballot as the nominee of multiple parties, was common in the 19th century but began to be banned in many states after the rise of Populist and third-party movements.

  • By the 1970s, nearly all states had outlawed fusion voting. Today, only a handful of states, including New York and Connecticut, allow it. The ban forces minor parties to either run their own candidates—splitting votes—or align entirely with one of the major parties (VERY IMPORTANT TO TODAY)

And one major change happened particularly on the Republican side of the party…

In 1996, Fox News was founded with a view to combatting the liberal/progressive bias in most media (largely down to selection bias in who becomes a journalist in non-explicitly-conservative news organizations meaning a heavy overlap with this demographic).

I’ll talk about this in depth in my follow up piece, but this became a key political weapon for entrenching Republican power and with the close relationship between the Republican party and the news outlet, it made it increasingly difficult for a conservative aligned candidate to become popular without the blessing the party and hence Fox News…but at some point this got flipped on its head…

What did neither party account for?

In a sentence, they hadn’t predicted a future where the tools they’d create to guard party power became the backdoors for someone to hijack the parties entirely.

I’ll leave you on this cliffhanger, as this unexpectedly got longer and longer, so I’m gonna cut off and finish the rest in a part 2 to this piece…

Thanks for now guys! If you enjoyed this then do me a favour and share it with a friend :)