In a real marketplace, customers have leverage. If a company fails to deliver, customers walk away. That’s what keeps businesses accountable and innovative.
Congress doesn’t operate that way. Politics today looks less like an open market and more like a monopoly. The two major parties have insulated themselves from competition, and the result is the same kind of unresponsiveness you get from other monopolies—your electric company, your cable provider, or the post office. Why perform better when customers have nowhere else to go?
Voters expect Washington to solve real problems—runaway inflation, crushing healthcare costs, a broken immigration system—and to replace leaders who fail at that job. But instead of solving problems, Congress has chosen to make accountability harder.
- They redraw districts to lock in safe seats and make it almost impossible to vote out ineffective or unethical incumbents.
- They threaten to repeal the filibuster so that whichever party holds power can sideline the other completely.
- They shut down the government rather than compromise on policy or budget priorities.
Meanwhile, inflation keeps rising, healthcare costs are devouring paychecks, and immigration remains stuck between over-enforcement and dysfunction. These issues aren’t new—and they’re not partisan. They persist because both parties have found it more profitable to fight each other than to fix anything.
As a smaller share of Americans argue over symbols and slogans, the parties quietly consolidate control. They don’t see governing as their duty; they see it as a threat to their dominance. And they are working systematically to make sure voters can’t remove them when they fail.
The truth is simple: America’s two-party system has become a monopoly on power. The only way to change that is to reintroduce competition—by empowering the tens of millions of independent voters who want a government that serves people, not parties. Until we do, Washington will keep working for itself, and no one else.
