Most Americans don’t know this: in 1988, the Republican and Democratic parties fired the League of Women Voters — the neutral, nonpartisan organization that had hosted Presidential debates for decades — and replaced them with a commission they run themselves. Many Americans only tunes in to politics during the runup to a Presidential election, which means the Presidential debates are often the pivotal events in the race.
When that organization — the Commission on Presidential Debates, or CPD — was founded it was jointly run by the chairs of the Republican and Democratic national committees. It existed, in practice, to protect the two parties that created it.
The most notable rule the CPD instituted was requiring any third-party candidate who wants to participate in these nationally televised debates to receive greater than 15% support in at least five national polls — an effectively impossible hurdle. For context, only two third-party candidates have ever exceeded five percent of the popular vote and received federal matching funds since the law providing them was passed in 1974. The bar set by the CPD is triple that. The two major parties have, in other words, constructed a system specifically designed to ensure no one else can compete.
Through nine election cycles it served that purpose until 2024, when it was no longer even needed. It had been forty years since the debates were hosted by the League Of Women Voters and the two major parties decided to simply negotiate the details directly with the networks. Notably, they didn’t invite anyone but each other.
Broken government is serious and dangerous stuff. The two major parties fight for control like petulant children wrestling over a television remote. When one of them shakes it free, the loser storms out of the room. Or the Capitol Building.
When their inability to compromise led to a government shutdown in 2011, Standard & Poor’s downgraded this country’s debt from AAA to AA for the first time in roughly a century. That will likely cost future generations trillions in interest payments.
The system has been mostly the same for two hundred and fifty years, but for decades after the fall of Communism there was no existential threat to democracy that forced compromise. When Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill couldn’t agree, they didn’t shut down the government — they famously worked it out, because failing to do so risked giving quarter to the Soviets. Once the wall came down, the consequences of not compromising no longer seemed more important than the pursuit of personal power and wealth to our elected officials. Country over party became optional. They chose party.
Is the citizenry pleased with the performance of this duopoly? According to Ballotpedia, in January 2026 the approval rating for Congress sits at around 15% — what pollsters call “the floor,” meaning it is almost impossible to go lower. According to Gallup, since 2010 the approval rating for Congress has almost never exceeded 30%.
To put 15% in context: according to a YouGov poll from roughly a year ago, the approval rating on Adolf Hitler ranges between 11% and 23%, depending on how you interpret the results — 11% of Americans say some of his ideas were “right,” and 12% categorized him as “a bad person who did some good things.” YouGov puts his unfavorable tracker at -88%. Stalin comes in somewhat stronger, with an unfavorable rating of roughly -75% to -80%.
Hitler. Stalin. The U.S. Congress. The polling puts them in roughly the same neighborhood. That sentence should alarm every American.
Most of us have acquiesced to the notion that there is simply nothing we can do about it. I disagree. Things do change. Change often happens when we don’t expect it, or too slowly to observe — but it is inevitable. Just because you can’t see the continents moving doesn’t mean tectonic plates don’t exist. Just because you don’t know that the Republican party was once a third-party movement doesn’t make it untrue. The Whigs would agree — if any of them still existed.
Individual issues no longer matter in an era when we have no functioning political system with which to legislate. That is not an epitaph — it is a call to action. Citizens must push representatives to reverse Citizens United, minimize the effect of money on politics, broaden access to Presidential debates, end the filibuster, dissolve the electoral college, institute term limits, and update the system so it works again.
Whether or not Edmund Burke actually said, “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing because they could only have done a little,” it remains a truism. Change is inevitable, but reform never comes from the top. It comes from the people. More Americans who turn eighteen now register as Independents than join either of the two major parties. They had a good run. We deserve better. Vote Independent. Write your representative. Hold them accountable. Do a little.
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