Dangerous Bipartisan elites

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It was during the Clinton–Rubin–Greenspan–Lawrence Summers deregulatory spree of the nineties that the innovation of bipartisan lobbying shops also took off in earnest, obliterating any remaining distinctions between the financial interests and imperatives of the two parties. Before then, most Washington lobbying firms were affiliated with either one camp or the other—and suffered at the bottom line when their teams cycled out of power. So why not diversify the partnership pool as a hedge against defeat? What you’ll never hear on Morning Joe, with its incessant “Why can’t we all just get along?” bromides, is what Leibovich says in his opening pages—“that the city, far from being hopelessly divided, is in fact hopelessly interconnected.” It’s the friendly interconnectedness of special interests at the top more than the combative ideological divisions in the trenches below that makes the situation so hopeless. Two of the top three political-action-committee donors to Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell are the same: Comcast and AT&T, one of our government’s esteemed partners in domestic surveillance. The former Republican Senate leader Trent Lott and the former Democratic House leader Dick Gephardt are similarly united in lobbying for GE, best known of late for its remarkable record of ducking U.S. corporate taxes.

Death Race 2000 speaks of the dystopian future under the thumb of the Bipartisan Party.

After all, wasn't Gore Vidal saying post-war that America had only one party, the "business party" with marginally differing factions? America has never had a strong, labour-populist party gain power and has always been pretty ideologically one-sided (as is any place where social-liberalism represents the "extreme left").

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently… and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.