By John Leake
The Focal Points
September 1, 2026
In the 1995 film, The Usual Suspects, what appears to be a hapless man named Roger "Verbal" Kint memorably paraphrases the French poet Charles Baudelaire with the remark:
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist.
It seems to me that the second greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the American people that they should place their faith and hope in one of the two political parties.
For many years I have observed people with strong "Republican" identities and people with strong "Democrat" identities fulminate about the folly of the other party. The former watch Fox; the latter watch CNN; both are equally persuaded by the propaganda they are served.
My personal sympathies and biases have always strongly tilted Republican. My paternal grandfather, who knew some of LBJ's cronies, once told me that LBJ was "the most corrupt man who ever walked the earth." Conversely, my maternal grandfather knew George H.W. Bush and thought he was a swell guy. In my twenties I also noticed that people who identify themselves as Democrats tend to be far more given to virtue signaling, which I have long perceived to be a dangerous form of self-deception and self-congratulation.
I was therefore, initially, a strong supporter of George W. Bush. My support began to attenuate rapidly after September 11, 2001. I was in Manhattan on that infamous day and was badly traumatized by it. Looking back, I believe my political awakening about the evil of both political parties began then. I now believe that the two major American parties should be understood as belonging to the same monstrous structure-as complementary halves of a single system.
Like yin and yang, they are opposed in rhetoric and personnel, but in practice they are as co-dependent as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald after they became severe alcoholics and started quarreling all the time.
Each political party supplies the other with an enemy, a rationale for mobilization, and a ready explanation when outcomes disappoint. Together they form the visible face of a national government whose scope and liabilities have grown under administrations of both labels.
This face may be understood as that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. People who have strong partisan political identities see their party as the kindly and humane Dr. Jekyll and the other as Mr. Hyde, not realizing that they are the same.
While the two parties constantly point the finger at each other, spending, regulation, and debt have risen across decades regardless of which coalition held the presidency or Congress.
Wars, the national security state, entitlements, and emergency authorities have been advanced, modified, or merely continued by both. Even when differences are real, they they operate inside a shared institutional logic of concentrated benefits, diffuse costs, logrolling, and political reward for delivering visible programs while deferring their fiscal consequences. The result is an entity that becomes steadily larger and more indebted even as the parties trade office.
While the monster grows like a cancer, the public is served-through their preferred propaganda organs-with a partisan blame mechanism. Persistent problems-structural deficits, the growth of unfunded liabilities, regulatory accumulation, infrastructure decay-are routinely attributed to the other party's unique vice, incompetence, or capture.
When Democrats hold power, Republicans point to spending and bureaucracy; when Republicans hold power, Democrats point to tax cuts, wars, or corporate favoritism. Each side can produce examples that support its case. The mechanism works because it is psychologically efficient, converting complex outcomes into a simple story of villainy versus virtue. Voters are thereby equipped with an identity and a target without having to examine the incentives that operate on both coalitions once they are inside government.
Divide-and-conquer follows from this arrangement. Energy that could be marshaled into the broader project of rejecting the entire game is instead absorbed by inter-party combat. Polarization is not an accidental byproduct; it is the system's most essential function.
A public sorted into hostile camps is less likely to form a durable coalition around taming the beast. These camps have been rigorously trained to view each other with mutual suspicion and contempt.
The parties do not need to conspire for this effect, which naturally emerges from ordinary electoral incentive. Primary electorates reward differentiation; media markets reward conflict and tribalism, and incumbents of both parties benefit from a government that continues to distribute resources.
In my business of trying to communicate in the public forum, tribalism is especially operative. I once played golf with a major Silicon Valley investor who happened to be a fan of this newsletter, and he offered me the following counsel.
The key to building a major media channel is to build a tribe and then constantly excite its outrage and flatter its identity. It seems to me that you and McCullough haven't figured this out, and you have a rare talent for offending all tribes.
What can I say ? The truth hurts everyone, and every major lesson in life is learned through pain.
The point of this essay is not to claim that both parties are identical, but that their differences are secondary to the their mutual capture by the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, the bio-pharmaceutical complex, and the intelligence agencies.
Partisan political differences coexist with a deeper continuity in the size and indebtedness of the state, while the partisan narrative of exclusive blame helps stabilize that continuity.
Yin and yang do not cancel each other; they complete a cycle. In this cycle, the government entity grows, the debt accumulates, and the public is offered a contest over which half of the whole is at fault.
As I recently pointed out in a video shot overlooking the Capitol building, the fuel that feeds Leviathan, enabling him to grow to ever large and more terrifying dimensions, consists of an unending train of "crises" and "emergencies." If you've not yet watched the video, you may find it interesting.
This article was originally published on The Focal Points.