Neither

Cenk Uygur made a simple point last night.

Donald Trump loves debt.

He built his business career borrowing enormous amounts of money, losing enormous amounts of money and, more than once, leaving somebody else holding the bag.

Now America is holding the bag.

The national debt is approaching $40 trillion.

Trump deserves plenty of responsibility for that.

But presidents don't appropriate money.

Congress does.

That is where the story gets more interesting.

Because Democrats would like us to believe the problem is Donald Trump.

Republicans would like us to believe the problem is the Democrats.

Both arguments are useful.

To them.

They are the foundation of the most successful monopoly on Earth.

The American political cartel.

Two parties control virtually every meaningful path to political power in the United States. They control ballot access. Committees. Fundraising networks. Debates. Primaries. Congressional leadership.

Most importantly, they control the choice.

And increasingly, neither party has to persuade you that it deserves your support.

It only has to convince you that the other side is worse.

That is an extraordinary business model.

Imagine a restaurant that stopped serving good food and simply locked every other restaurant in town.

Eventually the waiter doesn't have to ask what you want for dinner.

He tells you what you're getting.

The Democrats demonstrated this perfectly.

Faced with the possibility that Donald Trump might return to the White House, they did not respond by creating the most competitive democratic process possible.

They did the opposite.

They protected incumbency.

They suppressed competition.

They avoided a meaningful primary.

Then they presented the country with an ultimatum:

Us or him.

They believed the answer was obvious.

It wasn't.

Behavioral economists could have warned them.

There is an experiment called the Ultimatum Game.

One person is given money and told to divide it with another person.

The second person has two choices.

Accept the offer and both people keep the money.

Reject it and neither gets anything.

Pure economic theory predicts that the second person should accept almost any offer.

One dollar is better than zero.

Human beings don't behave that way.

Make the offer sufficiently unfair and people reject it.

They will hurt themselves to punish the person they believe is cheating them.

This has confused economists for decades.

It shouldn't confuse politicians.

Millions of Americans believe the political bargain is unfair.

They watch the government accumulate debt they will inherit.

They watch financial institutions receive protection unavailable to ordinary citizens.

They watch industries write the rules governing their own markets.

They watch politicians promise change and preserve the same arrangements.

Then every four years the cartel presents two choices and warns that refusing its preferred candidate will produce catastrophe.

Eventually people stop negotiating over the offer.

They reject the game.

That is the part of Trump the political establishment has never understood.

Trump didn't create the rejection.

He monetized it.

His violations of institutional norms were not necessarily liabilities to voters who had already concluded that the institutions themselves were illegitimate.

The more respectable Washington found him, the less attractive he became.

The more Washington condemned him, the more useful he became as a weapon against Washington.

That doesn't make the weapon good.

It explains why people picked it up.

And now the cycle feeds itself.

Trump accumulates debt.

Congress enables him.

Republicans defend him.

Democrats condemn him.

Then Democrats point to Trump as proof that voters must support Democrats.

Each party becomes the other's reason for existence.

Neither has to earn your loyalty.

They rent it from your fear.

That is not competition.

It is cartel economics.

And it works remarkably well.

Until it doesn't.

Because monopolies eventually make the same mistake.

They begin to believe the customer has nowhere else to go.

The Ultimatum Game tells us otherwise.

When the bargain becomes insulting enough, people will choose nothing.

They will choose chaos.

They will choose the candidate everyone tells them is unacceptable.

Not because they misunderstand the cost.

Because sometimes rejecting an unacceptable bargain becomes more important than the cost of rejecting it.

Trump is not the disease.

Neither are the Democrats.

They are symptoms of something older and larger.

A political market without meaningful competition.

A government spending money neither party intends to repay.

A public increasingly convinced that the people making the rules are not playing by them.

And a cartel still making the same offer:

Us or them.

Eventually the answer becomes:

Neither.