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Bush filled his White House with Goldman Sachs and Citigroup executives; Obama has done the same.

There are, of course, several reasons for these very narrow differences. Most important, each party pulls its campaign contributions from the same sources and therefore does not deviate far from the core messages of the corporate sector and high-net-worth individuals. America has thereby been pulled to a “median” that is politically far to the right of center and to the right of the public’s true values. On issue after issue, Washington politics back the special interests rather than broad public values.

We can consider America’s political system today to be not so much a true democracy as a stable duopoly of two ruling parties, whose members shout at each other from time to time but which both basically stand for many of the same things when it comes to issues touching the interests of business, the rich, and the military. Both parties are instruments of powerful businesses and the rich. Rather than aiming for the median voter, as in the textbook two-party election theory, both parties actually aim to the right of center to attract high-income campaign contributors. For the Republican Party, this is easy and natural. For the Democrats, who ostensibly represent the needs of the poor, it means party leaders such as Presidents Clinton and Obama, who relentlessly side with Wall Street and the rich and just as relentlessly apologize to their base.

The overpowering role of money in politics has led to a fairly stable bipartisan consensus among politicians (though not necessarily the broad public) on five major points of policy in the past thirty years that reflect a fidelity to vested interests. These are low marginal tax rates for the rich, as sponsored by campaign contributors; the contracting of public services to well-connected private interests; the neglect of the budget deficit when voting on tax and spending issues, leaving the debt to future generations; the favoring of large military outlays, even as domestic spending is squeezed; and the lack of serious long-term budget planning. These five policy biases have been maintained through the thick and thin of presidents since Reagan.

The famous “triangulation” of Obama and Clinton with conservative positions is designed less to win centrist voters than to fill campaign coffers with corporate funds. Corporatocracy, the over-representation of corporate and wealthy interests, is the essential feature of the duopoly. Campaign financing and lobbying are the key elements that keep the system intact.

The compromises made with the rich are consistently out of line with public opinion. The public desires to tax the rich more heavily, cut military spending, and develop renewable energy alternatives to oil. The outcome instead is tax cuts for the rich, unchecked military spending, and a continued stagnation in alternatives to oil, gas, and coal.

Both parties have consistently downplayed the importance of budget balance in favor of other political objectives. Reagan’s supply-side advisers argued that tax cuts would spur enough growth to pay for themselves. Obama’s stimulus supporters have argued something analogous: that deficits in the midst of a downturn have little or no longer-run cost, and even that deficit cutting in a recession is not feasible. These are both magical arguments without any empirical support but lots of ideological fervor. More important, they are arguments of convenience, allowing each party to favor its constituencies with short-term benefits (more tax cuts or spending increases) while downplaying the buildup of debt that will inevitably ensue. There have been only two short-lived exceptions to the chronic neglect of budget deficits. The first was George H. W. Bush, who broke his 1988 campaign pledge of “no new taxes” in order to reduce the budget deficit in 1990. The second was Bill Clinton, who pushed a modest hike in the top income tax rate (from 31 to 39.6 percent) and agreed to Republican-led budget