The U.S. political parties do not actually function as republican bodies. At its core philosophical basis from the ancient model, the government was founded upon the classical expectation that its governing associations would remain bodies of free citizens oriented toward the common good, their deliberations governed by civic virtue rather than by the continuous pursuit of private advantage. In practice, the two national parties have ceased to function in that manner and have instead become the principal instruments through which organized particular interests obtain access to public power. What follows continues What Form of Government is the United States Today, and is an examination of the means by which aggressive lobbies now shape the composition, financing, and legislative conduct of those parties inside the capital.
In the classical and neo-classical republican tradition, a genuine republican body is one whose members hold office as a trust for the res publica, subordinating personal ambition and pecuniary interest to the integrity of the commonwealth and preserving the independence of the citizen against the claims of clienteles. The parties of the United States fail this test at the level of their ordinary operation. They are sustained not by the spontaneous association of citizens animated by a shared concern for public things, but by the perpetual solicitation of large-scale contributions from those who expect legislative or administrative returns. Aggressive lobbies do not merely petition from outside the parties; but they also furnish the bulk of their campaign resources, populate their staffs and donor networks, and supply the policy drafts that candidates and officeholders adopt as their own. The nominal contest between the parties therefore functions less as a competition of principles than as a market in which organized interests bid for control of the instruments of state. Offices that classical republicanism understood as public trusts are thereby converted into assets whose value is realized through reciprocal favor, the distinction between the magistrate and the client collapses, and the body politic is partitioned into competing clienteles. The republican form survives in outward appearance while its animating requirement, that public power remain independent of private wealth and specialized advocacy, has been extinguished.
The colonization of the parties by organized interests reaches its clearest expression in those alignments that appear, to the uninstructed eye, as settled judgments of the republic and its federal states. Among these, the bipartisan posture toward Israel is exemplary: it does not arise from the independent counsel of legislators weighing the public thing (res publica) but is continuously manufactured by the same apparatus of resource, personnel, and candidate selection that converts public office into a client relation. What must be measured against the republican standard is therefore not any claim of clandestine command by foreign intelligence, nor the assertion that both parties merely share values, but the plain and lawful efficiency with which that apparatus decides who may remain a viable contender for office.
The bipartisan Israel consensus is not the common good discovered by independent legislators, that we have been discussing. It is a produced alignment. The producing machinery is visible, legal, and unusually good at the one task that matters in a two-party republic: deciding who is allowed to remain a viable candidate. That is the fact that has to be put against the republican standard of undependent public counsel.
“The Israel lobby” is not American Jewry and it is not the Israeli state sitting in the House gallery, but a coalition of organizations that treat one foreign relationship as a first-order test of political legitimacy and then enforce that test inside both parties.
The core architecture is AIPAC as a 501(c)(4) lobby plus, after 2021-22, two electoral weapons it did not previously wield at this scale: AIPAC PAC (direct and bundled contributions) and the United Democracy Project (unlimited independent expenditures). Around them sit Democratic Majority for Israel (intra-Democratic policing), the Republican Jewish Coalition, Christians United for Israel and its action fund (the mass evangelical army), donor portals, and, increasingly, partner and shell PACs that receive UDP or DMFI money so the origin of an ad is not obvious on the air.
Before the Super PAC turn, AIPAC’s reputation was access, briefing books, trips, scorecards, and the ability to steer bundled checks. After Citizens United plus AIPAC’s own decision to enter independent spending, the group acquired the power to drown a House primary. New York Times accounting of AIPAC-linked spending across 2022-2026 shows the money is not mainly spent in November. It is spent in primaries on the order of $138 million in primaries versus a few million in generals. The implied strategy is not to persuade the American people, but to decide which Democrats and which Republicans the American people will be permitted to choose between.
That is factional power in the exact sense republican writers feared in the past, because it describes a partial interest that does not out-argue the assembly, but pre-selects the assembly.
The method is consistent even when the targets are ideological opposites.
Against the Democratic left, the 2024 cycle made the price explicit. United Democracy Project and allied spending turned the Bowman and Bush primaries into the most expensive House primaries on record at the time. Figures in the public record cluster around $14-15 million in the New York race and $8 million-plus in Missouri. The ads frequently did not argue Gaza policy. They argued competence, extremism, “out of touch,” ethics, or disloyalty to the president. The selection rule was Israel policy. The public text was domestic character assassination. Bowman and Bush lost. Summer Lee and others survived where the local coalition and the spending ratio were less lopsided. The lesson to the rest of the caucus did not require a memo.
Against the Republican restraint right, the same instrument was used on Thomas Massie. He voted against aid packages and against ritual solidarity resolutions on fiscal and non-intervention grounds. In 2026 the primary became the most expensive House primary in history, with total advertising in the district reported above $30 million. AIPAC’s super PAC, the RJC Victory Fund, CUFI billboards, and a Trump-aligned vehicle fed by major pro-Israel Republican donors (the public reporting names Singer and Adelson-linked money) combined to retire him. AIPAC then congratulated the winner and described Massie as one of the voices most hostile to the relationship. That is not a think-tank debate. It is an example made of a sitting member.
When decorated officer Joe Kent, placed at the National Counterterrorism Center, told the president that the Iran war was not driven by an imminent American threat and that Israeli pressure and the American lobby had closed the space for a contrary intelligence brief. Whether every clause of his resignation letter was fair is a separate historical argument. The institutional claim is narrower and harder to dismiss: the person, a vast majority of Americans voted in, whose job was to give the republic a “sanity check” concluded that the check could not reach the president. That is dependence of counsel.
The pattern across forty years is the same type, different names refuting the idea of a shared strategic culture: Findley, Percy, McCloskey on the old Republican internationalist-restraint edge; later intra-Democratic purges; and now the MAGA-adjacent non-interventionists. The parties are not coordinating a joint platform. A third organized force is setting a boundary that both party establishments have found cheaper to accept than to fight.
The thing that seems to be the issue, is that House members run every two years, and the expensive races are now primaries in safe seats. A group that can put $5-15 million into a single primary can end a career before the general electorate ever sees a real choice. Once that is known, most members do not need to be bribed on the morning of the vote. They need to be able to imagine the ad that will run against them if they become the next object lesson.
Fundraising is continuous. AIPAC’s political portal and PAC exist to make “you will not have to raise that money yourself” a live offer, and “you will face a funded opponent” the alternative. The two-year cycle is the mechanism of dependence.
The factor to consider, is that religion supplies intensity that money alone cannot (The Origins of the Religious Right with Samantha Bee). White evangelicals are a large Republican bloc for whom Israel is not a foreign-policy file but a theological marker. That is why the GOP became the more unconditional party after the late 1980s, and it is also why “the lobby” cannot be reduced to Jewish donors. The mass army is Christian Zionist, and the professional congressional operation is AIPAC and its cousins. The two wings are not identical, but they reinforce the same voting line.
Party obligation and career path do the rest. Committee seats, leadership, administration jobs, think-tank sinecures, and donor networks in both parties treat the relationship as a loyalty test. Dissent is not answered as a contestable claim about American interests, but is reclassified as hostility, bigotry, or unseriousness, and that classification is itself an instrument. It raises the personal cost of the argument above the policy cost of the aid package.
None of this requires every member to be a believer. Republics are corrupted by the terms of remaining in office, not only by the inner convictions of officeholders.
On paper, both parties voting for aid, weapons resupply, sanctions on Israel’s enemies, and resolutions of solidarity can be dressed up as Washingtonian unity or as Madisonian coalition, but it is neither.
Washington’s warning was not against having an ally. It was against habitual fondness for a particular nation, or the attachment that makes public counsel a servant of someone else’s primary interests; and that opens the door to foreign influence through domestic faction. A republic may arm a partner. It may not outsource the question of when it goes to war or treat the partner’s offensive timetable as a constraint that American intelligence is not allowed to contest.
Madison’s problem of faction was never “people disagree.” It was a number of citizens united by a passion or interest adverse to the permanent and aggregate interest of the community. The test is not whether Israelis have a right to a state. The test is whether an American faction organized around that state’s preferences is allowed to define the perimeter of legitimate American debate, including the debate over war, aid, and speech about the alliance itself.
Liberal and neo-classical republicanism add the demand that reasons of state be public reasons of this people: equal standing of citizens in the argument, no privileged client whose organized friends can bankrupt a representative for failing a foreign test. A consensus manufactured by primary annihilation is not public reason. It is the appearance of agreement after the disagreeing have been removed.
A republican interpretation of that convergence is not “the parties matured into fraternal pursuit of the common good.” It is that on this file the two parties have been disciplined by a faction that is stronger than either party’s internal restraint wing. Bipolar structure makes that discipline easier: there are only two tents to police, and the police work is done in the nomination, not in the open field.
Two errors have to be refused at the same time.
The first error is the official one: that lopsided, often unconditional support is simply what strategy and public opinion would have produced anyway. Public sympathy for Israel has statistical support, and strategic cooperation is measurable and observable, but neither fact explains the unconditionality, the punishment of intra-party dissent, or the difficulty of attaching leverage to aid. When Washington D.C. privately dislikes a settlement policy or a timing of war and still cannot make that dislike operational, the gap between preference and action is exactly what organized domestic power is for.
The second error is the closed theory: that “Zionists” run the United States. American Jews are not a monolith; large parts of that community sit to AIPAC’s left; J Street exists as a rival; evangelicals are the larger electoral battering ram; oil, arms, Gulf monarchies, and the national-security bureaucracy have their own claims on the same region. Mearsheimer and Walt were right that the special relationship is hard to derive from unadorned grand strategy and that the lobby is the missing political variable. They were also working with a definition broad enough that critics could fairly say it bundled too many different actors into one will. The precise claim that survives is narrower and uglier: on congressional careers and on the range of sayable Middle East policy, this coalition punches far above a normal ethnic or foreign-policy lobby, and it now does so with Super PAC firepower that did not exist when the older literature was written.
AIPAC’s formal lobbying budget is not always first on OpenSecrets tables. The relevant power after 2022 is independent expenditure in primaries, bundling, and the demonstrated ability to end incumbencies. Rank-of-lobbyist-spending misses the weapon that was built.
A classical or liberal republic can have Israel as an ally, but it cannot treat the alliance as a sacred exemption from the ordinary tests applied to every other attachment: Does this serve the safety and independence of this people? Can the representative say no without professional destruction? Can intelligence and military advice reach the executive when they contradict the ally’s preferred war? Is aid an instrument or a tribute?
On those tests I say, the convergence fails. It fails not because Democrats and Republicans secretly merged as some adopt (uni-party theory), but because a well-funded, cross-party faction made merger on this one file the price of staying in the game. That is why the spectacle of partisan hatred can coexist with lockstep votes on Israel and with wars that both teams inherit. The hatred is about other axes. The lockstep is the residue of a nomination system that a particular interest learned how to operate. None should fixate on the uniparty theory, seeing as the rampant factionalism of this country has implanted in both politicians and voters a logic proper to the one-party state. That Americans believe the nation can be restored only by the destruction of their opposing party reveals the irony of our loudest self-styled anti-authoritarians.
If the parties were functioning as republican bodies, the argument would be over American interests in the Levant, the price of war, the terms of aid, and the right of the assembly to attach conditions. What exists instead is a compliance market. Politicians appease because the alternative has been priced, advertised, and collected in Bowman, Bush, Massie, and the officials who leave or are pressured out rather than sign or impact the next finding. It is the thing a republican constitution is supposed to make difficult, and not respectable by calling it bipartisanship.
