The Political Machine
The American two-party system requires that you declare a party before you can participate in the voting system. This is the back door to authoritarianism. This is an authoritarian structure.
These days, authoritarianism generally arrives through democratic backsliding — elected leaders gradually take power away from voters and redirect it toward the machine that keeps them in office. The machine is a set of interlocking interests: party infrastructure, donor networks, media systems, and the officials who serve all three. It grows through accumulated small captures of democracy, each one normalized before the next one lands. Voter suppression, manufactured division, and information control are the visible tools. The two-party system is its foundation.