These large conspiracy theories are always absurd because our government can't both be eminently incompetent and also full of scheming masterminds, able to keep hundreds or thousands of people from spilling secret plans. You have to pick one.
Overall you’re right. But there are some notable exceptions. Arguably Iran/Contra, the CIA spying on all phone calls, the Drug War. But the big one would be The Manhattan Project, since it employed literally hundreds of thousands of people.
Ministry of Magic effect, even. With how full of idiots and bigots it is portrayed in the books, they shouldn't be able to hide from the Muggles even by spamming the memory erasure spells left and right
Actually, chronic, systemic incompetence is one of the main factors preceding fascism. It doesn't have to be deliberate to be the manifestation of any given stage of conservatism.
The mechanism of why Republicans and conservative dems work together to degrade our institutions is quite simple; greed. It doesn't take much more than that really, and they get so caught up taking turns spraying money from the corporate money hose up eachothers asses that they can't mount any meaningful resistance when the far-right metastasizes into full blown fascism.
I think this was asked in good faith, but is unfortunately unlikely to produce useful discussion. The down-voters are right but the original poster shouldn’t feel bad for asking.
Short answer: it’s ok to say “maybe, we have no way to know, moving on” when something is unknowable like this.
Longer answer / topic hijack: as voters there are many contradictions in our system, and important and necessary information is often hidden from us. Doing the best we can might take various forms:
choose government ran by the least-evil people possible and trust the imperfect system formed by the structured interactions of those people
choose government that follows policies that align the best with your values or your ethical understanding of the world
choose government that is best able to reduce harms and injustices, in a practical and realistic way that anticipates the acts of other factions
choose government led by people you hate the least — no, this one is toxic, lazy, easy to manipulate with lies. Manipulators know the longer they keep people hot with emotion the less time people spend learning.
Please do not reply to this with hatred or calls for strong emotion. Leaders at any level can be deliberately evil, sure, but it's never helpful to dehumanize entire clusters or demographics.
The Democrats and Republicans mostly despise each other, but the establishment from each naturally have a few things in common. I am not a centrist "both sides" guy. However, with rare exceptions, members of both major parties are pro-capitalism, just for starters.
They are not secretly working together, but they do have somewhat overlapping goals. And some of those goals do screw over working people. Private health insurance tied to your employer is something both parties praise and support. That's one easy example.
And some of them cross the aisle and openly work together on bipartisan issues.
Finally, the "left" in the United States is really not left. Both parties pull rightward. The Republicans pull rightward much harder than the Democrats. A few progressives and democratic socialists try to pull us left.
I don't think it's as simple as this, but lobby groups of course want to influence both parties. And all of them have a vested interest in keeping the two party system intact.