How a Cold War game theory called the "Prisoners' Dilemma" explains the terrible mess we're in.
Yeah, we're all pretty much screwed. Until we're not.
Imagine, for a second, that you and a friend pull a caper. This friend — we’ll call him Frank — invited you along on a heist, but it turns out that he wasn’t very good at heisting, or capering for that matter, and you both got nabbed. Dammit, Frank!
Now you’re in one interrogation room, and Frank’s in another. You can’t communicate with each other, but your fate is bound to Frank’s. You both did the crime, but who talks determines who will do the time? If you both confess and rat each other out, you both get lenient sentences. If you rat out Frank, and Frank keeps his big yap shut if he knows what’s good for him, well then poor Frank goes away for a long stretch, probably longer than both of you’d have served if you both sang combined. And vice versa, though for all Frank’s faults as a criminal, he’s no stoolie. Frank don’t squeal, see. So there are your first two options: bad together, or worse for either one of you.
There’s a third option: zip it. Exercise your option to remain silent. Sure, you both go away, but without either one of you singing like a canary, you each pull a shorter sentence. You only get the best-possible outcome if you act in the other’s best interest without any knowledge that he or she is doing the same.
Welcome to the Prisoners’ dilemma.
In 1950, RAND Corporation mathematicians Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher invented this game theory to examine the paradox of conflict and cooperation. Flood, as you are no doubt aware, also game up with the Traveling Salesman problem and the Hitchcock Transportation problem, and I feel silly even pointing out that he coined the word “software” in the ‘40s. Dresher, I’m sure you remember, is referenced in A Beautiful Mind. But it was Princeton mathematician Alvin Tucker, the father of AP Calculus, who gave the game theory its Law & Order overlay, and the name stuck.
Flood and Dresher articulated this paradox during the Cold War, a time when two great powers who communicated badly with each other and possibly understood less, had the power to annihilate each other. But it applies equally to our current political situation which I’ve argued for years should be understood as a cold civil war.
Let’s start with the ending: In the Prisoners’ dilemma, the way out of this mess is to stop playing for immediate partisan gains and to find whatever common ground remains. And I’d like to think that most of the Democratic Party would be all shrug emoji about negotiating a truce on a lot of issues, such as the debt ceiling, the national debt, the deficit, and others. The Very Online would be big angry that we’re negotiating with the political party that’s giving cover to domestic terrorists, but keep in mind, Democrats nominated Joe Biden, a man so besotted with dreams of bipartisanship that he said if Barack Obama won re-election, “I think you’re gonna see the fever break.” He did; it did not. Then, in predicting a post-Trump Republican “epiphany,” he said, “you’re going to be surprised.” Your mileage may very on sugar-plum dreams of getting along, but the Democratic Party, with certain exceptions discussed below, seem down with O.P.P. — other person’s party.
How willing to tack to the center are Democrats? The Iowa caucuses are no longer going to be the first state in a Democratic presidential primary campaign. Why? The state’s Democrats are too liberal and more likely to pick a candidate unelectable in a national election. The Democratic Party is structurally engineered to appeal to swing voters and independents — even though they may not functionally exist anymore.
But the post-Jan 6 GOP seems structurally unable to rub the sleepies from their eyes and see that they’re taking us down a road toward mutually assured destruction. We’ve survived worse, but at great cost, and not completely. Their entire reward system drives Republicans toward one goal — winning/surviving/avoiding a Republican primary — at the expense of (oh god, I can’t believe I’m typing this) making America great again.
Mind you, I’m not saying that Republicans are bent on destroying America, merely that the incentives in their political ecosystem do not reward establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty, let alone compromising to form a more perfect union. The modern Republican Party seems structurally unable to put the best interests of the country ahead of Marjorie Taylor Greene, which really isn’t a name I should be able to spell correctly off the top of my head, but god bless America.
I’m not trying to let Democrats completely off the hook here. Both sides /ducks/ think badly of the other and mostly fail to understand each other’s motivations, but Republicans are quicker to write off Democrats. Here’s a good one: a third of Democrats would be upset if their child married a Republican, but half of all Republicans would be mad if their child married a Democrat even though we’re better looking, smarter, and funnier. Let’s put this into perspective: More Republicans are cool with mixed-race marriages than with mixed-party marriages, despite our aforementioned advantages, which also include knowing how to use spices.
Bottom line, most Democrats see Republicans as political opponents. Most Republicans see Democrats as enemies. We think each other are lazy, stupid, and pig-headed to remarkably similar degrees, but when it comes time to suit up for Team America, three-quarters of Democrats see Republicans as patriotic, something only a minority of Republicans can do. Add to that a poll taken right after Jan. 6 that showed two-thirds of Republicans thought Democrats had stolen an election in which they’d lost control of the House, and you have a clear picture of a party that thinks the only way to save America is to destroy the Democratic Party.
Even writing that makes me feel silly, because it’s a damned silly idea, but apparently it’s taken hold in the Supreme Court. A University of Michigan Law School professor named Leah Litman noticed a trend in which discrimination against Christians was rated as more valid than discrimination against racial and ethnic minorities. In a paper published last February in Michigan Law Review, she dubbed this “Disparate Discrimination.”
In religious discrimination cases, the Court has held that a law is presumptively unconstitutional if the law results in a comparable security activity being treated more favorably than religious activity. Yet in racial discrimination cases, the Court has said that the mere fact that a law more severely disadvantages racial minorities as a group does not suffice to establish unlawful discrimination.
Alleging fundamental bias on the Supreme Court on something as basic as whether we are all equal (or some are more equal than others) is a strong statement. Luckily for Litman, the Washington Post did an exposé about dark money groups tied to Ginni Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence, that want to fight back against the oppressive left. “We have some culture warriors, but we have a lot more to do,” Thomas told a group called the Conservative Action Project. “Conservatives and Republicans are tired of being the oppressed minority.”
“I wrote a whole article in Michigan Law Review about how this idea — that conservatives & the GOP are an oppressed minority — is shaping SCOTUS doctrine related to religious liberty, race discrimination, & LGBTQ equality,” tweeted Litman. “And she just ... comes out & says it!”
We also see the Prisoner’s dilemma in play with the reaction to Donald Trump’s indictment. The revealing thing here isn’t that, heavens to Betsy!, a former president was indicted for a crime. Trump has been breaking laws all over the place and in plane sight. He flooded the zone with so many lies that catching him in one lost all meaning. The wonder is that anyone followed an obvious paper trail to indict him. Did he pay a professionally naked lady to not tell anyone they had sex, let alone what he looks like with no pants on? Yes. Did he lie about this in business records and campaign finance reports? Yes. The surprise of his indictment is only in the degree to which this has been obvious from jump.
But what did Republicans say? Democrats have weaponized the justice system. This is a political witch hunt, and this from a party that chanted for the incarceration of a woman they actually called a “witch,” and worse. The way they cry wolf shows us how much they have wanted to be wolves all along.
We can still see Republicans as fellow Americans even as most of them see Democrats as enemies of the state. But we can’t seek compromise with a political party that is turning game theory into LARPing The Handmaid’s Tale. As was recently (and more ably) pointed out on the Disorder Up newsletter, there are some things impossible to compromise with.
Trump’s community of collective narcissists, on the other hand, is firmly grounded in the idea that white Americans, especially white men, are persecuted and victimized by people who aren’t white men, and are entitled to greater social, financial, and legal standing than they currently possess. You can acknowledge the decades of economic and demographic changes (sometimes related, mostly simply concurrent) that led to this, and even sympathize with the disorientation and trauma that resulted. But ultimately, a political ideology based on the idea that Some People Are Real People And Some Aren’t and only the holders of that ideology get to decide who is what, cannot be acknowledged or accommodated. It can only be opposed and defeated until it is destroyed.
Therein lies our Get Out of Jail card. The Prisoner’s dilemma posited that the only way to avoid nuclear Armageddon was to restructure incentives toward compromise and cooperation, but that’s not how the west was won. The Cold War ended because the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving the U.S. free to bring former Soviet states into the NATO tent and for western Europe to form its own more perfect union.
The Prisoners’ dilemma was posited as a way to create a path out of an intractable paradox, but what history shows is that an ideology that gets dressed in a fun house mirror can’t long survive. And besides, we have things called elections that sublimate the violence of an armed uprising. At the end, the theory goes, they tally up the votes, and whoever has the most wins. Again, this is just a theory.
But if the theory holds, and some day Democrats control the House, the Senate, and the White House again, maybe we can appoint some judges to bring a little balance to the force. And Republicans can sit over there, alone in their feelings, while Democrats give them all the good government they can handle.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
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