Game Theory
For Dummies
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| At first, I thought Donald
Trump was Jesse Ventura in a wig. Then I suspected that he was
The Fat Hitler. |
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| By
Debby Long |
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 “To know and not to know, to be conscious of
complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies,…
to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that
democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of
democracy, that was the ultimate subtlety…” – George Orwell,
1984
At first, I thought Donald Trump was Jesse Ventura in a wig.
Then I suspected that he was The Fat Hitler. Then for a brief
moment, I wondered if The Donald was playing some sort of Game
of Chicken where he theorized that a 245-year-old democracy
would screech to the edge of the cliff - and then hit the
brakes. Now I’m convinced that it has been a Game of Chicken all
along. And although his performance has been dazzling; his
audacity has been spellbinding; and his dark material has been
the stuff of historic American degeneracy – his finale on June
6th, 2021 was so cheesy that, for him, orange will undoubtedly
be the new black.
But Trump’s insurrection was not the dénouement of this
tragicomedy. There was way too much human suffering, way too
much cruelty, and way too much global destabilization to view it
through the lens of a moment of cultural vacuity. That’s because
what we have witnessed is nothing less than Game Theory for
Dummies.
If we pull back from the comedic aspects of this tragedy: the
orange face paint, the glower of Mitch McConnell and all his
chins, the irony of seas of red MAGA hats bobbing to “Lock Her
Up” as if it were a Queen anthem – at some point it is
instructive to wonder why Liz Cheney - a rock-ribbed Republican
who voted for Trump policies 95% of the time - has suddenly
decided to break ranks with her party. And why has a Great White
Hope like Adam Kinzinger elected to break ranks with the
Republican Party as well and take his 85.5% voting record with
him? And most of all, why, oh why is the Republican party
continuing to play a zero-sum strategy on literally any and all
Democratic legislation - this, with the knowledge that over
600,000 Americans died from their party’s Covid denialism, and
their own voters in their own red states are now dying at a
faster rate than voters in blue states.
The Republican Party should be dead. But just like a kitschy
zombie movie, they keep rising from the dead to bring new ways
to “tell carefully constructed lies and repudiate morality while
laying claim to it”. They preach that wearing masks to prevent
the spread of Covid is an affront to personal freedom and that
Donald Trump is the Christ of the Second Coming.
This strategy of theirs appears to be the same as Donald Trump’s
strategy - known in game theory as “Hawk-Dove”. The evolutionary
biologist John Maynard Smith named this strategy in 1973 when he
noted that competition in nature for a shared resource leads to
either conciliation or conflict. The hawk attacks, and the dove
either walks away, runs like hell, or gives it up. In our
American story, the shared resource to which Smith’s metaphor
refers is our national treasury. Trump and virtually all
Republicans see our economic resources as theirs for the taking,
ergo, their historic opposition to progressive taxation,
regulation, and social safety nets like Social Security and
Medicare. When Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in
2016, he asked: “When we invaded Iraq, why didn’t we take the
oil?” Everybody laughed at his naiveté, everyone except all of
the Republicans.
But Trump is silenced now; he played Chicken with a little help
from his friends, and he lost. So why are these Republican
parasites still sticking together? Their policies are
responsible for chronic recessions that must regularly be
cleaned up by the subsequent Democratic administrations that are
elected after each collapse. In the 2008 recession, the
Republican opposition to the regulation of our financial sector
led to the near collapse of large swathes of the American
economy. When Republicans get into office, recession follows,
and then the Democratic administrations that follow have to bail
out the US economy. Republicans cut taxes and their donor class
gobbles up the savings. Then the Democrats have to raise taxes
so that the US economy can bounce back. The TARP program of 2008
was used to bail out the automotive, banking, credit, housing,
and insurance industries. And now, once again, after a rapacious
Republican administration, Joe Biden and his Democratic congress
must do it again. We’ve experienced the economic consequences of
Republican rule for over 40 years. I often wonder when the
Democrats finally respond to Republicans who say that Democrats
“tax and spend” by yelling from the rooftops that Republicans
“loot, and plunder”.
Hawk-Dove has been working for the Republicans for decades, so
they must think: "why stop now"? Donald Trump happened; that’s
why. He believes that “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is
mine”. He lacks delicacy, he lacks subtlety, and now, so do the
Republicans. They used to be much better at this.
We have also watched Republicans play a non-zero-sum game known
as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. We have seen examples of various
Prisoner’s Dilemma strategies acted out by Michael Cohen with
his use of the “betray” strategy, and we have seen Paul
Manafort’s strategy of “stay silent”. (also known as cooperate
or defect).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma...
These are tried and true strategies, but they are only the
simplest manifestations of Game Theory. Think: the Cuban Missile
crisis, the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD), or the
global crisis of climate change. They can all be explained by
Game Theory.
Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are also playing the Manafort
strategy of “stay silent”, and their ability to retain unity
within their caucus has yielded enormous short-term gains for
the Republican Party such as voter suppression legislation to
eliminate competition, tax evasion schemes for their donors, and
the silencing of unions, to name a few.
Politics is, above all else, a game of strategy. It is a system
driven, not by the rationality of the players, but by the
differential success of the strategies employed. Our
245-year-old liberal democracy produces what biologists refer to
as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS), where cooperation in
the long run defines the dynamics of our system of governance.
Democrats want that system back for many reasons, not the least
of which is to reestablish predictability in our foreign and
domestic policies and particularly in our economy. Withdrawing
from NATO and establishing alliances with Russia, Saudi Arabia,
and North Korea are the antithesis of a stable democracy.
Negotiating with Republicans over major progressive bills now in
Congress has always been the ideal of our heretofore stable
democracy. But now, facing a zero-sum Republican senate fighting
a Democratic Party that historically plays “cooperate”, we need
to ask what game are we actually playing, where no negotiation
between parties is even possible? I suggest that we are playing
Hawk-Dove – Chicken – and the Republicans expect Democrats to
just give up and hit the brakes. But given the disasters of the
Republican’s past administrations, I think this time they’re
playing Chicken -Thelma and Louise style- and I doubt that
neither Liz Cheney nor Adam Kinzinger will be able to pick up
the pieces because, you know, splat. |
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