To create More and Better Democrats means to increase cooperation. Punishing cooperation, even among themselves, is the declared Republican mission. The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod, says they lose, and recommends strategies to make it happen faster. What we want to know, of course, is when and how they lose, and how those strategies speed things up.
Well, they lose this year, faster and faster as we come together, and as they shoot each other in all of their feet.
Grokking Republicans: The Non-Cooperator's Dilemma
I wrote up the theory of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, and its applications to a variety of problems, at some length six years ago. I am not going to repeat all of that. You should definitely have a look. Suffice it to say, today, that theory and experiment and social history all tell us that cooperation is one of the most powerful forces in the world, when tempered with a moderate amount of non-cooperation, aka defection, with the non-cooperators.
The most successful Prisoner's Dilemma strategy, Tit For Tat (TFT), begins by cooperating, and then defects once in response to every defection by an opponent. A modest number of players running Tit For Tat can hold their own against much larger numbers playing all sorts of other strategies that try to get away with something. At some fraction of the population, the TFTers actually win and take over.
Examples:
- The survival of Jews and Judaism in the face of millennia of persecution
- The survival of Roma ("Gypsies") in Europe, including their language and culture, for a millennium since their ancestors left India.
- The radical transformation of business practices under the influence of the Society of Friends ("Quakers")
- The slow but inexorable advances in human rights for the formerly enslaved and their descendants; Asians (once the "teeming hordes" and the "Yellow Peril"; Latinos; women; Native Americans; LGBTQs; teachers of science; workers; and many other groups.
On the other side, we have
- The terminally greedy, aka the Masters of Mankind (Adam Smith), the Robber Barons, the Leisure Class (Thorstein Veblen), the Malefactors of Great Wealth (Teddy Roosevelt), the Economic Royalists (FDR), the 1%, the self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe, and so on, with Trump at the forefront.
- The terminally panicked haters of everybody who threatens White Male Christian Privilege, with Trump at the forefront.
- The enablers of the above, with the Trumpish sycophant class at the forefront.
Greed, hatred, and delusion, the Three Fires and Three Poisons of Buddhist teaching, represented by the pig, the cock, and the snake. But we can also break them down by issue.
The greatest threat that they all pose has been the Devil's bargain between the rich and the haters, to give the rich tax cuts and deregulation in exchange for a promise to defund all social programs for Those People and go back to Jim Crow, outlawing contraception and abortion, and all of the other oppressions.
On July 14, 1978, economist Alan Greenspan testified to the U.S. Finance Committee: "Let us remember that the basic purpose of any tax cut program in today's environment is to reduce the momentum of expenditure growth by restraining the amount of revenue available and trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending."
That's the strategy. Blow up the deficits to force cuts. Not to our bloated military, of course. To Social Security and health care and anything that helps, you know The People, especially Those People. The delusional Ayn Randian Greenspan also assumed that corporatists would not destroy the economy. He was praised to the skies on the Right for reining in inflation, by which he and they meant wage increases.
We agree that the Republican Party agenda is evil. So do they, but each faction claims that it is only the extremists (the Rightist Adventurists, in an inversion of Communist jargon) or the RINOs (the Leftist Running Dogs) that are the problem, not themselves. I have identified ten major factions among the Republicans, each focused on different issues, and each expressing the utmost contempt for all of the others as well as the rest of us, in spite of the massive overlap among them.
The Tea Partiers and the Libertarians are the worst, in the specific sense of refusing to cooperate with, let's say, "mainstream" Republicans like Mitch McConnell, otherwise Non-Cooperator Enemy #1. They have embraced
the war of each against all; and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
- Solitary, incels in particular
- Poor, as in voting to wreck the economy to keep Blacks down
- Nasty, you name it
- Brutish, see White Supremacist terrorism, including Trumpish state terrorism and formerly-socially-approved police murders
- Short, as documented in Dying of Whiteness, by Dr. Jonathan Metzl
Metzl documented White people with serious, even life-threatening illnesses voting against Medicaid expansion to help themselves, because Those People would get some. Also, the increased suicide rate among desperate, paranoid Whites.
Yes, But…
I could go on for months at a time on the evils we face. DK has been doing so for well over a decade, and others have done so through three millennia of recorded history. That and several dollars will get you a latté. What we really want to know is what to do about them.
Right now, start here.
- We cooperate. That is the entire strength of the Democratic coalition. We have each others' backs. But it is not enough to cooperate. We all need to see each other cooperating, each of our subgroups with each and every one of the others. And no, "What have you done for me lately?"
- We defect whenever they start acting up again. This is the entire Pelosi strategy for getting covid aid bills through. You don't cooperate, we don't cooperate. You start cooperating, we resume cooperating.
- But more, we defect by voting the rascals out, as the Founders intended.
- And we defect in court, also as the Founders intended.
- And we defect in the streets, repeat after me, as the Founders further intended.
These are the times that try men's [sic, but that was then] souls. The Summer Soldier and the Sunshine Patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his [yes, sic] country, but he [OK, OK] that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of men and women.
Thomas Paine
No, you moron, women are leading the charge.
I can point to a wide range of further cooperation going on in the world, all of which I commend to your attention and participation. You know about Global Warming and the rest of the assaults on the environment. You know about the multifarious ills that come from global poverty and oppression, particularly Christian denial of family planning services to the poorest of our brothers and sisters. The greatest manifestations of non-cooperation are the various civil wars currently raging and the various remaining tyrannies. Not as many as there used to be at the height of the Cold War, but still far too many and far too vicious. For example, it is only civil war that is preventing the eradication of polio and Guinea worm in the wild.
Oh, yes, here is another good one.
You Can't Say You Can't Play, by Vivian Gussin Paley. Resistance to a rule forbidding exclusion from kindergarten play groups collapses as though it had never been, once it is implemented. This alone, if made universal in our schools, could eventually solve all of our biggest problems. But we don't have to wait for that. We can do it everywhere, now.
As bad as any of it is today, and as bad as education systems and social media and the MSM are, we are still cooperating on getting out much more information than misinformation. Our young people, especially, are falling away from the old fears and hatreds and so on by the many millions every year, and joining with the rest of us. We are the majority, and we get to act like it now.