Hi’.
The foreigner that I am made the mistake of re-suscribing to the New York Times, and doubled-down on that mistake by reading its opinion essays, including how Joe Manchin is a hero by Ben Ritz and how repeating 2010 will avoid another 2010 by David Axelrod. Those essays, along with others and the thousands of comments accompanying them, sum up the current Democratic Party’s strategy for the midterms and the mainstream centrist opinion.
And they are right.
Let’s state a few facts: with only 50 votes in the Senate, nothing gets done without Manchin. In fact every achievement so far is glad to him. Likewise, those achievements are sizeable, with judges, covid relief and roads&bridges among other things (most recently an extension of the student loans moratorium). Meanwhile, every vote is needed to survive the midterms and anyone not voting is essentially approving trumpism. All of this is true, and it can be summed up with “less is better than nothing”.
It is sound and solid logic, and it is also shortsighted, if not delusional or downright suicidal.
So I will, if you don’t mind, first explain why, using game theory (in two parts) and then use one current topic, the student loans crisis, to illustrate what it means, before concluding. But long story short, it is exactly because every vote is needed to survive the midterms that the current strategy is suicide.
1. The game theory of US politics
If you’re not accustomed to game theory, here is a friendly mini-game to introduce you to it: the evolution of trust (Nicky Case). In short, game theory describes social relations with mathematical models.
So let’s describe ours.
Let’s reduce the entire US electoral spectrum to three actors: A, B and C. Let’s also reduce all policies to an undefined X. Each actor wants a different value for X:
- A wants X=1
- B wants X=0.5
- C wants X=-1
As long as B wants a value of X above 0 and under 1, mathematically A and B agree on opposing C. To put that into words, progressives and centrists agree on opposing trumpism. Now, if two actors agree on the same value (of X), that value wins; if no one agrees, then C wins by default.
Assuming this is accurate enough, we can move to how people will behave.
The “less is better than nothing” argument on which everyone now has to rely for the midterms follows a simple reasoning:
- 0.5 is closer to 1 than to -1 so A will vote with B to prevent C from winning
(0.5-1 = -0.5), (-1-1 = -2), (|-0.5| < |-2|)
That looks sound, except for one problem:
- 1 is closer to 0.5 than to -1 so B will vote with A to prevent C from winning
(1-0.5 = 0.5), (-1-0.5 = -1.5), (|0.5| < |-1.5|)
While the distance is closer (by 0.5), the same logic should make Joe Manchin say “more is better than nothing” and have our actor B embrace X=1. Since you never saw that behavior ever in your life, you can tell that the reasoning itself is deeply flawed. We need a better model to understand what’s actually going on.
To do that, let’s reduce the problem to only two actors: A and B.
2. A variation of the prisoner’s dilemma
What we obtain is the following matrix:
Fig.1: Reduction to actors A/B.
A/B |
yes |
no |
yes |
~0.75 (0.7, 0.7) |
0.5 (0.3, 1) |
no |
1 (1, 0.3) |
-1 (0, 0) |
Okay, what does any of this mean.
Well each actor has a choice: to compromise and vote on a shared value of X (“YES”) or to go their own way and vote for the value of X they want (“NO”). Actor A’s choice is represented by the rows and actor B’s choice by the columns. If both agree, X=~0.75 or something. If both disagree, C wins and X=-1. But if one agrees and the other doesn’t, then the one who agrees surrenders and the other gets the value they wanted (X=0.5 or X=1).
In parentheses, we give a reward to each actor (A, B) on a scale from 0 to 1. Actors want that number as high as possible. If both vote “YES”, they get 0.7 each. If both vote “NO”, they get 0.
Now let’s say that actor A votes “YES”. Now for actor B that table (fig.1) is reduced to the first row [ 0.7, 1 ], that is agreeing and getting 0.7 as a reward, or going their own way and getting 1. 1 is higher, so actor B will vote “NO”. Actor A would do the same if the roles were reversed. This is why compromises are so hard to get or maintain: it’s always tempting for one side to try and get more.
Now let’s say that actor B votes “NO”. Now for actor A that table (fig.1) is reduced to the second column [ 0.3, 0 ], that is agreeing and getting 0.3 as a reward, or going their own way and getting 0. 0.3 is higher, so actor A will vote “YES”. This is the actual “less is better than nothing” argument, as said it’s sound logic, it works.
(For people familiar with the prisoner’s dilemma, our matrix varies with that “0.3” reward.)
Except it doesn’t.
Because not only does actor A have the same incentive as actor B to vote “NO” in the absolute, because 1 is higher than 0.7, but if actor A votes “NO”, now it’s actor B facing the second row [ 0.3, 0 ], meaning their incentive shifted from walking away to compromising. And actor A knows that. So actor A can vote “NO” to force actor B to switch. Mathematically, this becomes particularly relevant when repeating this game several times (say, over three or more decades). It is simply more efficient for actor A to vote “NO” in such a scenario so that either both actors get stuck at 0, with each waiting on the other to budge (and that’s how trumpism wins) or both actors more or less compromising and getting 0.7 on average (and that’s how democracy works).
In other words, the normal behavior, and what we can observe from voters, is that one-sided deals don’t last, and people will punish bad faith actors even if it means trumpism. Actors who don't, in game theory, starve out and lose the game.
So what does it mean, in practice?
3. Application to the student debt crisis
Let’s take the student debt crisis. We got a few diaries on it:
This is one of the many ongoing crises plaguing the country and the only reason it attracts attention is that Congress isn’t (immediately) needed to address it. So people are discussing what Biden should do and the discussion is mostly on policy. But let’s look at it electorally.
Progressives need centrist voters in the midterms, and centrists say they’ll stay home if debt is forgiven. And they will.
Centrists need progressive voters in the midterms, and progressives say they’ll stay home if the crisis isn’t addressed. And they will.
It’s proportions of course, but with thin margins and about every indicator in the red for the midterms their votes are needed. So we can repeat our table in figure 1 where “X” will be our student loans crisis and the value is how it’s addressed. You can ignore the crisis (0.5) and pray that progressives will still show up; you can forgive the debt (1) and pray that centrists will still show up. Either way the argument is the same, “but Trump”, to keep people in line. And proportionally, that’s not going to work. You will end up with trumpism (-1).
The only way out is a middle-ground, or what used to be called a compromise. Something all sides (but trumpists) can live with.
In this case it seems repayment plans might be the answer. Reasonable income-based payments with adapted interests (down to 0% even), while still leaving borrowers with monthly payments, would prevent ballooning debts and remove most of the dread; and avoid the looming economic crisis it could cause. Meanwhile, time and again in their comments centrists signaled they were fine with low or no interests, long as people repaid the principal. This, I suggest, is X=~0.75. It’s not debt forgiveness, but it mostly addresses the crisis, and it should be both powerful enough and measured enough to hopefully get both sides to show up in the midterms.
Which is the point.
4. Compromising is not a choice
Let’s stress again how bad trumpism is. Best-case scenario, losing the midterms means another decade of incompetent criminals stalling and wrecking everything. Worst-case scenario, the US turns into another Russia, a one-party rule with pseudo-elections for oligarchs. Not good.
What I’m trying to say is that trumpism is not an option. It shouldn’t even be entertained. Meaning all sides must compromise. Anything short of that is a suicide pact.
So, do progressives compromise?
Ahem. Progressives gave up on their own agenda in favor of a centrist one, the Biden agenda. They then gave up on large swaths of that agenda: minimum wage, public option, … They then compromised on most of what was left and signed a blank check on top to the Senate. They wrote themselves out of the picture, at this point it’s just centrists negotiating among themselves.
So, do centrists compromise?
Ahem. Biden united the party with his agenda, kept his word with covid relief and extended the moratorium. His administration fought to keep the eviction moratorium in place (and lost, I know). He and the vast majority of the party fought for immigration and is still fighting (hopelessly, I know) for infrastructure and voting rights. I’m not exactly happy with progressives who write all of that off.
But Joe Biden only represents part of the centrists.
Joe Manchin (and Sinema, Gottheimer, etc.) represents another sizeable part that insists on having it their way. They believe they are already compromising. They believe they are the true middle-ground and wardens of democracy and whatnot. They believe they are the good guys, pragmatic, incrementalists, that there is no alternative and anyone disagreeing is just an extremist. They want X=0.5 and why wouldn’t they? Mathematically, it has worked for them, they got a reward of roughly 1 for decades now. 2016 was, to them, just a progressive hiccup. Why fix what’s not broken.
The reality is that this strategy has been eroding for decades to the breaking point. Centrists have been fueling extremism all this time. To caricature:
Fig.2: What each cell means.
progressives/centrists |
compromise |
deny |
compromise |
reason |
extremism |
deny |
extremism |
suicide |
Now, to be clear, my model can be wrong too and that model says an actor still has incentives to surrender to avoid trumpism, as Joe Biden’s side is doing in that intra-centrist divide. You can pray that business as usual works once more. But that model says this is playing ostrich, surrendering is suicidal, compromising is not a choice.
It’s not a question of it’s feasible. It’s the only way to stave off trumpism.