Even though it may be tough, if we can hold the Republicans to a minority of any kind in both chambers of Congress, there will be hell to pay within their ranks. If we hold the line in any way, their political party will hit a catastrophe curve in the dynamic system of American national politics, and all the way down the levels of politics.
It never hurts to consider the situation the regressive community would be in if we in the progressive community can hold the line. We must rise to this work not for Obama or anyone in office. Not for any one citizen. We must work now for the Netroots and the movement We The People have created by bringing our grievances against our government to the attention of our fellow citizens, here and in millions of other ways. In that quest, we will continue. There is no turning back now. There isn't anything left to turn back to.
We are called upon, once again, to enact the political strategy we have already enacted, and whose strength is being tested in this campaign season, even more so each day closer to this election we move. The strategy?
Tit for tat.
The term karmageddon was coined by Tulip in a comment to my diaries Countdown To No Confidence, dicussed more fully here.
In game theory, a famous game is called the prisoner's dilemma. A typical statement of the rules are:
Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated the prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies for the prosecution against the other (defects) and the other remains silent (cooperates), the defector goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?
Wikipedia
Each player has the choice to cooperate or defect. Played once, the rational outcome is for both to defect. However, if the game is played over and over again, called the iterative prisoner's dilemma, cooperation strategies yield the best payoff for all players.
In the very real and serious game of addressing our national problems in the realm of politics, the Republican Party has been defecting for four years now. They have refused to cooperate -- perversely and loudly. However, by doing so they lose the opportunity to fully represent their own constituents and further their own legislative goals. The sheer stubborness and anger they have displayed is not unprecidented, but it has led to gridlock and failure.
We The People are, unfortunately, used to that state of things. Especially since the Gingrich "revolution" in 1994, all branches of government have been stymied in making progress on any number of fronts. Meanwhile, our standard of living has eroded and our sense of security has been shredded. Writ large, we are all faced with the prisoner's dilemma at each election in deciding how to vote and in deciding whether to vote. Voting is a cooperative move. Not voting is a defecting move. Voting out of anger to "punish" the opposition is a defecting move. Voting out of hope that real solutions can be had is a cooperative one. We are all bound in a real situation, together, from which not one of us is immune from the best and worst outcomes possible, as a nation.
Many interesting experiments have been carried out using small software "bots" carrying out various strategies against each other. Over thousands of iterations of the games, the most successful strategy turned out to be tit for tat ( TFT ).
This strategy is dependent on four conditions that has allowed it to become the most successful strategy for the iterated prisoner's dilemma:
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Unless provoked, the agent will always cooperate
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If provoked, the agent will retaliate
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The agent is quick to forgive
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The agent must have a good chance of competing against the opponent more than once
In the last condition, the definition of "good chance" depends on the payoff matrix of the prisoner's dilemma. The important thing is that the competition continues long enough for repeated punishment and forgiveness to generate a long-term payoff higher than the possible loss from cooperating initially.
A fifth condition applies to make the competition meaningful: if an agent knows that the next play will be the last, it should naturally defect for a higher score. Similarly if it knows that the next two plays will be the last, it should defect twice, and so on. Therefore the number of competitions must not be known in advance to the agents.
Wikipedia
This strategy requires a level of control against an opponent in which each aggressive move they make is met with, first, a cooperative move. Depending on the response by the opponent, that move is followed by a measured and equal competitive response, if the opponent reacts competitively, or by further cooperation if the opponent reacts cooperatively. Cooperation is the first move at every escalation in the conflict. Bots employing more aggressive strategies won big and lost big. But over time, the bots employing tit for tat would win the most games overall. When the iterations are expected to continue into the future without end, the tit for tat strategy endures while purely competitive moves at every junction collapses.
The regressive movement has to win and win big -- and continue to do so at their own peril. The way that kind of string of victories can endure is through a coordinated message control strategy among multiple opponents. That tight collusion is used to skew the odds.
In more recent competitions tit for tat was not the most effective strategy, even under the game-theory definition of effectiveness. However, tit for tat would have been the most effective strategy if the average performance of each competing team were compared. The team which recently won over a pure tit for tat team outperformed it with some of their algorithms because they submitted multiple algorithms which would recognize each other and assume a master and slave relationship (one algorithm would "sacrifice" itself and obtain a very poor result for the other algorithm to be able to outperform tit for tat on an individual basis, but not as a pair or group). This "group" victory illustrates one of the important limitations of the Prisoner's Dilemma in representing social reality, namely, that it does not include any natural equivalent for friendship or alliances. The advantage of tit for tat thus pertains only to a Hobbesian world of so-called rational solutions (with perfect communication), not to a world in which humans are inherently social. However, that this winning solution does not work effectively against groups of agents running tit for tat illustrates the strengths of tit for tat when employed in a team (that the team does better overall, and all the agents on the team do well individually, when every agent cooperates).
Ibid.
Like trying to avoid admitting a lie, that collusion among players gets more complicated the more their messages are not coordinated tightly. Every degree of freedom of any member of the collusion, every error in the logic of defense, cumulates in a diminishing ability to win -- exponentially so. Every chink in their armor really hurts, and doesn't heal quickly. It's a high-risk, high-stakes, winner-take-all gambit. The current collusion is falling apart, and its members ever so much more desperate to keep it alive as the sense of danger of losing grows.
Democrats are known for being nuanced, for talking ahead of what we are doing (sometimes to a fault, sometimes to glory). We've lost battles for thirty years. We're hardened to losing. We hate it, but we don't stop moving forward when faced with it. We have no choice because we share the same message, arising from millions of individual conversations. Opportunity must be balanced against equality, and our Government, as flawed as it is, is the best place we have to maintain a minimal level of equality. Raising that minimum level for everyone increases the odds each individual can prosper. Lowering it casts millions of our fellow citizens into cycles of despair and poverty. Leaving it even, as the Masters Of The Financial Universe have for thirty years, weakens us as a nation. Look at a graph of real incomes over decades of time, and you can see the election of Reagan. Our real incomes go flat, and stay there.
Opportunity has been shared in such an inequal manner that more and more of us lost the ability to increase our income. Collusion did that, has done that, for thirty years.
Republican pundit Ed Rollins once went off on CNN about how Democrats can't learn to condense their message into bumperstickers. He laughed about how the Republicans were so effective because they could do so. At our best, we are persistent and unfazed by the odds. We keep moving forward. We are relentless but not ruthless. At our best, we work together, without being commanded to by some Dear Leader, as a hive. We swarm.
Swarming is a seemingly amorphous, but deliberately structured, coordinated, strategic way to perform military strikes from all directions. It employs a sustainable pulsing of force and/or fire that is directed from both close-in and stand-off positions. It will work best — perhaps it will only work — if it is designed mainly around the deployment of myriad, small, dispersed, networked maneuver units. This calls for an organizational redesign — involving the creation of platoon-like pods joined in company-likeclusters — that would keep but retool the most basic military unit structures. It is similar to the corporate redesign principle of flattening, which often removes or redesigns middle layers of management. This has proven successful in the ongoing revolution in business affairs and may prove equally useful in the military realm. From command and control of line units to logistics, profound shifts will have to occur to nurture this new way of war. This study examines the benefits — and also the costs and risks — of engaging in such serious doctrinal change. The emergence of a military doctrine based on swarming pods and clusters requires that defense policymakers develop new approaches to connectivity and control and achieve a new balance between the two. Far more than traditional approaches to battle, swarming clearly depends upon robust information flows. Securing these flows, therefore, can be seen as a necessary condition for successful swarming.
Abstract from Swarming and the Future of Conflict
John Arquilla, David Ronfeldt
RAND Corporation
The Netroots is a swarm. Swarming is a cooperative strategy. Voting is a cooperative activity. We swarmed in 2006. We swarmed in 2008 even more. People were going out into the streets that election night. Citizens cried and hugged at the acceptance speech. The period in which we still find ourselves was known then -- there was no rational basis for hope. TARP was rolling the dice. Two wars were sucking away our money and our hearts. Those whose power had waxed since the day Ronald Reagan walked into the Oval Office were to whom we had to turn in the breach, and none of us believed in them and their bullshit any more.
We swarmed because we had had enough, and in millions of small ways we swept along many undecideds and independents.
This midterm election we swarm to drive home a fundamental point. Our employees in Washington have failed us. All of them. Our representatives, our courts and our administrations for thirty years have followed a course which ended in national tragedy. Unlike 9-11, there can be no doubt who did this to us.
We did.
Facing Truth
It's easy to hide from that truth. We can lose ourselves in a media storm. We can vent through multiple media. We can find others to rant with us over the Web. We can worship at the media shrine suited to our tastes. We can rationalize together in real time.
We want to hide from that truth, many of us. Thirty years we wasted on the choice for opportunity over equality. Some citizens were allowed to consider themselves our betters -- in economics, in science, in politics, in therapy and in immersion in our jobs. Productivity was everything. Efficiency was king. The jaws of financial failure yawned close enough to all of us, every day, that we could fell the hot breath of it. We feared for our retirement more than our loss of the chance to acquire wisdom. We volunteered as we could, but never enough. Never even close to enough.
People were falling into poverty and dispair all around us, but we got good at looking away, looking askance.
This truth, that we did more damage to our own nation than any adversary could hope to inflict on us, is the last thread for many of our opponents. In 2006, a majority of us turned to face the truth. Sadly. Unwillingly. Our 401Ks fed a monster of our own making. Our credit lines and equity in our homes let us hide from it a little longer. But no more. We turned, and found each other. Together we turned to face that truth and from that sprung the hope that, only together as a team could We The People once again rise to the challenge and overcome it.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Historical Review of Pennsylvania
John Bartlett (1820–1905). Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. 1919.
Over all generations, and over centuries of time, we cooperate or we all lose this experiment called The United States Of America. Defecting here and there is natural. Doing it too much is the only real danger to our common weal. Over iterations of voting, we must cooperate more than we defect, or we are all doomed to tyranny.
Our grassroots movement has now created a wave of change which is only beginning to ripple through the Establishment of thirty years' making. The wave is that large. It is magnified by the knowledge We now have that They are not gods, and the Market is not a thing we can control. First by surprise, in 2006, and then deliberately in 2008, we put our hearts and our minds and our hopes into that wave. We are now facing the opponents of that wave.
Obama did not create this wave, he only rides it. He was smart enough or lucky enough or intuitive enough to sense the swell long before others did. Howard Dean did as well. They acted on that sensibility at great risk to their reputations. They believed. They played tit for tat relentlessly.
In 2010, we face a paper tiger. The alliances now against us have risked everything on a big victory. A draw would be a loss. A loss by one seat would be a catastrophe. They are on the bubble, and We The People put them there.
But there is an even bigger change in the wind: regulating the non-banks. Democrats and Republicans alike agree that the proliferation of unregulated, non-bank lenders contributed significantly to the financial crisis by feeding millions of dangerous financial products into the economic system. Non-bank institutions were active participants in the race to the bottom among lenders. From subprime mortgage loans to small dollar loans, they showed how to wring high fees and staggering interest rates out of consumer lending. Their fine-print contracts, and new tricks and traps, transformed the market.
Real Change: Turning up the heat on non-bank lenders
Elizabeth Warren
New Deal 2.0
Their bulwark of anger and juvenile scheming like junior high kids (albeit armed and "liberated" from shame by being in a lynch mob) is riven with voids. The voids grow, eaten away by the fact that most of our fellow citizens wrapped up in this swarm are themselves competing with each other. Vigorously. Cunningly. Their knives are out for dominance of an imagined party which can no longer govern the real nation in which we find ourselves today.
They are angry at those of us who have faced the truth. In the end, they will face it, too. We make stimulus money available, they will take it and they will come to depend on it -- just like the Reaganites did to Us. Unlike the Reaganites, though, we are returning to what we know works. Hard work. Equal pay. Sharing risk en masse. Making sure the middle class has enough income to actually live a prosperous life, not simply treading water as we have done for the last thirty years. We treaded water because we expected something big at the end. Instead, the whole value of our whole economy was leaving the country by the afternoon on a single day in September, 2008. We were being sucked dry at nanosecond speed.
We couldn't afford the mortgage because we were not allowed to make enough money to do so. We were fooled by the Wizards Of The Financial Universe (I'm talkin' to you, Greenspan).
I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms.
Alan Greenspan
The Top Dozen Insights of Conservatives, 2008
By Greg Anrig - December 19, 2008
TPM Cafe
Greenspan was an idealist. He assumed no group of players would collude instead of cooperate. He assumed no group of players would pursue their own self-interest and defect on the rest of us at every opportunity. He was a fool -- admittedly so.
The End Game
The Republicans, as a party, have no Message any more. Our opponents have hundreds of messages, now blasting out from every pore of the media skin in which most of us are immersed. But the money isn't going to the RNC or the other official channels in the Republican Party. It is freed from having to play patty-cake with other interests. Citizens United liberated all that money to pour forth and roil the waters so much we are swimming through cloudy water. All of us. The sense of uncertainty seems heightened, unless we remember the direction in which We must go, and continue swimming without being able to see it.
The Republican Party has defected so much they are now weakening their own fitness for surviving future iterations of the voting dilemma. Each election they tilt the odds further against themselves. The irony of this situation is those with the most to lose are acting as if they have the most to gain. The classical game leaves out human factors: believing in ideals beyond the economics of the current situation in which they find themselves. People are complex and unpredictable. People are also at risk, all of us together.
We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
At the signing of the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776
John Bartlett (1820–1905). Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. 1919.
The tea partiers are trying to swarm. They are finding in the process a sense of fellowship. They think that is enough to hold back the truth they know in their hearts by talking incessently with their heads. They are trying to be blythe to what is around them. The Fox News juggernaut lets them keep their eyes on The Message -- but which one? Each day the messages shift with Tweets from Palin or YouTube vidoes or a host of other random stimuli. They are bouncing off the walls of a prisoner interrogation room of their own making.
The other factions within the Republican Party are so used to having The Message given through a centralized clearinghouse every day for so many years that now they grab onto anything being given by a hundred sources, in their own Web world, and they are going a thousand directions at once. "Taxes Are Too Damn High" is their mantra sung so loud and obviously in fear that they hope it can drown out the cry "Rent Is Too Damn High". The last defenders of Opportunity above all else are desperate to hide from the truth shining forth from the defenders of Equality.
The sooner these fellow citizens face up to the truth, or have their small swarm against our long-term and overwhelming swarm collapse in disarray, the better for the future -- their future as well as ours. We Democrats have made the cooperative moves for four years. To a fault, many of us think. Now it is time to compete. It is time to employ tit for tat. It is time to meet their aggressive response to our cooperative one -- exactly, unemotionally, wisely.
GOTV
Snap them back to reality. For their own good as much as ours.
GOTV
Make them face the reality of Our wave and meet their anger toward Us with action and willingness to cooperate, as the situation demands and no more. The harder reality will then be that much closer and they will have a harder time ignoring it. They have to face it eventually. It would best for it to be now.
GOTV
We must make our leaders address our grievances, not expect them to just do it for us. It is Our power at their backs that will make real change continue and grow as We know it must. It is also Our power at their backs which will ultimately leave them no other choice.
GOTV
Claim the prize. The time is now.
GOTV
Fly, my pretties! Fly!
Wicked Witch of the West
The Wizard Of Oz movie