While our beloved Kula is moving, I'm filling in to give the Kula Krew a place to gather for Koffee, Kuddles, and Konversation. In today's offering we consider the wisdom of playing political Chicken with adversaries who have no incentive not to crash.
"Here lies the broken wreckage of progressivism ... but they didn't blink" is not what I want for our movement's epitaph.
More after the fold....
I've seen several diaries and comments here lately suggesting that progressive Democrats in the Senate should vote against cloture on the stimulus package unless the bill meets progressive criteria, let the GOP filibuster and the bill stall, hope the media blame the Republicans for obstructing, and wait for pressure to build on the Republicans to give in to a truly progressive bill. To me, that's playing political Chicken in the worst possible way, because it's playing Chicken with adversaries who have nothing to lose by crashing. It's worse than being a Rebel Without A Cause. It's being a Rebel Without A Clue.
Who knows when or where the game of Chicken originated, but a variation of it was made famous in the James Dean classic, Rebel Without A Cause. The conventional description of the game has two drivers heading toward each other at high speed; the first one to swerve is the "chicken" and loses the game. The movie version had the two drivers headed toward a cliff, with the first to stop or jump out of his car declared the "chicken." Not surprisingly, it's a game that often has a bad outcome in the real world.
Chicken has received a lot of attention in game theory, a field of mathematics that focuses on making decisions when the optimum decision depends in part on the decisions of others. As readers of my other diaries know, I like game theory and cite to it often. I'm not a Ph.D mathematician - merely a J.D. attorney turned novelist - but I've designed and played historical simulation games for over 30 years and studied a fair bit of game theory along the way.
The classic mathematical analyses of Chicken assume a state called outcome symmetry. That is, each player stands to gain equally by the other swerving first (winning the game), and each stands to lose equally by crashing (dying). The ultimate game of Chicken was long considered to be nuclear war, where the outcome was Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). In that context, tellingly summarized in the movie WarGames, "the only way to win is not to play."
The problem with the political Chicken game I've seen proposed here on DKos lately is that progressives' and conservatives' positions are not outcome symmetric. Indeed, they could hardly be less so. Conservatives have every reason to play Chicken. Progressives have every reason to avoid it. Why is that so? Here are three reasons:
Conservatism is declining; Progressivism is rising.
It takes no genius to see that conservatism is a tarnished political philosophy. Both "cowboy diplomacy" and laissez faire free market capitalism proved to be failures under George W. Bush. The former brought us the flesh-eating virus of Iraq, while the latter threatens us with economic paralysis. As late as March of 2006, Republicans believed they might still be Painting the Map Red, making the GOP a permanent majority. Instead they lost both houses of Congress in 2006, and both the White House and more seats in both houses of Congress in 2008. Now even Rush Limbaugh concedes that if President Obama and the Democratic Congress are successful, the Republicans are likely to be the minority party for years if not decades.
But the failure of conservatism does not mean progressivism has triumphed yet. Progressives are not a majority of voters, and arguably not even in the Democratic Party or our elected leaders. And that's reasonable, as progressives haven't yet proven our ideas are any better than conservatives'. Theirs have failed, but ours haven't succeeded yet. We are ascending, but not yet ascendant, and we dare not forget that or take our ascendancy as a foregone conclusion. We must make government work well for the American people to prove our worth.
In game theory, an ascending power generally has an interest in caution, building one incremental success upon another to generate momentum. By contrast, a declining power can generally afford to be reckless, as they are losing anyway and must take risks to turn the tide. In that context, the game of political Chicken favors conservatives, not progressives.
The Economic Status-Quo Favors Conservatism
As several recent news stories and DKos diaries have documented, the present economic system favors the wealthy base of the Republican Party. That's hardly a surprise, as the GOP have been skewing the system that way since the Reagan era by gutting the counter-gravitational forces that offset the inherent gravitational pull of wealth: (1) anti-trust regulation to prevent "too big to fail" and/or monopolistic corporations; (2) banking and finance regulation to limit profit-piracy and speculation; (3) business practice regulation to make businesses pay the full costs (environmental, safety, etc.) of doing business; (4) trade unions to enable workers to negotiate for a fair share of profits; and the biggie, (5) progressive taxation both to redistribute wealth and fund investment in the common wealth from which we all benefit.
The gravitational effect of wealth lies in the calculation for risk-of-ruin. Wealthy people can afford a wider range of profitable investments, and can ride out more "misses" while waiting for the profitable "hits." Those with limited wealth have a much higher risk-of-ruin, and can't afford as many "misses." And obviously, those living paycheck-to-paycheck can be ruined by a single bad event. Thus, with no counter-gravitational forces in place, wealth will inevitably concentrate in the hands of the wealthiest.
And that's exactly what happened under conservative rule, where most of the economic gains of the past 20 years went to the wealthiest 5% while ordinary Americans' incomes stagnated or fell. And unless those counter-gravitational forces are restored, that's what will continue to happen.
An economic crash will hurt the wealthy only somewhat. For the rest of us, it means homelessness, hunger, and hopelessness. The wealthy are the conservatives' real power base. The progressive base is the rest of us, and a collapsed economy hurts our base, not theirs. Getting nothing done because we can't get everything we want helps their base, not ours.
What's more, because Democrats hold the White House and both houses of Congress, Democrats (and by implication progressives) will be blamed for a continuing collapse. That's the downside of being the party in power: you're on the hook for what goes wrong. So an economic collapse under a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress helps Republicans, as it "proves" that Democrats can't govern any better than Republicans did.
Again, that means Republicans have nothing to lose by obstructing economic change. The system as it stands favors the Republicans' base, and if the economy collapses because that system can't be changed, the party in power - the Democrats - will get blamed for it. That's why Rush Limbaugh could afford to say "I hope [Obama] fails."
Changing the Discourse and Practice of Power
Finally, progressives shouldn't play political Chicken with conservatives because Chicken is an inherently conservative game. As I wrote last week, Obama's core political philosophy is a truly radical and progressive goal: changing the discourse and practice of power in America. Chicken is a power-as-dominance game. It is an all-or-nothing view of power, where the objective is to humiliate or destroy the opponent. Obama has said, and I agree, that the power-as-dominance frame is the most malignant cancer infecting our nation. It's "the mindset that got us into the war" in Iraq. It's the intellectual sewer in which greed flourishes. It's the "childish thing" Obama warned we would need to put away, in his Inaugural Address. Merely by playing that game, we progressives endorse that concept of power-as-dominance. We become the very enemy we claim to oppose.
Playing political Chicken on the economic stimulus favors Republicans. They can afford to be reckless because their party is in decline and they need a game-changer; they need progressive ideals to fail as badly under Obama as conservative ideals failed under Bush, or they're a political minority for years or decades to come. Progressives, by contrast, have yet to prove that our ideas will work. And leaving the economic system as it is favors the Republicans' wealthy base, even if that leads to an economic collapse. The wealthy will suffer less in that collapse, and the party in power - the Democrats - will be blamed for the collapse. And merely playing the game endorses a conservative narrative of power-as-dominance.
Given that glaring outcome asymmetry - where one party loses nothing by crashing, and the other loses merely by playing - progressives who want to play political Chicken with Republicans over the stimulus package are simply ...
... Rebels Without A Clue.