When they go low, kick 'em in the teeth

Game Theory reminds us that repeatedly playing fair with bad faith people is a sucker's bet

Game theory starts with a scenario most of us have spent our lives avoiding.

It’s a probability-based thought experiment called The “Prisoner’s Dilemma” and it goes like this:

You’re handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser, having been arrested for a serious crime. You don’t know which crime, but it’s apparently a felony, because the likely penalties are severe, and required the help of an accomplice. Right now, that accomplice heads your list of worries. Like you, they’re headed downtown towards a booking and a separate interrogation, where they might maintain silence, but also might rat you out and walk free.

You both have the same set of options. Depending on whether you cooperate (stay silent), or defect (turn snitch) you’re looking at anything from freedom to 20 years in prison. And in this simplified world model, there are four possible, absolutely guaranteed outcomes.

1. You stay silent; your accomplice turns snitch:

   1. They walk free

   2. You get 20 years in prison

2. You turn snitch; your accomplice stays silent

   1. You walk free

   2. They get 20 years in prison

3. You both turn snitch

   1. You both spend five years in prison, avoiding each other in the chow line

4. You both stay silent

   1. Each of you gets a one-year sentence

Fool me twice…

If you play this game to its sad conclusion only once, you learn that defecting (turning snitch) is the most advantageous short term strategy. But when you treat it like the simulation it is, and run it through multiple times, things get more interesting—and equitable. In multiple run-throughs that allow participants to retaliate for their opponent’s past behavior, both will derive the most benefit from

1. Cooperating more often than not

2. Forgiving the other’s occasional lapses

3. Punishing repeated defections by retaliating in kind: AKA, the “tit for tat” strategy.

4. Rewarding cooperation with more cooperation

If the goal is to minimize your own jail time across 100 plays, you will have to minimize your opponent’s jail time too. That requires a strategy based on cooperation. That way, you both wind up with a total that’s more or less a century behind bars and a game that’s incredibly dull to watch.

This ongoing cooperation and its attendant mutual cutting of losses even has a name: It’s called The Nash Equilibrium after brilliant and troubled mathematician, John Nash, whom Russell Crowe played in the movie, “A Beautiful Mind.” Once upon a time, Congress maintained its own version of Nash’s equilibrium, with both sides more-or-less following the rules and neither seeking to destroy the other forever. That’s what the old timers meant when they spoke of “bipartisanship” and “collegiality.” Nobody got everything they wanted, but both sides got something. That happy state persisted until 1995, when Republican Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, taught his party the road to power lay in demonizing and destroying the other side—a textbook zero-sum defection strategy.

Russell Crowe as John Nash, who formulated The Nash Equilibrium in Game Throry

How to lose, and keep losing

What if your opponent consistently defects, but you never retaliate in kind? You spend 2000 years modeling an orange jumpsuit, while they sleep in their own bed every night.

This strategy of constantly defecting to gain those sort of lopsided advantages only works with an opponent who refuses to pay you back in the same coin. And fortunately for the Republican party, that’s exactly what they’ve had in the old-school Democrats, who were more interested in preserving some long-vanished notion of bipartisan institutionalism than rescuing the country from Fascism. . For decades, their response to each more blatant Republican offense had been:

1. Clutch pearls

2. Draft strongly worded letter

3. Assume posture of submission

4. Lose

5. Declare moral victory

(I left out “send fundraising text,” because you knew that part already.)

Or at least that was true until last week.

That’s when Trump gave the command and the Texas legislature set about ‘packing and stacking’ their already-gerrymandered to death state into even more grotesque and anti-democratically shaped congressional districts. Texas Democratic representatives fled the state to disrupt quorum in the legislature, and Governor Pritzer of Illinois welcomed the refugees as honored guests. Meanwhile, human weathervane, Gavin Newsom, pledged to slice California up into a maniac’s quilt of GOP-proof districts. Even inert congressional ingredient, Hakeem Jeffries has given it his blessing. We can only hope they keep it up.

Anyone who’s ever bloodied a bully’s nose can tell you, abuse doesn’t end until consequences begin. And the GOP is long overdue for some consequences.