2020 was… truly unique. It was so hard to stay away from doom scrolling, and I (and many others) were pretty disillusioned by the sad fact that so much of our country legitimately supported the Orange Man. I didn’t get a wink of sleep the night of the election because I genuinely considered it to be a make or break decision for America.
My point is that looking back on it, in the end the only real difference I made was at the ballet box. This year I’m going for the Head-in-the-Sand approach. I’m done with the political memes. Done with the Twitter screenshots. It just riles me up and this year I’m gonna do my best to fight that.
I’m voting for the most progressive candidate possible in the primary, and then whoever’s not the Republican in the general, and I fully intend to do that for the rest of my life.
The Republican Party has some plans they’re putting together, and between that and the rhetoric that most major Republican politicians and candidates spout these days (very specifically including Trump), it’s abundantly clear they’ve more or less completely given up on democracy, and are planning on dismantling a significant proportion of the core institutions of our country and government, which will effectively usher in the American Empire (as in: a possibly theocratic, but definitely authoritarian and likely outright fascist dictatorship). To be clear: that would be a Very Bad Thing. You think Russia is troublesome now? Wait until Trump or someone similar starts treating them like an ally, emulating as much of Putin’s power structure as possible just because they think it’s cool and would make them look powerful, and potentially teaming up to do shitty things to the rest of the world because we have something like 95% of the nuclear weapons ever produced, and while Russian ones are in a questionable state, ours definitely work.
If Republicans win this next election - and especially if they are able to secure the presidency and both houses of Congress - I genuinely don’t think things will recover without significant domestic political violence, which may ultimately result in a civil war. I’m doing my best to prepare for some “GTFO” contingencies that could be executed in the next few years, but it’s not an easy thing to do, and there’s still a huge number of unknowns in a ton of dimensions.
If you think I’m being hyperbolic, you’re not paying attention.
Oh hey look, it’s the only rational voting strategy in a FPTP elective structure! Anyone who thinks different is just more evidence we need Civics back in our schools.
Maybe we need more math as well - have you heard of the Ultimatum Game? Sometimes the rational strategy is to reject unfair split offers, even if that makes it a guarantee that you both get nothing.
I’ve taught game theory. Voting isn’t the Ultimatum game, because the most a third party is going to do is shave off a few percentage points, resulting in the main party losing, resulting in the main party generally becoming more conservative. Look who ran after Reagan - the entire Democratic Party shifted right with the third way. Look who we ran after Trump.
In voting the way it’s currently configured, there are two elements from game theory that apply. The first is minimax strategy - minimize the maximum damage your enemy can do. Above all that means keeping republicans out of office if you care about minimizing harm to women, minorities and immigrants, the poor, and the LGBT community.
The second concept that applies is the BATNA - the best alternative to a negotiated agreement. If the negotiated agreement fails (we get a left democrat on the ballot) our next best alternative is to get a Democrat elected.
We came within a hair’s breadth of not having another election, and at the very least we will be looking at a roll back of LGBT rights, a nationwide abortion ban, and a massive crackdown that will make sure they don’t lose any more elections.
If the third party can force the main party to lose, then it holds ultimatum power and game theory rules apply. The main party irrationally keeps rejecting the ultimatum and as a result keeps losing. To execute the threat of the ultimatum even after the unfair split has already been offered is the paradox of game theory. You have to appear credible enough to carry out such a threat, but the only reliable way to appear credible is to actually follow through on such threats every time.
The Democratic party keeps losing and shifting right because it acts irrationally and fails to execute optimal game theory strategy. It could have offered the left a fair split and we could have all had guaranteed single-payer medical care, food, and housing, but instead none of us will have women’s rights, and the immigrants and gays among us will be herded into cages.
That is literally not how it works. That’s how people think it should work, but when you see that it doesn’t, you have to turn back and review your premises and your model. I know the way you think it should work and how you want it to work, but when it doesn’t work you need to revise.
The problem is this - the feedback loop is insufficient and the correlation is unclear. If you are directly negotiating with someone, then you can play Ultimatum. If you are one of a hundred million people casting a vote for one person or another, you cannot. Perot cost Bush I the election, and Nader cost Kerry the election. Neither party decided that they needed to move in the direction of the spoiler candidate. They’re especially not going to do so for 3p candidates who pull in the low single digits, even if they lose by low single digits, because they’ll think they can get more by moving towards the center.
You can vote however you want, but don’t base it on a theoretical foundation that has less than zero application to the scenario you’re modeling. It really, honestly is a minimax choice, and if you are truly an ally for those of us in marginalized communities, you have to recognize it.
I’m not being a right winger here - I’m a member of the DSA and this is in line with what they (and people like Chomsky) advise. But I’m not talking about even that angle. I’m just talking minimax and BATNA. If negotiations fail (ie we didn’t get Bernie), the best alternative is Hillary. At least Roe wouldn’t have been overturned and we wouldn’t have states suing to make ten year olds give birth to their rapist’s babies.
So I am proposing that the Democratic party is acting irrationally and suboptimally, but you claim that the Democrats are acting most optimally, and it is the fringe left that is acting irrationally instead by refusing to accept a unfair split against all game theory guidance, causing all of us to eat shit (despite them making up only low single digits). Yet if the Democrats are so rational, how come they keep losing? Shouldn’t they have found an optimal strategy to get around the irrational ultimatum of the left? Yet here we are.
I do not mean this to come off as blunt as it sounds, but I’m trying to be both clear and concise.
What you’re talking about is not how game theory works. What you’re doing is taking the most basic, highly abstracted representation of a generic idea and expecting it to correlate with reality. It’s the same thing people do when they ascribe some kind of wish fulfillment to the free market or to evolutionary dynamics. It’s not even a platonic ideal - it’s drawing a supply/demand curve and thinking you understand how prices work in a market economy. Here’s the main issues you’re running into when you try to play Ultimatum with something the size of the Democratic Party:
We as voters aren’t playing Ultimatum. Instead, we are playing minimax as an emergent strategy to defend the rights of marginalized populations.
Thank you for your detailed input!
You got me 😁. I love drawing supply-and-demand curves. Seems pretty hopeless then if to even begin to understand how to vote “correctly” you need 5 years of game theory PhD. Hearing someone say “just trust me bro, the optimal strategy is that one” is not good enough. Voting was supposed to be for the masses…
I could get onboard with ranked-choice voting. My city used IRV for our latest mayoral primary election, and even though none of my ranked candidates won, I felt extremely satisfied that at least my voice was finally being heard. When a literal police-mayor got elected (winning primary by only 7000 votes), I had the comfort of full knowledge that this was not due to any spoiler effect on my part, but solely simply due to more people voting for him. If we’d campaign for ranked-choice voting in federal elections - presidential primaries and general - we can eliminate all the above hand-wringing. The Democratic party should be totally on board with this since they could finally get the Green protest vote.
Not having another sham election sounds like a great outcome to me.
Sounds great, but then the genie grants it and you don’t get any more elections, sham or otherwise. I’ll take the illusion of democracy over blatant mask-off fascism, personally.
If you live in the “illusion of democracy” then the elections don’t matter in the first place, so we may as well forego the mask so taht even blind people like you can see it. And polite fascism is actually worse because then liberals like you will support it and chastise others for pointing out the emperor has no clothes.
For example, do you know who started using drones to bomb civilians? Do you know who first started putting kids in cages? Because liberals like you think he was the greatest president to ever president, and you gleefully supported him since he was polite with his fascism.
Lotta unsubstantiated assumptions about me there. Maybe reassess your own biases before offering analysis.
I’m just making assumptions based on your own words.
This is what liberals believe.
Yup. Mutually assured destruction: either the malfeasant and murderous can get right and start fixing what they’ve ruined, or I don’t have a single issue becoming a lead weight around the country’s neck. Ain’t like this country hasn’t tried to kill me by cop more than once anyway, I have no reason to want to see this awful joke of an empire perpetuate.
Is there a neutral review of project 2025 that you can point to? That site is ass and either points to a book you can buy or a thousand links to PDFs.
Please define “neutral review” in this context.
The whole thing is unrepentantly and deeply biased, and it’s intentional.
I don’t know if this matches your definition of “neutral”, but it must be said that “neutral” is not synonymous with “unbiased”.
Yes I meant unbiased, but I was unsure if even using that word would be taken the wrong way. I don’t want to be taken as a centrist or anything like that, because I’m not even close.
I just want a flat clinical review of what it says versus what it actually means without clickbait sensationalism. It is plainly bad, that much is obvious. But what are the real-life, bureaucratic implications of its potential execution?
Thanks for the link, I’ll definitely check it out.
The Constitution needs to be rewritten anyway and we are overdue, preserving the status quo is enabling American fascism.