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The Prisoner's Dilemma is a thought experiment that illustrates how it can be that two self-interested parties rationally make a choice that does not maximize their payoff. In the scenario, two suspects are arrested for a crime and interrogated independently of each other. However, there is insufficient evidence for a conviction, and so the prosecutor must try to get them to testify against each other. Each suspect has two options: he can keep his mouth shut, or he can rat the other suspect out. If he keeps his mouth shut and his partner in crime does the same, then the prosecutor can't make a good case and they both receive a short, 6-month sentence on some minor secondary charge. If, however, the suspect keeps his mouth shut but his partner defects and rats him out, then the suspect receives the full 10-year sentence and his partner--the rat--goes free. Finally, if both suspects decide to rat each other out, then they both share responsibility for the crime and each receives a 5-year sentence.
Assuming that both suspects are rational self-interested agents--i.e., that they both just want to minimize their sentence--what is the best choice? Well, if I am a suspect, then there are two possibilities: either my partner stayed silent, or he ratted me out. If he stayed silent, then the best choice for me would be to rat him out, thereby allowing me to walk out of there a free man while leaving him with the full 10-years. However, if he ratted me out, then my best choice is still to rat him out--because that way I get the 5-year sentence instead of the full 10 years. And so I choose to defect and rat my partner out. Ironically, though, since my partner is just as rational and self-interested as I am, he comes to the same conclusion, and so we doom each other to a sub-optimal result: a 5-year sentence.
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It only takes a little imagination to apply the Prisoner's Dilemma to the state of partisan politics over the last two decades. The Democrats and Republicans are like the suspects: locked in a dogged pursuit of their own agendas while all the while maintaining a rational distrust of the other side. When the Republicans control Congress, they shut the Democrats out of the legislative process--after all, why risk sharing power now only to be completely shut out when the Democrats regain control? When the Republicans seek a compromise on Social Security--allow some privatization, for instance--the Democrats reject it in toto. Why risk giving up an inch on Social Security now when the Republicans will surely take miles once they get a chance?
In this political environment, not only does the atmosphere become unpleasant--"poisonous" I think is the word often used--but the results become middling, and the progress incremental. We get Frankenstein legislative solutions--on health care, on energy--that are more about avoiding the worst possible scenario for both sides than actually effectively tackling the problem for the long-term.
However, there is a growing sense that the problems we confront as a nation are beginning to outstrip, in their sheer magnitude, the political mechanism we have created to handle them. Our health care system is not an ideological catastrophe for either side, but neither is it particularly effective. Entitlement programs are not on a sustainable track to accommodate projected increases in the elderly population. And as of today, there is basically no strategy in place for dealing with global warming (hint: ethanol subsidies won't cut it. Neither will ignoring empirical evidence).
In all this, there is a temptation to blame the self-interested nature of the factions involved. Why can't they put the national interest ahead of their own ideological agendas? But I don't think this kind of criticism holds water, because it misses the point: each faction really and truly believes that its ideological agenda is the national interest. The Democrats and the Republicans are doing nothing wrong by pursuing their versions of the political good--on the contrary, this is the very essence of democratic government. So I think it is not so much naive as incoherent to chide Democrats and Republicans for not "setting aside their differences" for the sake of the "national interest". If this is what is meant by bipartisanship, then bipartisanship is incompatible with the notion of representative government.
The proper target of blame is not the self-interested nature of today's political factions--theirs will always and should always be a rational political calculus that maximizes their own ideological payoff. Instead, we should blame the political environment that makes their calculus churn out sub-optimal results. Remember--the reason that politicians don't make effective compromises on long-term solutions isn't because they can't, but because it would be irrational to do so. Today's "5-year sentence" health care system is, after all, much preferable to the "10-year sentence" health care system that would surely result from letting the other side have too much leeway.
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The goal, then, should be to change the political environment so as to shake up the political calculus on both sides, so that it is no longer irrational for self-interested political parties to cooperate on a meaningful level. But what does this mean, exactly?
Well, let's revisit our suspects in the Prisoner's Dilemma scenario. We might imagine that in this world there is a game-theory savvy Mafia boss who is sick and tired of his hired goons serving long 5-year jail sentences when they could, by cooperating, be back on the streets in a mere 6 months. Our Mafia boss, of course, is under no illusions about the self-interested nature of his goons, and so he decides to introduce an externality that will surely alter the suspects' interrogation-room calculus: he lets it be known far and wide that from now on, anyone who rats out their partner in crime will be tied to a large cement block and thrown into the Hudson River. This move is good news for our suspects! Now, if I am the suspect being interrogated, I know that if my partner in crime stays silent, then I should stay silent too, or else the Mafia boss will kill me upon release. Moreover, the fact that the Mafia boss will kill any rat guarantees that my partner in crime will not be ratting me out. The inevitable and optimal result is that we both get trivial 6-month sentences.
The question is: what kind of externality can we introduce in the political world that would alter the political calculus in such a way as to yield viable long-term solutions? What is needed is for there to be a high degree of confidence among the political factions that the other side will not take advantage of temporary power imbalances in the compromise process to bulldoze its own ideology through. The Democrats need to be confident that the Republicans will not use the limited privatization of Social Security as the first steps toward abolishing Social Security. The Republicans need to be confident that universal health insurance will not metamorphosize into an unwieldy government program that ignores market realities. Specifically, both sides need to be confident that such ideological power grabs will be politically punished--that the electorate will actually vote users of these tactics--the "rats"--out of power.
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Enter Barack Obama, inexperienced one-term Senator with no executive background, an oratorical powerhouse that doesn't sound, look, or feel like anything in politics going. Judging him against the conventional criteria of a political candidate, he doesn't stack up all that well: he can spin a good yarn, sure, but substantively he brings nothing new to the table, and his untested meddle is a risk. Indeed, it is by precisely these sorts of metrics that the Clinton campaign has argued that Obama does not make sense as the Democratic nominee. Moreover, viewed from this perspective, the Clinton criticism of Obama's rhetoric as empty and naive is valid: it appears as though Obama thinks that, in thrall to his silver tongue, Republicans will magically jettison their ideological self-interest and support his standardly liberal agenda. Fat chance.
But the Clinton criticism misses the mark, because it fails to understand that Barack Obama is presenting the success of his very candidacy as the externality that will alter the political calculus of Democrats and Republicans and usher in a new era of good-faith politics and bold compromise. His very inexperience and political otherworldliness is crucial to his candidacy, because he needs to be credible as a true "Washington outsider"--someone who is not part-and-parcel of either side in the national political Prisoner's Dilemma, and who will not therefore engage in the same rational dead-end politics that have characterized both sides for decades. Moreover, he needs to demonstrate in his character, his rhetoric, and his political methods that conciliation and empathy are dominant values, and that political opponents will not be shut out of a Democratic regime. Those on the political right need to be assured that their arguments will be heard and taken seriously, and that, yes, they will even be given some power when in the minority to steer and participate in the national agenda. If Obama succeeds in embodying these values--and wins in virtue of them--then he will have remade the political landscape on the day of his election.
The extremely nifty thing about all this is that, if it works, it will not be because of any special talent of Obama's, particularly, or anything specific he is likely to do once in office. Indeed, a persistent rhetorical theme in his speeches is his status as a vessel--the political power doesn't originate from him or his silver tongue, but rather, from the vast and diverse movement for change that he is the arbitrary placeholder for. If he is elected President, he will take office in a radically different political reality, one where a totally inexperienced outsider stormed into office on a message of conciliation and compromise. The mandate will be obvious and indisputable, and it will be all the empirical assurance the Democrats and Republicans need in order to have high confidence that those who abuse political conciliation for undue ideological gain will no longer be tolerated by the electorate.
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Viewed with all this in mind, Obama's rhetoric of hope, unification, and change suddenly makes sense, and the words--so deadened over the years by standard partisan boilerplate--turn out to be doing some serious work. His whole body of rhetoric supervenes on the elaborate, technical arguments I have outlined above. "Hope" is not just some sense of vague optimism that everything will turn out okay. It is the confidence we need to have in each other that, though we disagree, we will work in good faith towards pragmatic solutions and not attempt to hijack the process for our exclusive ideological gains, or unfairly demonize the opposition. If Barack Obama is indeed elected on the hope message, then in virtue of self-fulfilling prophecy we will all have a good empirical reason to believe that our hope will be rewarded by the hope of others--after all, we all voted for hope, right?
This notion of hope plays into his other rhetorical obsession--"unity", or "transcending partisan differences". Many commentators are baffled at how Obama can claim to be a unifying force in our politically divided nation while at the same time championing an indisputably Liberal agenda. They wonder what "transcending the partisan divide" means in terms of concrete policy details--does it mean that he will "triangulate" between the two sides and adopt centrist positions? Does it mean he will somehow persuade Conservatives and Independents to rally around traditional Liberal causes? But I think these commentators are mistaking the dynamic property of a candidate's political and negotiation methods for the static property of a candidate's policy preferences. Obama has always conceded that, at the end of the day, he is a Liberal and a Democrat--and, in an ideal world, would like to see the Democratic agenda fully implemented. In that sense, he transcends nothing. But in the sense that he explicitly acknowledges that whatever solutions we do end up passing cannot be defined at present, and that their substantive shape will take form organically in a yet-to-be-determined political environment of mutual conciliation, he really is transcending the partisan divide. It's just that the "transcendence" is in the process, not the policy details--and that it won't take place unless and until he actually gets elected President.
The Clintons once described the nomination of Barack Obama as "a roll of the dice". I agree with this. By nominating Obama as the Democratic candidate, Democrats--and Liberals and left-leaning Independents in general--will be signifying their intention to break free of the Prisoner's Dilemma politics of the last two decades and recast the political landscape as one that is more germane to sober conciliation and compromise. But the other half of the electorate might not be on board with the project. Indeed, if Obama loses the general election or wins on a razor-thin party-lines vote, Obama's political raison d'etre will have vanished, and we will be stuck with either a loser or a President ill-prepared for battle with the vaunted Republican "attack machine".
However, if Obama sweeps into office on the crest of a Reagan-like political realignment--an ideologically diverse mix of Democrats, Independents, new voters, and even some Republicans--then the roll of the dice will have been well worth it. And at this point, I'm not sure what other outcome is worth the hoping for.
2 comments:
Dude, you busted out. Nice.
You've outlined how one individual may be able to come in and establish a change in the dominant political attitudes, and that this change could potentially end the sub-optimal governing that results from bipartisanship.
But my question is: Is there a way to actually change the framework of our government, change the rules, to ensure a fair, representative government that produces legislation that is effective?
The press is an agent that is supposed to be there to oust lawmakers that undermine the public good, but either the press gets bought out, or, it dishes out blame to everyone, leaving us with no alternatives. So the press by itself is not sufficient to play the role of the Mob Boss, and without a structural change in how our government is elected and operated, even with an agent of hope in concert with our watchdog, I worry that it would be impossible to have lasting change.
I think that currently, the political landscape is such that politicians are rewarded for waging total war in support of their ideological agenda. My idea is that maybe a convincing victory by Obama would make politicians believe that they will no longer be rewarded for such tactics.
All this is different from what the press as an institution is concerned with. The press is there to ensure that politicians play by the rules of law and, to some basic extent, the rules of empirical reason: they're out to catch crimes and lies. But the press isn't really there to enforce one kind of political strategy over another.
The thing that will force a change in political strategies on all sides--the "Mob Boss"--is, I argue, not the press or any politician but the electorate, newly consolidated around Obama and, hopefully, a credible enforcer of sober and magnanimous politics.
Of course, I'm not under any illusions that this will somehow start a utopian golden era where Karl Rove/Mark Penn types are banished from the political land forever. It's more like, I'm hopeful that the zero-sum Rove sort of thing will fall out of vogue long enough for rival politicians to come together to architect some sound policies on health care, energy, global warming, terrorism, etc. as we head into the next century.
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