Game Theory was part of my economics education and later my computer science education. Game theory analyzes interactions between competitors to understand the strategies, given the incentives and the rules of the game. The overused example is the prisoner’s dilemma. Two prisoners locked in separate interrogation rooms have two options: to stay quiet or rat out the other prisoner. They are unable to communicate. If both stay quiet, they will get convicted of a crime with a short sentence. The prisoner who rats out the other prisoner, while the other prisoner stays quiet, gets off. The prisoner who stays silent, while the other rats him out, gets the worse sentence. The player that is silent while the other player rats is called the patsy. If they both rat each other out, they get a medium sentence.

Without getting too deep into the weeds, if you play the game repeatedly, players do best if they adopt a tit-for-tat strategy. One player stays silent, and on the next iteration the other player also goes silent. If they both stay silent, they do much better. If one player decides to “get one over” on the other player by ratting them out, the other player goes back to ratting. And the player who ratted has to accept the cost of staying silent and being the patsy to get back to a better outcome. Therefore, no one has an advantage when cheating, except it will cost them more than if they hadn’t cheated. I’ve heard the argument made the Democrats need to start playing tit for tat instead of being a permanent patsy.

The Republicans keep ratting (abandoning norms and breaking the law) and the Democrats keep silent (playing by norms and rules). In game theory speak, the Republicans are defecting (not cooperating) and the Democrats are cooperating. But I’m not sure that’s we are playing the prisoner’s dilemma. There’s another game called the chicken game. (Named for the “sport” of two drivers hurtling toward each other in their cars, with the one who swerves becomes the loser). In this game there are different payouts. If player 1 does not swerve, but player 2 swerves, player 1 gets their best outcome. Player 2 loses some face. The worst outcome (they both die) happens when the both do not swerve. Unlike the prisoner’s dilemma, where if they both rat on each other, the outcome is not their worst. For the chicken game, this is not just the worst outcome, it is a catastrophically bad outcome. If they both swerve, it’s a draw and neither wins or loses face. In this game swerving is cooperating strategy and not swerving is considered the defecting (not cooperating) strategy.

A slightly modified chicken game is the game I think Republicans are playing. They can reign in the administration, by cooperating with Democrats, but that costs them their job during primary season. Unlike the normal chicken game, where if both parties cooperate it’s a tie, any cooperation with Democrats is loses face. But the the country is in tact. Or, they can defect and not reign in the administration, expecting the Democrats will cooperate by obeying norms and laws, and the Republicans expand their power. That’s their best outcome. But what happens if we apply tit-for-tat to the chicken game and Democrats stop cooperating until Republicans cooperate? We get a catastrophic outcome. In the cold war days, this was the strategy of mutually assured destruction (MAD). The US can back down and lose face, the Soviet Union can back down and lose face, but if neither backs down, there aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape up all the dead bodies.

Look at what happened when Joe Biden came to power. Initially, the goal was to prosecute just the protestors breaking into the Capital. The norm was to never prosecute the opposite party, lest that open up a Pandora’s box of criminal accusations at every transfer of power. The restrained effort to hold the ex-President accountable moved through bi-partisan commissions and through Congress, not the White House. They retained Republican appointees at Justice for their full terms. Republicans didn’t cooperate, while the Democrats reliably cooperated. As the Democrats had cooperated by preserving order in the Senate during the made up “norms” Mitch McConnell discovered about Supreme Court nominees. The Republicans are fully expecting the Democrats to swerve again, should they lose the presidency in 2028 or the house, and maybe the Senate, in 2026. Republicans are not expecting something like a two year delay on the a Supreme Court appointment, if Clarence Thomas leaves the bench.

The idea the Democrats will fall back to norms partially preserves the system. If there’s a transfer of power we can all take a breather. We might get lucky and everyone goes back to norms from here on. At least half of the political machine is still invested in the system. If Democrats play tit for tat and stop cooperating until the Republicans cooperate? If no one is invested in the system, it completely breaks down. At that point it’s no longer a democracy. It’s mob rule and he who has the biggest mob rules. Instead of an orderly transfer of power it’s a shoving match at the end to see who comes out on top and woe to him that does not. There are countries like this all over the world, where once power changes, people flee the country to avoid being arrested. And we could very well become that kind of country. (Although some people think we’re already there because they’ve never traveled to any one of these places and are deluded).

The more brazen the Republicans get, the less tied they are to norms and rules, the bigger the stakes if the Democrats apply tit for tat. With the conduct of ICE, and the the highly politicized FBI covering for ICE, we may already see the people they’ve killed as extra-judicial murders. What if Democrats come into power and decide to arrest hundreds of ICE agents and arraign them on Federal murder chargers and others with felony murder? (Felony murder is charging someone with murder if they aid or abet a murder. Even lending a car, without knowing there was a murder, has been grounds to charge someone with felony murder). And what if the DoJ and Treasury (no longer independent and summarily replaced with partisans) go after the right wing pod casters and big Republican donors. (I suspect there’s something Elon can be charged with without even stretching the truth). Maybe start charging anything crypto related with money laundering, unless they buy into the new Democrat run “clean” crypto. Maybe force the companies Trump has bought into to higher key Democrats into the C-suite?

And let’s be clear about something. In countries where norms don’t form or where norms are abandoned, corruption follows. As long as you have power you need to extract wealth and create a system of patronage, just as the Republicans are doing now. To hold power, you need people who are vested in you maintaining power. That flows by bestowing money or status. Tim Cook and Apple would be just as happy to give a Democrat a gold iPhone, if it meant some kind of special treatment. They might grumble, but even oil executives will happily line blue as well as red pockets. And if enough executives are getting snatched up for tax evasion, they could be incentivized to behave themselves. And if those that behave are rewarded, even better. Especially if they were were afraid the arrest would involve a degree of physical violence.

So what’s the out, if we don’t want to become as ineffective a government as your stereotypical banana republic? Are Democrats turned into eternal patsies, while Republicans take increasing liberties with the constitution? Unlike the prisoner’s dilemma, chicken game participants can and do communicate. The Democrats can signal they will stop cooperating next round and that they will be just as bad, if not worse. To make this threat credible, they really need to gin up the base. This isn’t easy, but some of the administration’s actions are making it easier. This is not something Chuck Schumer, or his imaginary friends the Baileys, can do. Or the Obamas, frankly. As Amanda has said, this “we go high” strategy doesn’t always work. Sometimes, if they spit in your face, you need to make them spit out their teeth. Nor is the far left useful. They are more willing to tear apart the slightly less politically correct left, than do anything particularly useful.

Of course, the Republicans may not believe it. This was the real danger of MAD (mutually assured destruction). If the other side mistook your actions as guaranteed cooperation, and lost confidence in your willingness to respond, you could very well wind up in nuclear war. To avoid nuclear war, you had to convince the other side you would respond quickly and robustly. But we don’t have to completely convince every Republican, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it would be the end of the American system. We would only need to make them think it is sufficiently likely. Unless they moderate and return to norms, and look at cooperating as not so bad compared to other outcomes, they have no incentive to change. Right now, I don’t think Republicans believe Democrats have the balls. If things get bad enough, the danger is the Democrats get pushed into a tit for tat strategy when the base demands they don’t chicken out this time. And we wind up not with the third worst outcome (from prisoner’s dilemma), but with the destruction part of mutually assured destruction.