Two authoritarian cults
Putting the horror of the Democratic and Republican parties under a game theory lens
Let’s start in the abstract. When people need to act together, i.e. to coordinate, how can they do it? Keep it simple: suppose everyone in the group must choose action A or action B. Also:
The more people choose the same action, the better it will be for everyone — that’s just the definition of coordination;
At the same time, one action may be better than the other for the group as a whole1;
But group members may not know for sure which action is better;
And, some members may not share the group’s preferences: the action that is better for them may be worse for the group.
The group needs some way to decide what to do, so that all its members do the same thing. Ideally they should also all end up choosing the best action for them, as often as possible.
There are two well-known ways to solve this problem. I think they may be the only two possible ways; anyhow, they are universal throughout history, and at every level of action from Cub Scout troops to nation-states.
The first way is to let some leader choose what to do, and have everyone follow the leader.
The second way is to choose what to do according to a known rule. This could be very simple, like “always choose A”; or it could be arbitrarily complex, like “choose A if the I Ching gives the Méng hexagram”. The rules can be written laws, or commonly known social norms. The Ancient Greek concept νομος, nomos, could mean either law or tradition, and each city-state had its own nomos.
Each approach has different advantages. The advantage of leadership is that it is flexible. A leader can consider each individual situation before making a decision. A wise leader may make smart decisions. If you are lucky, the leader has been chosen in a way that gives him incentives to make the best decision for the group. For example, a CEO may have vested options in his company’s share price; a public official may face reelection. If so, then the leader may exert effort to learn about the options, consult experts, or set up useful advisory structures.
The disadvantage of leadership, aside from the fact that leaders are not always wise nor incentives always adequate, is the risk that the leader does not want what is best for the group. Charles II took bribes from Louis XIV to do what benefited France, not England. A CEO may jigger up the share price, pumping his options and hurting the company in the process. And so on.
The advantage of rules is that they can be impartial. Yes, laws have throughout history been written by the rich and powerful. But even then, they were not usually designed to benefit one person in one specific situation. Making decisions in the form of general laws imposes a “veil of ignorance” which can align individual and group welfare: I may want to sleep with your wife right now, but I don’t want everyone else to be allowed to sleep with mine in future. There is a deep connection between the Old Testament’s attachment to the Law, and its social egalitarianism. (Whereas by contrast, as Samuel puts it:
This will be the manner of the king that shall reign over you: He will take your sons, and appoint them for himself, for his chariots, and to be his horsemen; and some shall run before his chariots…. And he will take your fields, and your vineyards, and your oliveyards, even the best of them, and give them to his servants.
1 Samuel 8:11-14
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The disadvantage of rules is their inflexibility. By definition, they were not designed to cope with the unprecedented and unforeseen. Even with foreseeable circumstances, there is a trade-off: the more a rule must be adapted to different contingencies, the more complex it must be. The ongoing process of adapting rules to the complexities of life is what fills law books.
Relatedly, laws do not interpret themselves. Laws beget lawyers, Talmudists, scribes…. Such classes are no more immune than princes to individual and collective self-interest. One way to think of the whole historical progress of the rule of law in Britain and America is as a massive lawyers’ boondoggle with some fortunate side effects.
But let’s zoom back in. Having written down this apparatus of vast transhistorical generalisation, we can now apply it to the contemporary Democratic and Republican parties. This is like building a space laser to take out a gnat.
