“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies,… to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, that was the ultimate subtlety…” – 1984, George Orwell,

At first, I thought Donald Trump was Jesse Ventura in a wig. Then I suspected that he was The Fat Hitler. Then for a brief moment, I wondered if The Donald was playing some sort of Game of Chicken where he theorized that a 245-year-old democracy would screech to the edge of the cliff – and then hit the brakes. Now I’m convinced that it has been a Game of Chicken all along. And although his performance has been dazzling; his audacity has been spellbinding; and his dark material has been the stuff of historic American degeneracy – his finale on January 6th, 2021 was so cheesy that, for him, orange will undoubtedly be the new black.

But Trump’s insurrection was not the dénouement of this tragicomedy. There was way too much human suffering, way too much cruelty, and way too much global destabilization to view it through the lens of a moment of cultural vacuity. That’s because what we have witnessed is nothing less than Game Theory for Dummies.

If we pull back from the comedic aspects of this tragedy: the orange face paint, the glower of Mitch McConnell and all his chins, the irony of seas of red MAGA hats bobbing to “Lock Her Up” as if it were a Queen anthem – at some point it is instructive to wonder why Liz Cheney – a rock-ribbed Republican who voted for Trump policies 95% of the time – has suddenly decided to break ranks with her party. And why has a Great White Hope like Adam Kinzinger elected to break ranks with the Republican Party as well and take his 85.5% voting record with him? And most of all, why, oh why is the Republican party continuing to play a zero-sum strategy on literally any and all Democratic legislation – this, with the knowledge that over 600,000 Americans died from their party’s Covid denialism, and their own voters in their own red states are now dying at a faster rate than voters in blue states.

The Republican Party should be dead. But just like a kitschy zombie movie, they keep rising from the dead to bring new ways to “tell carefully constructed lies and repudiate morality while laying claim to it”. They preach that wearing masks to prevent the spread of Covid is an affront to personal freedom and that Donald Trump is the Christ of the Second Coming.

This strategy of theirs appears to be the same as Donald Trump’s strategy – known in game theory as “Hawk-Dove”. The evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith named this strategy in 1973 when he noted that competition in nature for a shared resource leads to either conciliation or conflict. The hawk attacks, and the dove either walks away, runs like hell, or gives it up. In our American story, the shared resource to which Smith’s metaphor refers is our national treasury. Trump and virtually all Republicans see our economic resources as theirs for the taking, ergo, their historic opposition to progressive taxation, regulation, and social safety nets like Social Security and Medicare. When Donald Trump campaigned for the presidency in 2016, he asked: “When we invaded Iraq, why didn’t we take the oil?” Everybody laughed at his naiveté, everyone except all of the Republicans.

But Trump is silenced now; he played Chicken with a little help from his friends, and he lost. So why are these Republican parasites still sticking together? Their policies are responsible for chronic recessions that must regularly be cleaned up by the subsequent Democratic administrations that are elected after each collapse. In the 2008 recession, the Republican opposition to the regulation of our financial sector led to the near collapse of large swathes of the American economy. When Republicans get into office, recession follows, and then the Democratic administrations that follow have to bail out the US economy. Republicans cut taxes and their donor class gobbles up the savings. Then the Democrats have to raise taxes so that the US economy can bounce back. The TARP program of 2008 was used to bail out the automotive, banking, credit, housing, and insurance industries. And now, once again, after a rapacious Republican administration, Joe Biden and his Democratic congress must do it again. We’ve experienced the economic consequences of Republican rule for over 40 years. I often wonder when the Democrats finally respond to Republicans who say that Democrats “tax and spend” by yelling from the rooftops that Republicans “loot and plunder”.

Hawk-Dove has been working for the Republicans for decades, so they must think: “why stop now”? Donald Trump happened; that’s why. He believes that “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine”. He lacks delicacy, he lacks subtlety, and now, so do the Republicans. They used to be much better at this.

We have also watched Republicans play a non-zero-sum game known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. We have seen examples of various Prisoner’s Dilemma strategies acted out by Michael Cohen with his use of the “betray” strategy, and we have seen Paul Manafort’s strategy of “stay silent”. (also known as cooperate or defect). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma…

These are tried and true strategies, but they are only the simplest manifestations of Game Theory. Think: the Cuban Missile crisis, the policy of mutually assured destruction (MAD), or the global crisis of climate change. They can all be explained by Game Theory.

Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are also playing the Manafort strategy of “stay silent”, and their ability to retain unity within their caucus has yielded enormous short-term gains for the Republican Party such as voter suppression legislation to eliminate competition, tax evasion schemes for their donors, and the silencing of unions, to name a few.

Politics is, above all else, a game of strategy. It is a system driven, not by the rationality of the players, but by the differential success of the strategies employed. Our 245-year-old liberal democracy produces what biologists refer to as an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS), where cooperation in the long run defines the dynamics of our system of governance.

Democrats want that system back for many reasons, not the least of which is to reestablish predictability in our foreign and domestic policies and particularly in our economy. Withdrawing from NATO and establishing alliances with Russia, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea are the antithesis of a stable democracy.

Negotiating with Republicans over major progressive bills now in Congress has always been the ideal of our heretofore stable democracy. But now, facing a zero-sum Republican senate fighting a Democratic Party that historically plays “cooperate”, we need to ask what game are we actually playing where no negotiation between parties is even possible? I suggest that we are playing Hawk-Dove – Chicken – and the Republicans expect Democrats to just give up and hit the brakes. But given the disasters of the Republican’s past administrations, I think this time they’re playing Chicken -Thelma and Louise style- and I doubt that neither Liz Cheney nor Adam Kinzinger will be able to pick up the pieces because, you know, splat.