The Third Breakdown of Rationality
If there are two or more possible compromises, of which the one most favored by player 1 is not the one most favored by player 2; then to choose a sure-thing strategy is to be a sucker that capitulates entirely to the other side.
Nigel Howard, Paradoxes of Rationality, MIT, 1969, p. 181
In discussion of healthcare negotiating strategies at Yglesias’s site, the whole “don’t let the best be the enemy of the good” / “politics is the art of the possible” / “politics is the art of compromise” meme came up another god damn time.
Democrats and liberals have learned that lesson far too well, but they seem to have forgotten the other set of lessons: don’t make your final offer at the beginning of negotiations, and don’t let the other guy know how desperate you are to make a deal.
Politics is the art of compromise and the art of the possible, but it’s also the art of fighting for the best compromise and the best possible. Democrats never fight and Republicans also do, and for that reason Republicans can dominate with tiny majorities and Democrats lose with 60 Senators.
Gingrich lost a lot of fights on his way up, and he kept coming back. In other words, he was thinking of the future and had a long-term strategy. The Democrats don’t. It’s always “the best we can get right now”.
I’m always hearing Democratic wonks saying “We know we’re not going to get that, so why even talk about it?” The fact is, you never know how a game will turn out until after the game has been played. You don’t know how much the other guy knows, and he’s not going to let you know what his weak spots are. Smart people who try to figure out the final score in advance are really dumb people. The little tastes of social science that they’ve had in school tend to make the wonk demographic think that they know what’s going on and how things will turn out, but they’re just fooling themselves.
I’ve been arguing for some time that the heavy influence of the highly educated on the Democratic Party has been harmful. One of the most harmful aspects of this domination is a trained incapacity at dealing with situations where where bargaining, bluffing, bullying, and and deception are required. I’ve never been in the business world, but from friends I have I understand that big-time negotiations are feints, bluffs, and bullying all the way to the end, with the two parties fighting for every nickel and every dime right until the pens come out — not a gentlemanly search for a consensus fair to both parties. And that’s how the Republicans play.
P. S. My leftist friends explain to me that this is all silly, and that the Democrats are just corrupt. Yeah, a lot of the big-time Democrats are corrupt, and those Democrats certainly do know how to play hardball. But there are a lot of Democrats who aren’t in on the take, and far too often they end up surrendering to the hard bargainers without even knowing what they’ve done. And one way the tough-minded realists befuddle these nice idealistic Democrats is by telling them, over and over again, that politics is the art of the possible, but never cluing them in that anyone who chooses the sure-thing strategy is a sucker.
The Democrats have to learn to fight the Republicans, and we have to learn how to fight the Democrats.
Trollblog 
December 11, 2009 at 6:20 pm
Yep. You’ve said it before, but liberals took the wrong lesson from Susskind’s anecdote:
December 12, 2009 at 5:29 am
I’d like to think this were the case–and hopefully it is since it makes things easier for us, in many respects. But my impression of liberals, whether politicians or not, is that they have a vested interested in defending the status quo. Liberalism, IMO, results from the contradiction of trying to reconcile defending the status quo (i.e., class power and violent imperialism) with wishing to see oneself as a decent person. It’s not a matter of being “on the make” in the crude sense of accepting bribes. It’s a matter of preserving a lifestyle that enables a comfortable income and a fairly empowering job without having to work very hard or take too much responsibility because someone poorer and browner is there to bear the burden instead.
December 15, 2009 at 6:48 pm
I would argue that the theory of modern liberalism itself creates this problem (or helps to create this problem) with the extreme level of abstraction as we see in Locke, Hobbes or Rawls as opposed to classical philosophy, where both the forms of philosophy are much more varied than in modernity (Xenophon as historian and autobiographer, Maimonides’ letters, Machiavelli’s plays and historical work, Lucretius’ poetry, More’s novel and so on) and that classical philosophy starts with a much closer engagement with the non-philosophic. Locke’s books, for example, are extremely dense, highly abstract treatises from the first page. There is little indication how non-philosophers are intended to begin understanding these books. Kant and Rawls are even more abstract. In most of these books, there is very little discussion of actual politics.
December 15, 2009 at 6:57 pm
Locke’s books, for example, are extremely dense, highly abstract treatises from the first page.
Agreed, but Locke, Descartes, and Hobbes are pretty down to earth compared to the academic (scholastic) philosophy of today.
December 16, 2009 at 2:07 am
“Agreed, but Locke, Descartes, and Hobbes are pretty down to earth compared to the academic (scholastic) philosophy of today.”
And that’s why I threw Rawls into the discussion. What it means in a political sense is that the modern philosophers who are most charming (and write in ways that non-philosophers can easily approach them) are Rousseau and Nietzsche. And both Rousseau and Nietzsche are extremely anti-political in the sense of day to day politics in a modern democracy: Emile avoids politics (as does Rousseau himself in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker) and Nietzsche is more focused on cataclysmic revolution.(Nietzsche does give concrete examples of what he’s talking about and the most recent example he gives is 2000 years old.) None of this provides any guidance to anybody trying to be in politics in the vast majority of times or places.
It reflects in the way we entertain ourselves: from the earliest times, the preferred literature was the tragic play and the epic poem – all focused on royals, heroes, princes, generals, warriors, politicians – i.e. politics on the level of average politics. The literature of modernity is the novel within the trail blazed by Rousseau himself – the novel of private amour – i.e. intentionally anti-political.
December 16, 2009 at 2:27 am
One thing I came up with when reading about populism, progressivism, etc. during the period 1870-1940 is that a very high proportion of the leaders were newspaper editors, lawyers, preachers, orators, or debaters. Thatis, they all had the talent of making verbal sense of things for people. This isn’t really philosophy, it’s persuasion and rhetoric, but a fair number were actually quite well read according to their interests.
Whereas politics today tends toward a mix of professional, operant-conditioning advertising / PR methods, and “trust me” technocracy. One of the dogmas of pluralist liberalism is that it’s wrong to try to make sense of things or to hope for things to make sense, since everyone’s values are different and politics is not sense-making in any way but just a system of payoffs and exchanges.
One reason I especially hate to see Beck or Limbaugh being described as populists is that the level of their discourse is so incredibly low compared to the populist level, and because people who call B&L populists firmly believe tht the populists were exactly like them.
December 16, 2009 at 6:40 pm
“One thing I came up with when reading about populism, progressivism, etc. during the period 1870-1940 is that a very high proportion of the leaders were newspaper editors, lawyers, preachers, orators, or debaters. Thatis, they all had the talent of making verbal sense of things for people. This isn’t really philosophy, it’s persuasion and rhetoric, but a fair number were actually quite well read according to their interests.”
Rhetoric is an immensely important topic in classical philosophy. If we assume that Plato’s Apology is the first written work of philosophy, then it is also a piece of rhetoric (Socrates trying to convince a hostile political audience of something during a highly sensational show trial). Many of Socrates’ dialogues are with sophists, i.e. the teachers of political rhetoric. The fact that Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Maimonides, Aquinas and Erasmus all wrote on rhetoric indicates that the subject is of central philosophic interest: it is where philosophy meets politics. And we also note that this interest in political rhetoric (which is distinctly not modern philosophy’s language analysis) abruptly ends as we enter modern philosophy.
“One of the dogmas of pluralist liberalism is that it’s wrong to try to make sense of things or to hope for things to make sense, since everyone’s values are different and politics is not sense-making in any way but just a system of payoffs and exchanges.”
Again, a problem with modern philosophy.
December 16, 2009 at 9:27 pm
We seem to be substantially in agreement. Would you like to do a guest post?
December 17, 2009 at 4:00 pm
John,
What would you like me to do a guest post on?
December 17, 2009 at 7:13 pm
Something of interest to you which is more or less in harmony with the general drift of this site. Rhetoric and politics?
Don’t constrain yourself much. No harm will be done if it’s atypical in terms of the site.
I’m emersonj at gmail.