Left: President Donald J. Trump, addresses his remarks prior to signing Anti-Human Trafficking legislation Wednesday, January 9, 2019, in the Oval Office. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead) (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Should Donald Trump use all the same dirty tricks on Democrats and RINOs they have used on him for the last eight years? F.H. Buckley discusses the idea in The New York Sun:
The Democrats thought they had him, but the American people had a better sense of the rule of law and ignored their bad faith and reelected Trump. And so the new administration has to decide between pretending none of this happened and payback.
For game theorists, this is a familiar problem. They distinguish between two kinds of strategies: cooperate and defect. When the parties cooperate, they promise to play by the rules and both sides do so. When they defect, no one believes they’ll play by the rules because no one does so. Then there are outcomes when one party cooperates and the other defects. In that case, the defector gets the payoff from the other party’s cooperation, while the latter is a patsy.
When the parties repeat the game with each other in real life, one strategy tends to dominate. Start out cooperating, and in subsequent moves do what the other party did in his previous move. If he cooperated in the prior move, then you cooperate too. If he defected, then you defect. The strategy is called tit-for-tat. Try to be a nice guy, but don’t let yourself become a patsy.
If the Trump administration adopts a tit-for-tat strategy, we’re going to see payback against the bad guys on the left. That’s how the Democrats play the game, and it’s what they anticipate in their pleas for more pardons from Biden.
Payback would do two things. It would remove the shame of being a patsy, of being the guy you can tramp on with impunity. It would also amount to what the left calls a teachable moment, and might persuade it that they better start cooperating. If the GOP goes after the Democrats as they did against Republicans, perhaps that might teach the Democrats not to do it again.
So the game theorist would expect to see payback by the GOP. It’s the way of the world. It’s even Biblical. An eye for an eye. Against this, however, there are three possible reasons not to indulge in payback.
First, the patsy is the guy who turned the other cheek, and there’s Biblical authority for that too. Second, it’s not as if the left can be taught anything. It’s too self-deceived about how wonderful it is to think it might ever have done anything wrong. If so, tit-for-tat would simply lead to the low-trust world of zero cooperation, where both sides criminalize the other party.
Finally, there’s one last argument for being a nice guy. Apart from the two players, there are the voters and they’re the last repository of virtue in America. In November they saw through Democratic defection and recognized the GOP as the more honorable party. Perhaps Republicans might not want to jeopardize this through payback.
Read more here.
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