Republicans and shutdowns: An American love story

 Fall is in the air.  The leaves are about to turn lovely shades of every blessed color the eye can see.  A brisk breeze will contrast with the warm rays of the sun as we all prepare to gather with our loved ones for comfort food, and the fiscal year is ending.  Congress is doing as Congress does(n't), and the most natural pairing in all of biology is about to happen, in all its Darwinian beauty, for you see, this is how Republicans are made.  Peacocks strut their feathers, males of many varieties engage in spectacular combat, bowerbirds build... um... something, and Republican mating season begins and ends with the dumbest and most destructive reproductive ritual of all.  No, not the zombie brain parasite.  That was a one-time thing, even if it is still there.  No, a shutdown.  If you watch a bull elephant in heat, he not only goes on a destructive rampage, but dribbles as he goes.  This is dumber.  Go home, evolution, you're drunk.

Why do Republicans like shutdowns so much?  I put up a quick post earlier in the week, referencing a concept from spatial theory that I applied in Incremental Polarization, but there is more, and given that the country is heading towards another shutdown, this seems to merit more detailed analysis.

The basic game-theoretic models we use to study shutdowns and the like are chicken and brinksmanship.  Let's review, quickly.  Chicken works as follows.  Two drivers head towards each other with bragging rights at stake.  Whoever swerves is the chicken.  If both drivers swerve, each driver loses two utils, since if they are both chickens, at least nobody gets bragging rights.  If one driver swerves, the chicken loses ten utils, and the manly man of manliness gets ten utils.  If neither driver swerves, they both die, and let's call that negative infinity.

Dumbasses.

There are two Nash equilibria, which consist of the strategy pairs in which precisely one driver swerves.  It is a question of who swerves.  The thing is, real games play out over time, with sequential moves.  What happens when we take this underlying concept and add some dynamics?  We get brinksmanship.  Each player sequentially decides whether to yield, or stay in the contest, and the longer the game goes on, the higher the probability gets that "nature" will cause some disaster that fucks over everyone.

Solve that game through backwards induction, and you get the following.  One player will have a higher tolerance for probability of disaster.  The other player should just quit at the very beginning, and "the only winning move is not to play."

In either case, then, the disaster is not supposed to happen.  Either we get a Nash in which one player drives and the other swerves, or the wuss just quits in the first round.

What you're thinking is, huh?

So here's the thing.  In order for any of these analytic techniques to work, each player has to see the disaster as a disaster.  If one of the drunken idiots playing chicken really is suicidal, the math falls apart.  There is one Nash equilibrium, not two, as for example.

Now let's step back, back, way back into the wiring of rational choice theory.  How does rational choice theory work?  Each actor has well-ordered preferences, and when presented with options, each actor selects a strategy that maximizes his utility, constrained by other actors.  We impose no restrictions on what constitutes a rational preference ordering, so long as it is well-ordered.

Is there anything irrational about liking shutdowns?

Stupid?  Yes.  Irrational?  In technical terms, no.

There's the rub.

Once upon a time, legislators were not exactly smarter, but their preferences were less intrinsically stupid.  Let us consider, then, the stupefying of preferences.  And when we talk about the stupefaction of the Republican Party, we cannot help but turn to Newton Leroy Gingrich, Ph.D.

If you ever needed evidence of the worthlessness of the Ph.D., let it be he.

Gingrich was a backbencher during the 40-year Democratic dominance of the House from 1954 through 1994.  During that period, most of the GOP thought that their best strategy was to get what pork they could, cut the deals they could and basically accept minority status.  To his credit, Bad Bad Leroy Gingrich (come on, it's a Jim Croce song!) was among the few who saw opportunity in contesting the chamber.

To his discredit, he didn't know how to do much besides pick stupid fights.  His strategy, such as it was, in the minority, was to gum up the works for the sake of gumming up the works.  He deserved some credit for the GOP's gains in '94, but he received outsized credit, and received the speaker's gavel.  To his discredit, he thought that he could run the House like a backbench bomb-thrower.

It did not work.

He proposed the strategy of forcing shutdowns as a negotiating tactic.  He thought that Clinton would be the chicken.  Instead, the 95/6 shutdowns took a bite out of Republican approval, so the Republicans caved.

Lesson:  brinksmanship does not apply costs universally.  Public opinion can blame one side more than the other.

For the rest of Clinton's presidency, the GOP shied away from shutdowns over Medicare cuts.  Instead, they impeached him.

Dumbasses.

Flash forward to Barack Obama.  Republicans get it in their heads that they can threaten shutdowns and defaults to extract concessions.  Or rather, some do.  And here's the problem.

The GOP was divided between those who wanted to use shutdowns and defaults as a negotiating tactic, and those who sincerely liked the ideas.

And now we turn to Thomas Schelling.  How do you make a self-destructive (see: Gingrich) threat credible?  Be or appear crazy.

Shutdowns and defaults are stupid.  They are destructive, and if your party for forces either, the public will blame you.  Badness, all around.  So how can you make the threat credible?

Run naked through the halls of Congress, smeared in shit, spouting bonkers conspiracy theories about Barack Obama being born in Kenya?  That'll do it.  (Of course, the smearing of feces didn't occur until January 6, but I'm taking some literary license.)

Anyway, the general point is that if you can convince your opponent that you actually like the idea of a shutdown/default, then you'll be happy to force a shutdown.  Badda-bing-badda-boom, Bob's your bonkers uncle, credible-threat-a-go-go.

Hence, a division in the GOP, emerging in 2011.  Some of them actually convinced themselves that shutdowns and defaults were good.  We call them "extremists," if we are being polite.  I have many other terms, when I am being less polite.  John Boehner, who was Speaker at the time, referred to Jim Jordan as a "terrorist."  The mathematical observation, though, is that we can graph these people.

Literally.

We can put them on the spectrum.

So to speak.

On the liberal-conservative spectrum, those who sincerely like the idea of a shutdown/default are way off to the right.

We return, then, to the concept of reversion points, which I introduced in a quick post a few days ago.  A roll call vote is usually a choice between a status quo point-- where policy is now-- and an alternative to which policy would move if the bill in question were to pass.  That structure presumes that policy just cruises along, like a car that isn't about to go over a cliff.

Sometimes, though, a change is built into the structure of policy, and if you don't pass a bill, policy will "revert" to something other than the status quo.  That's a reversion point.  Like, if you don't pass spending bills, the government shuts down.

If the Representatives who are way off to the right actually like shutdowns, then where is a shutdown in the left-right policy space?  That's right.  Off to the right.  Way off to the right.

What does that mean?  It means that before the party moved that far to the right, they didn't really want to play shutdown games like this.  It also means that the further right they drift, the happier they are with shutdowns, and so the fewer concessions the shutdown caucus will make to stop or avoid a shutdown because shutdowns give them the warm and fuzzies.

In terms of the mechanics of threats, it means their threat of a shutdown is credible.  Why?  They don't see it as a bad thing.  They see it as just fine and dandy, thank you very much.  More still, a leader who makes concessions to avoid a shutdown is now a RINO, a squish, and a sellout.

What does that mean?  The leadership now has to go along with a shutdown, because the leadership has to be seen to that caucus as fighting against the evils of [INSERT DEMOCRAT HERE].

Kevin McCarthy has to shut down the government.  If he doesn't, he's a sellout.  Motion to vacate.  This is now built into the internal mechanics of the GOP.

Shutdowns aren't about anything anymore.  When Gingrich shut down the government in '95, he was trying to force Medicare cuts.  He had a policy goal.  You can disagree with him all you like, you can call his tactic stupid (which... yeah), but he actually did have a goal.  He just didn't understand how the game was played.  He played chicken/brinksmanship and lost.

What has happened since is that the Republican Party has moved further right.  The rump of the party just clusters around the location of the reversion point-- the spatial location of the shutdown.  That means they won't give up much to avoid a shutdown, and they will remove a leader who makes concessions to avoid the reversion point, which they kinda like.  This isn't proper brinksmanship anymore, because brinksmanship presumes that everyone is trying to avoid a mutually agreed-upon disaster.  Once a major faction in the House majority party decides that it isn't a disaster, it isn't even brinksmanship.

It's a love story.

Lonnie Johnson, "Love Story Blues."