On Collective Action Problems
An OTB example to illustrate a larger problem.
When I was teaching, one of the things that gave me a great deal of satisfaction was coming up with a hopefully easy-to-understand example to use in class to help illustrate a complex or abstract concept.
A major question of the day is why can’t the opposition to Trump, and especially the Democrats, get their act together to more effectively oppose the Trump agenda? This is a classic collective action problem. How to get people who are ostensibly in agreement about a certain problem coordinated in such a way as to solve that problem?
Actions require agreement on the problem as well as the solution, and the coordination of disparate actors to move in a shared direction. This is challenging if there is no central authority to impose such coordination.
Consider ongoing discussions about disruptive commenters here on the site. Over time, certain visitors draw the ire of both the main page authors and the commenters. There are various responses that emerge.
Please note that while yes, recent comment threads are the proximate inspiration here, the comment-box-based microdrama outlined below has played out numerous times over the decades.
Some people (most) ignore the Disruptor from the get-go. Whether this is a conscious strategy or not is unclear, since more readers don’t comment, and not all commenters engage fully with one another. This is the Silent Majority. And, again, we don’t really know if they are silent for any strategic purpose and, indeed, are likely silent or mostly silent for any number of individual reasons.
Another group will try to engage in the hopes of having an actual argument or to try to understand what the disruptor is trying to say. We will call them the Engagers.
Yet another group will admonish the Engagers to not feed the trolls on the proviso that ignoring the disruptors will cause them to go away. Let’s call them the Ignorers.
There will also often emerge another faction, the ones calling for the ban-hammer. We’ll call them the Hammers.* This is an appeal to central authority (the main page authors) to exercise power to accomplish the goal of dealing with the Disruptor.
There is disagreement between the Engagers and the Ignorers as to whether the Disruptor is truly a troll or just someone who can be reached via dialogue. Meanwhile, the Ignorers and Hammers agree that the Disruptor is a troll. The disagreement is to be found in differing solutions to the issue.
What is striking to me about all of this is that, apart from an appeal to the central authority to solve the problem, there really are only two solutions to dealing with a disruptor, and likely only one, ultimately. Either the whole community joins the Engagers to try to collectively argue with the Disruptor in the hopes of either changing their minds or, at least, getting some answers or the whole community joins the Ignorers in the hopes that depriviving the Disruptor of oxygen of attention that they will just drift away (or, at least, not be allowed to derail threads).
Indeed, in terms of collective action, the Ignorer strategy is likely the best one a community such as OTB could deploy to minimize the disruption of Disuptors, but as we see, it is almost impossible to collectively get everyone onboard with that project. Even if whole posts are dedicated to the subject, it is just freakin’ difficult to get everyone to resist. I, myself, have succumbed over the years to engaging with Disruptors well beyond the point at which it was clear that such engagement was obviously pointless.
Those in the Engager camp can’t help but think and hope that engagement will eventually bear fruit. And the Ignorers can’t help but roll their eyes in response.
This is all a collective action problem. There is little doubt in my mind that most disruptive commenters would get bored and drift away if they weren’t getting the jolt of dopamine they get from being the center of so much attention. But they just say things that make it so hard for Engagers to stroll past!
And so, I return to the Democratic Party and ask: if it is so hard for what boils down to a dozen or so regular commenters to coordinate their actions to deal with this commenter or that, it should not be shocking that the Democrats can’t figure out how to deal with Trump.
Both are collective action problems.
Note: I am not making excuses; I am trying to provide an analytical frame to understand what is going on.
First, unlike the Hammers, the Democrats have no central authority to call upon. There is no centralized leadership in the party, as I have often noted. There is, therefore, no way to force a specific unified strategy to deal with the Trump administration.
Instead, we have to start from the reality that there are 213 Democratic House members and 13 Democratic Senators, each of whom is making their own calculations in terms of their primary fights and re-election bids. That means, too, that the other 34 Democrats/Independents have a difficult personal political calculus that they are making.
Put another way: the Democratic Party, even at the congressional level, is not a collective actor with a cohesive structure. It is a group of free agents with specific personal political goals that are acting with broadly similar, but not identical, goals.
Throw in law firms, universities, and other sources of opposition, and the collective action problem becomes more and more and more complicated.
It is not a surprise to me, even if it might be frustrating and disappointing, that there is no well-defined, focused opposition to the Trump administration from broader society, or even just from congressional Democrats. Which issue should be the focus? Tariffs? Deportations to CECOT? Attacks on research grants? Destroying long-standing alliances? A whole lot of other stuff?
If a handful of commenters have a real collective action challenge as to how to deal with a set of mildly annoying commenters, it should come as no surprise that the actors needed to coordinate to oppose Trump are having a hard time doing so.
This is made all the more difficult by the fact that it is not clear what the right strategy should be at the moment. Is it a massive protest action now? Is it the courts? Is it waiting until the midterms?
A simple example that has also emerged in the comment sections: Was Schumer right not to fight over the budget CR? There was no consensus on that collective action problem at the time, and there still is likely disagreement in the now about what he should have done, or not done, at the time.
I would note, too, that what makes this current political moment so difficult is that the Republicans not only have control over all the major sources of federal power, but they also have a central authority, Trump, driving the bus. So we are seeing the problems of a weak, collective, disparate, and therefore uncoordinated opposition versus a powerful and highly coordinated political opponent.
And therefore, it is depressing and frustrating to watch this unfold if one is opposed to the administration.
But as much as I would like for someone to do something, I am not surprised that the opposition is so weak. Indeed, I am not certain what effective opposition looks like at the moment.
This is not to say that I don’t encourage writing and calling members of Congress, donating where appropriate, campaigning, voting, protesting, writing, arguing, and whatever else you can think of.
But I can’t help but see quite clearly that we collectively took the wrong path in November, and it is hard to correct that poor choice with any ease, if it can be corrected at all.
*The Hamers. The Hammers are the nickname of what British football club? That’s West Ham United for those who know. Sorry, but you didn’t win the lounge suite.
Adding to the dilemma is that the Engagers actually amplify the sludge created by the trolls. Even those who display the discipline to ignore the trolls can’t ignore ten people feeding the troll and the various back-and-forth over the trolls comments, how to react to the troll, etc. The troll manages to make the thread maddeningly unenjoyable not by his own drive-by comment but by all of the off-topic comments it generates.
@James Joyner: Yup.
Great post and I need to think about it a lot more before fully commenting.
In the meantime, I’ll volunteer that one challenge we as a society have around collective action is that there’s been a long-term war in the US against most forms of organizing.
Organizing for collective action has been seen as a suspect activity for at least my lifetime (starting in 1974), especially in middle-class households. By the Reagan era, unions were typically positioned as the “bad guy*” and not just in Republican/Conservative circles. Likewise, “community organizers” were also branded as SUS and usually people who were just trying to cause trouble.
I think a lot of this comes down to how successful organizers had been–initially in getting labor protections passed, and then later in the various civil rights movements.
From personal experience, I have learned that organizing is a perishable skill. It takes a lot of work to become a good organizer. And then it takes even more work to help connect people and get them through the baby-steps of collective action. Given that most Americans don’t have real experience with collective action (and many are not prepared to take many steps without a lot of protections and training wheels) moments like this when folks need to go from 0 to 60 are incredibly challenging.
This is as much a practice and infrastructure challenge as anything else.
—-
* Anticipating the trolling: I completely agree that some of the fault for this should be laid at the feet of union leadership at the time. And that doesn’t negate the important work that unions have done in the past, are doing in the present, and will do into the future. Black and white thinking is really tedious and an inability to get past it is a sign of bad faith.
Wow.
Dr. J, this is the kind of clear, concise presentation that makes me wish I had been in your classes. The analysis and summarization you’ve provided clearly present both the problem, and the lack of a ready solution.
You’ve given us something to think about, even as we struggle with how to solve the issue.
In response to your closing paragraph, I’m afraid that the November election leaves the nation off course like a super tanker headed for shoal waters. Personally, I can see no way around the United States striking the shoals ahead.
Whether this results in the nation (figuratively or literally) breaking up, or merely leaving us a sorrowful memory in history, is outside of Luddite’s ability to foresee.
ETA
Emperor Nero seemed like a good idea to his supporters, too.
On my honor, I will do my best
To ignore the trolls and give engagement a rest.
@Matt Bernius: An excellent point about the problems (and opponents) of collective action in the US.
I have a family member who is anti-union, despite the fact that said family member was able to get a union job right out of high school back in the 1960s, live a middle-class existence in Southern California, retire super-early from that job, and currently owns two houses in Southern California with all that that suggests wealth-wise (at least in part, I suspect, from wealth inherited from stocks earned by a a blue collar parent back when blue collar workers got stocks as part of their compensation–not sure if they were union or not, but it wouldn’t shock me if they were). Said person is currently pro-Trump.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Exactly. And to be clear, the aversion to unions isn’t particularly unique to the right. I say this as someone who unionized a non-profit that, while not political, definitely sees itself as an organization dedicated to “helping people.”
Taking it a step further, prior to getting involved with a union, I was–at best–ambivalent to them. And as my writing shows, I’m pretty liberal on most topics.
Good post.
I would add another OTB/Internet comment group—the “Insulters,” who engage with the disrupters but not in a serious or productive way.
The collective action problem is very real in our politics, and it is one reason why America’s weak parties are so problematic. The lack of any centralizing structure like political parties everywhere else is a huge downside, one I think most people underappreciate. The GoP definitely has an advantage here because Trump provides the centralizing focus that holds the coalition together, and Democrats don’t have any equivalent. Democrats have the additional problem of being a more diverse coalition with the ‘everything bagel’ problem of trying to please everyone. That just doesn’t work and results in the kinds of circular firing squads we’re seeing now.
The other thing to consider is the time horizon. In a democratic system with periodic elections like ours, the losing party inherently has few options soon after losing, even without the collective action problem. So, the available strategy and tactics will be limited in the near term, even in the best case.
My view is that the focus needs to be on winning the next election. That requires a longer-term focus that is often incompatible with the short-term bias we have as humans, which is exacerbated by the immediacy of very real immediate problems and outrages, social media, the short news cycle, and other things that pull away attention. But again, I would argue that a healthy political party or coalition should focus on winning the next election because winning elections is (or should be) the most important goal in stopping political opponents. The entire purpose of a political party in a democracy is to win elections in order to gain power to achieve specific ends.
When Trump was first elected, I heard a story about a developer in the south who had both enthusiastically voted for Trump and had declined to do business with him because he was such a cheat. The person who told me this pressed the guy. How can you trust someone to run a country when you didn’t trust them to live up to a contract? No answer, of course.
It’s easy not to answer a question. The Good German who can’t answer questions about their support for the Nazi regime is a theory of history. Americans have always believed that you can be non-political and just hang with your neighbors regardless of what they support or have done. In essence, this makes shrugging your shoulders and feeling (and then doing) nothing to be a virtue of democracy, which is part of the American myth where the agitators distract us from the true path of consensus formed by MLK Jr (not an agitator).
All of this to say that collective action is not something most of us are taught as Americans.
@Andy:
100%
Good point. I would tweak it slightly to say that it is a subset of Engagers that underscores that even if a faction can agree on a kind of activity (in this case, engagement), sub-factions may not agree on how to execute that activity (types of engagement).
@Steven L. Taylor:
110% this as well. At some point, I need to write a rant on the fun of people on the sidelines who love winning internet points by loudly shouting “you’re doing it wrong” at people in the trenches.
This has been a harsh lesson for me to (re)learn. I write that as someone who, at one time, fell into that very behavior of critiquing activists and organizers for “being too extreme.”
I have come to appreciate the need for people in movements to push for what is beyond possible to land on what can be accomplished in the short term.
Collective action requires leadership. If James and Steven lay out a clear guideline I believe commenters would comply. I would. Much as I do enjoy unleashing a version of my old restaurant critic persona. But I can always find someone to insult, doesn’t have to be here.
Basically I believe if you guys say, ‘stop it’ it will be stopped.
Excellent post and I hereby commit to “ignorer-status.”
As to the larger issue that the post is really about, this is why I asked Neil about the face (faces) of the National Strike he teased.
https://outsidethebeltway.com/trump-openly-defying-the-courts/#comment-2994984
De Gaulle was not yet an eminent figure when he began encouraging the French resistance, a resistance that only gained real strength when de Gaulle assigned Jean Moulin to organize and unify the various underground networks.
IMHO someone has to step up to lead the opposition.
A group of large national progressive orgs is great but such a group requires a single leader. A Jean Moulin. And a de Gaulle who can present a united front and sell a fractured American people.
My bet is that we don’t know who these people are yet. But we better find out soon.
Again, just my $00.02.
Once again, I think this all shows the weaknesses inherent in our form of government and the Constitution. There is actually very little that can be done to stop a POTUS who chooses to break norms, and the law, if Congress and POTUS share the same party. When our country was formed it was assumed that congress would represent the interests of their states. Now they represent the interests of the party which currently in the case of the GOP means Trump. The only real option is the courts and we can expect some temporary restrictions on POTUS power from them but SCOTUS has already decided there arent many limits on executive power so we dont have a lot fo hope there.
Steve
@steve:
IMHO our Congress-cretins need to see that there is real benefit in standing up to the travesties taking place. That we are not going to lie down and allow them to walk over us. This includes the ones from red states. I have to think some of these people know this is wrong but see no upside in fighting it.
In any case I’m not willing to say fuck it, game over.
Wonderfully-written school lesson. Poetic. So fun.
Schumer might’ve faced less blowback had the execution been less wishy-washy. Would’ve liked him to put his foot down before the House vote, declaring Democrats are not for shutdowns. Ever.
But ultimately Schumer was right to “fight” via strategic restraint, rather than by setting everything on fire and screaming into a mic in front of friendly audiences, the preference of the leg-tingles crowd.
Rapist felon Trump has benefited from the lie he is good for the economy, helping him defeat Harris by 1.5%. Here’s video of an astonished Harry Enten on the sudden erosion in approval of Trump’s economic stewardship — a necessary precondition to Dems regaining the power to check him.
Would Trump alone shoulder so much public blame if Schumer had allowed to Dems to join him in dismantling govt? Unlikely. Would a nrofascist regime that defies 9-0 rulings have bent to Dems because of a shutdown? Pfft. No.
But those who were so sure Schumer erred, so righteous in their groupthink indignation, won’t admit they were wrong. To do that would require they jettison the assumptions (and ageism) behind their Democrat Derangement Syndrome.
If they could so reflect, they’d reach a sobering conclusion similar to this:
Many on our side cannot accept Americans were determined to touch stove and thus now need to be burned, that Dems have little recourse atm besides blaming Republicans for the fires then running elections in 2025-26 pledging relief.
Many on our side are instead stubbornly wedded to bashing allies. We want to believe this conflaguration that we the people chose to set — against the pleas of Hillary, Biden, Harris — can be put out right now based on things Dems or “woke” progressives or centrists “cowards” are and are not doing. Andy is right: the only hope is for Dems to win elections.
But the immediate gratification of blind, spleen-venting outrage performance feels better than clear eyed, long term strategic maneuver.
Our coalition has never been great at the latter tbh. Can you imagine the center-left successfully executing and implementing a 50-year plan to overturn Roe? In 2016, I had a chance to create a liberal Court majority for the first time in generations, but refused to stop depressiong our own turnout by telling each other how unexcited we were about “unlikeable” Hillary. We just love to help the right beat up our own people, and I just don’t get it.
Apropos of nothing, the U. S. in that photo is upside down, which is perfectly reasonable looking at the phone upside down. But it’s also somehow mirror image, if you turn the phone on the desktop, New England ends up on the right. At first glance I thought it might be North Africa with the Alaska inset as Gibraltar, Texas as Tunisia, and Florida as the Levant. @Andy:
Apropos of nothing, the U. S. in that photo is upside down, which is perfectly reasonable looking at the phone upside down. But it’s also somehow mirror image, if you turn the phone right side up while still flat on the desktop, New England ends up on the right. At first glance I thought it might be North Africa with the Alaska inset as Gibraltar, Texas as Tunisia, and Florida as the Levant.
ETA – I hit post, scrolled up, read Andy’s comment, and hit Reply. Then I scrolled back down, saw this hadn’t posted and the progress scroll was frozen. I deleted @Andy, watched nothing happen for a minute or two, and for lack of anything else to try, hit Post again. After a minute or two, it posted. I scrolled back up, read Andy’s post again, and came back down to find two posts, with edit only on the second. Don’t know if it’s the site or I’m having Wifi issues again, but given how many double posts I’m seeing, I don’t think it’s on my end. Offered not as a complaint, but as explanation and perhaps useful for problem definition.
I probably come off as an Ignorer a lot. I figure I will say a bit more. I would describe myself as an Understander. I want to understand what commenters are up to, what is the context from which they write, and when I aggregate all of their postings together, what picture can I assemble of the person making those posts. I also seek to share this knowledge.
But, jumping to the meta, this concords very well with Steven’s overall point about having a collective action problem. I was very disappointed with Schumer, for instance, but tempered that with the knowledge that he was probably in possession of knowledge I didn’t have, and had the benefit of a lot of experience I don’t have.
He needs to play his position, and I need to play mine. I don’t think we are at a place nationally where we can call a general strike and have it have any chance of success.
Yet.
We do need to stand up, be vocal, and be articulate in the way I know this crowd is capable of. With friends, with government officials, with social media.
For me, the disrespect of habeas corpus is easily the most objectionable behavior, but poor economic performance might get people’s attention faster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYeV7jLBXvA
In the Beatles song, “A Day in the Life” there is a passage (from about 1:50 to 2:15) where, using a very 20th-century musical ideas, there is a growing cacophany of sounds, both from the orchestra, from rock instruments, and from recorded sounds like jackhammers. It rises in chaos and pitch and volume until it ends … on a single note, and a new tune emerges.
It feels like we are living that transition. It might have felt like that to them, then as well.
@Michael Reynolds:
To a point. Look at James’ ongoing fight over giving Trump nicknames. It never stuck for long, and arguably stopped working.
I have intervened in some conflicts and asked people to knock something off, and they do,
But I can’t order a troll not to troll, and I can’t, ultimately, tailor how commenters respond to said troll. Ultimately, I can ban. But we try and weigh banning with open debate. It is ultimately an art, not a science.
Banning is really the only way to deal with it, and we really are reluctant to do so.
@steve: It shows, as I have written about, that partisan alliances across branches utterly short-circuit checks and balances.
OK, back to @Andy: Indeed. Another example of there being no such thing as “the Democrats”. Republicans have the same collective action problem, maybe worse. Atrios like to say almost all GOP elected officials want Trump gone. I think he’s right. But they all saw what happened to Cheney and Kinzinger, and Trump wasn’t even prez then. That said, the interlocked network of funders, “think” tanks, activist orgs, etc. is essentially an organized shadow party. They are better coordinated and more disciplined than the Dems. They’d like Trump gone (who ordered a trade war?), but as long as he’s the nominee, they’ll do all they can to elect him. He does have all they need, enough digits to hold a pen. And in the repeal of Roe, the prominence of AEI and Heritage, removal of most barriers to money, acceptance of the “Unitary Executive”, etc. we see evidence of long laid plans absent on the Dem side.
@Jay L Gischer:
A fair point. But also, and consistent with this post, Schumer sees job one as getting Chuck Schumer re-elected. Job two is raising enough money to accomplish job one. Job three is maintaining his leadership position, mostly by raising money he can spread around. Saving the Republic is well down the list.
Such as writing an entire post about collective action problems? 😉
It’s your site, and James’ and the other front pagers. I assume that letting this play out time and time again is something you prefer to exercising authority to stop it by banning obvious Disrupters (or the Engagers, or the Hammers, or, hell, even the Ignorers — “no one shall ignore the troll”)
[ETA: Given how much a certain disrupter wants to be banned, maybe you’re just playing the long game. If so, well done.]
Tying this back to the larger issue of collective action in the Democratic Party not effectively opposing Trumpism, I would point out that there really isn’t anyone in the party that has that ban hammer.
For a while, Joe Biden was President, and theoretically had the ban hammer (drone strikes in the US, targeting Trump and other Republican Party leaders). But he was understandably reluctant to use it, perhaps not even seriously considering it.
I guess Gov. Whitmer got close enough the other day that she could have had some impact using her binders as an improvised weapon. But there are too many heads on the hydra to get them all with a couple of binders.
ETA 2: that update was way faster than the post was. My latent software engineer powers are wondering if you have a bad query that is doing a full scan of the database, perhaps in the duplication detection.
@Gustopher:
Indeed! I almost didn’t write it because the troll stuff is actually ancillary, but it was such a great illustration of a very simple, very easy to understand collective action problem that I couldn’t resist!
Exactly. This is what I meant by the lack of any central authority amongst the opposition.
On general principle, I ignore the trolls one I identify them. If I ever read anything they spew on the screen, it’s accidental, or through reading a reply to them or about them. I sometimes do notice when they reply to me (if they use the reply function), and in particular ignore those comments.
I get enough aggravation in my life (thank you, cellphones!). I don’t go looking for more.
And I think not paying them attention both hurts them more than most arguments, and gets them to go away.
There was James Pearce. All I can plead is inexperience (I was new here), and he almost could pass himself off as a legitimate commenter.
@Michael Reynolds: I don’t recall this plan working any of the other times they have used it on other issues (use of crude or obscene language, for example) so color me skeptical.
I’m not saying you wouldn’t comply; guys like me are the problem. You’d stop impugning JKB’s manhood and stop replying to Connor/Drew/Guarneri/whoever immediately.
Collective action requires both leadership and a shared goal. Democrats can’t even seem to identify a shared goal. David Hogg, a Parkland survivor who is now the DNC Vice Chair, has announced that he’s leading an effort to unseat current Democratic representatives who (he? the organization?) feels are ineffective.
Yep, there we go–that’ll show Republicans! Primary Dems! Force people in safe seats to spend money, potentially positioning people who can’t win the general. Look, I get that people are frustrated at inaction, but why why why can’t Democrats focus on winning?? Leave your safe seats alone, find people who fit the districts in swing seats you can win, and throw sand in the eyes of high profile nuts like MTG, Boebert, etc. as a fundraising tool by running candidates against them.
@Gustopher:
If only all Democrats realized that. Many still seem intent on purging heretics and de-platforming co-partisans they disagree with. The latest is the DNC vice chair promising to spend millions running primaries against Democrats.
@gVOR10:
I agree that the partisan alliance is paper-thin despite the appearance of unity. The unity is born primarily out of opposition to Democrats and fear of being primaried by not being deferential to Trump. I’ve also read many, many reports from various reporters who have talked to Republicans off-the-record about this, saying that they support Trump not because they want to but because it’s political seppuku to oppose him.
When Trump finally exits the stage, I expect GoP unity will fall completely apart.
@Steven L. Taylor:
A lot of people who benefited from something tend to resent it when others benefit from the same thing later. A great many more are against something, like unions for example, but will take any and all benefits they can from such things if at all possible.
The latter makes me very skeptical of rich people who admit, or complain, their income tax rates are too low and should be higher. Why? Because they never follow up with how many deductions and other stratagems they forego in order to bring their tax payments closer to what they say they should be.
@Matt Bernius:
This. So very much this.
Because the right is about preserving privilege, it has always opposed all forms of collective action. In order to get the unprivileged to vote against their own interests, it is necessary to engage them emotionally rather than rationally. This is accomplished by appealing to psychological aversion to disorder, and by painting protesters as un-American, foreign-backed, communists, atheists, criminals, etc. “Law and order” has always been code for status quo, but it has a strong appeal to those who fear chaos more than they hate injustice.
As a result of the success of the Republican campaign to stigmatize protest and collective action, the Democrats have pretty much abandoned their post-WW2 championing of strikes, boycotts, mass marches, sit-ins, etc. Leaving them unarmed when the battle comes to them.
Obligatory soundtrack: “It Isn’t Nice” by Malvina Reynolds.
I was doing fine ignoring for a bit. I’ll go back to that.
Another big obstacle, si that everyone has their preferred course of action, and will seldom or never join in any other.
I’ve explained what I do about trolls. I sometimes will remind, beg, demand, or request the commentariat refrain from feeding the troll. I’ve never tried to engage any, nor asked for a ban, not gotten into a flame war. At most I do my take on Rita Rudner’s naive observation that is obviously aimed without acknowledging it has anything to do with anything that’s going on (I need a shorter descriptor for that).
@DrDaveT:
Adam Smith:
I wonder how many economics departments assign this part of Adam Smith.
There was a conversation several days ago about money, power, and politics. It seems many have never read the classical liberals they claim as heroes.
ETA: sorry for the weird formatting of the quote. I pulled it from https://socserv.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/smith/wealth/wealbk01
I’m on my phone, so I didn’t feel like going through and fixing it, and neglected to use the writing tools menu.
@steve:
This is only contingently true — it requires that party loyalty supersede all other concerns. Until recently, it was not true that members of Congress would vote on strict party lines even in cases of flagrant public malfeasance, such as attempting to doctor election results and fomenting an armed insurrection against the Capitol. Had Barack Obama done such a thing, many Democrats in Congress would have voted to impeach. Had George H. W. Bush done such thing, the converse is also true. And, of course, in the case of Richard Nixon, he resigned precisely because his own Senate leadership told him that he wasn’t going to get even 25 votes, which would not have been true had the vote fallen even approximately on party lines.
The Founders could not imagine a Congress in which more than half of the members were utterly feckless. Individuals here and there, certainly, but not a majority.
BTW, how about the various failures of collective action as regards dealing with the trump pandemic, even in countries more centralized than the US? It only took place a short five million years ago, after all.
@Kurtz:
Based on my own experience, 4 econ classes, this is one of those teaching surveys of what the students of the students of the teachers who summarized what Smith wrote events. Just like Calvinism.
Then again, economics was a branch of philosophy back in Smith’s time.
@Andy:
Hogg is only primarying Democrats in safe districts. Republicans have been doing this for a long time to enforce unity. I applaud his effort to get rid of dead wood.
@Jay L Gischer:
Define success?
The “Hands Off” protests, earlier this month, took place in 1300 locations and had easily 2-3 million participants seemingly w/ very little effort. So the momentum exists.
And a meaningful opposition isn’t going to be one event. Think military-like strategized campaign.
More important is the message being delivered.
“Trump bad.” Not so much.
@Jay L Gischer:
Define success?
The “Hands Off” protests, earlier this month, took place in 1300 locations and had easily 2-3 million participants seemingly w/ very little effort. So the momentum exists.
And a meaningful opposition isn’t going to be one event. Think military-like strategized campaign.
More important is the message being delivered.
“Trump bad.” Not so much.
@just nutha:
From The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Big Business and Love the Free Market by Oreskes and Conway:
IIRC, they go into more detail later in the book about how these edited versions came to be.
There is a website that tracks the readings assigned in college classes. I haven’t looked in a while. I’m not sure if the data is granular enough to see if excerpts rather than actual whole books are assigned.
@Kurtz:
I read The Big Myth last year. I highly recommend it.
Democracies are pluralist societies in which many institutions and organisations have a certain amount of power. For democracy to survive, at least the most powerful of them have to abide by certain core norms of behavior voluntarily. Those norms have been fraying for a long time in America. Trump’s MAGA movement has openly rejected them.
Once an institution as powerful as one of the two major political parties rejects crucial elements of democracy, there is nothing anybody else can do to compel them to stop without themselves resorting to undemocratic means. For example, free speech is one of the core foundations of a democracy, but the unspoken norm of behavior is that people and institutions will engage in truthful speech. Enlightenment ideals of rational conversation will be observed. The American right decided political advantage could be gained by trashing this norm. It adopted lying as a core strategy, building an ever more imposing media network to disseminate the lies and give them credibility. The only effective responses the left could make were (1) suppressing selected speech, or (2) mounting its own similar campaign of lies in response. Either one would mean a further retreat of democratic governance. In the event the left has tended to do neither, with the result that MAGA Republicans now live in an entirely fabricated make-believe world of myths and lies, impervious to any counter-argument.
I could point to other core elements of democracy which the MAGA movement has repudiated, such as the rule of law, an independent judiciary and respect for the rights of minority groups. In each case, democratic processes provide no effective counter measures that could restore these foundations of democracy.
The end result, which of course we’ve seen play out time and again throughout modern history, is that as democracy breaks down, conflict in society increases. Individuals and institutions resort to whatever methods they can devise to advance or at least protect their interests. These conflicts get solved – if they do – by an increasingly authoritarian government using the coercive power of the state. The descent into totalitarian rule only ends with a traumatic event, usually war or rebellion, that may or may not see a people commit once again to building a democracy.
I believe America has been on an anti-democratic pathway for years. I can’t see how it can get off it. I’m glad I don’t live there, and I’m sorry the country exercises such influence over the rest of us.
@Kurtz:
Indeed. A few days ago, I mentioned Steven Brust’s commentary on Smith. This passage fascinated him, as being so distinctly at odds with the popular press depiction of what Smith taught. His only real quibble with it was that Smith understates the extent to which the powerful routinely co-opt the mechanisms of the law and its minions (regardless of what the law actually permits or forbids) to put down collusion among workers.
@Daryl: I define success as 10 to 11 million people, and doing it not on a Saturday Morning, but Monday, Tuesday, Weds, etc.
That will work. That will change things. Maybe something less will change things.
@Michael Reynolds:
So, is the standard for Democratic behavior what Republicans do?
Don’t pretend this doesn’t come with tradeoffs. Taking back the House, at least, is the most important thing in 2026, and Hogg will instead waste time, money, and energy on infighting that will not move the needle a single inch on that. And if he get turds to win the in primary, then those safe seats may not be so safe in the general. And it’s not as if those primaried representatives don’t have allies in the Democratic coalition. Are they just going to accept what Hogg is doing and play nice? How many factions in the coalition are you willing to sacrifice? Considering the results of the previous election, it seems to me that purging rather than expanding the tent is a huge mistake.
@DrDaveT:
I don’t have enough knowledge of that era to say whether Smith understates it. I’ll look into Brust.
Something Smith could not know was how it developed in the US. The Pinkertons and other private outfits formed the goon squads in addition to the influence moneyed interests exerted on law. And of course, even when the influence failed to stop particular legislation from enactment, those laws must be enforced. We know how that goes.
It is frustrating.
@Andy:
The House election is very important, though I am not at all confident it will take place. But we can’t on the one hand bemoan Democratic disunity but reject all attempts at providing some discipline. We’ll have plenty of money to spend, I’m not too worried about Hogg squandering resources. I’m worried about Trump jailing Democratic candidates, and if that happens a disciplined and energized caucus will be necessary.
In a war you do sometimes have to make the hard decisions and send your General Fredendalls home to make room for your Pattons. We have a surfeit of ancient stiffs and we need to start preparing for the future. And I have to assume that Hakeem is on-board – he’s still tight with Nancy, and if they are signing off on this, so am I.
@Michael Reynolds:
Well, then we will have to agree to disagree on this.
War is not like elections. In the former, you seek to destroy your enemy by killing and breaking things to break their will and accept your demands. In the latter, you must appeal to a diverse public to affirmatively choose your side over the other side. These are not comparable. There’s a reason Eisenhower became a successful politician while Patton and MacArthur did not.
IMO, 2026 won’t be won or lost based on safe seats contested and possibly changing hands due to co-partisan purity tests. To me, that distracts from maximizing the total Democratic advantage in the House (and potentially the Senate, although that map is much more difficult).
What Hogg is doing is dangerous, insofar as he’s taking safe seats and making them unknowns.
He’s also doing this as part of leadership.
Those two components are problematic. As far as I am aware, Republican *leadership* didn’t primary members. That has the potential to destabilize the party and that’s the last thing we need right now. And as far as primarying members in safe seats–oof. For every smart, solid, articulate candidate there will likely be two that are borderline bonkers. Maybe they’ll win–even probably they’ll win. But there’s also a chance that they won’t. I don’t worry so much about a Republican winning some of these seats, so much as a third party candidate.
Hopefully they’ve done the analysis, but I think this effort will be a distraction at best, or a waste of resources.
I got into it on Bluesky over this move by Hogg’s.
I agree for the most part with those who want to see safe blue dems primaried (giving Hogg a big benefit of doubt that he’s done his research into each district, potential challengers, and likelihood of winning), and I’m somewhat ok, in theory, with the DNC favoring a candidate in an extreme circumstance (for instance, when a die hard MAGA type runs in the primary for a congressional seat, as has happened here), though I’d like to see a process and guidelines in place to do so. What I don’t want is the DNC being led by individuals who would use their personal wealth or political war chest to favor different politicians, whether that be from an earnest idealist like Hogg or a rich prick like Bloomberg. That type of wealth-driven leadership is what we are being subjected to on a national scale, and its a recipe for disaster.
If Hogg wants to fund primary challenges in safe districts–and, again, I’m here for that–he should just step down as Vice Chair and dedicate himself whole hog(g) to it.