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.
