From the always impressive James Howard Kunstler, comes an eloquent synopsis of the misgivings many people have about the presidential election campaign. No Confidence?
CNN is frantically advertising a set of “live” debates between the presidential candidates this week — Democrats Sunday and Republicans Tuesday, with loads of “color commentary” before and after. This big media show is being staged in New Hampshire, whose once-significant early primary election has been reduced — like so much else in our national life — to merely symbolic status now that fifteen other states have crammed theirs into the super-duper primary day of February 5, 2008. Since I believe that a collective unconscious operates among groups at all levels of the social hierarchy, including the national level, this extraordinarily early staged contest says a lot about how insecure we must be about our leadership, about our place in the world, and about where we are headed.
US election campaign periods have never been regulated in terms of a set number of weeks or months, the way some other nations do. But the 2008 US election is the first in my lifetime that ramped up to such an intense and formal level of activity so far in advance. If nothing else, the amount of money that the candidates need to raise — and burn through in airplane charters, staff salaries, and staged events — puts them all in jeopardy of corrupting themselves to the various donors desperate to preserve their prerogatives under the status quo.
What everybody seems to sense semi-consciously is that the status quo is dragging the US into an abyss.
More after the jump
I'm not sure I share fully Mr. Kunstler's level of pessimism with regard to the process that seems to have unfolded and produced a rather strange new elections process. But I do share his sense that is is quite wrong. This rush by states to shove themselves to the front of the primary process is based upon deeply flawed thinking. Individually they are using the rationale that they don't want their states influence to be diminished and thus want to move to the “important” early stages. Collectively, once everyone is “early” then everyone's influence is diminished.
This the the classic Prisoner's Dilemma.
Two suspects, A and B, are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both stay silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a two-year sentence. Each prisoner must make the choice of whether to betray the other or to remain silent. However, neither prisoner knows for sure what choice the other prisoner will make. So this dilemma poses the question: How should the prisoners act?
The dilemma arises when one assumes that both prisoners only care about minimizing their own jail terms. Each prisoner has two options: to cooperate with his accomplice and stay quiet, or to defect from their implied pact and betray his accomplice in return for a lighter sentence. The outcome of each choice depends on the choice of the accomplice, but each prisoner must choose without knowing what his accomplice has chosen to do.
In deciding what to do in strategic situations, it is normally important to predict what others will do. This is not the case here. If you knew the other prisoner would stay silent, your best move is to betray as you then walk free instead of receiving the minor sentence. If you knew the other prisoner would betray, your best move is still to betray, as you receive a lesser sentence than by silence. Betraying is a dominant strategy.
But we aren't in a prisoner's dilemma situation. Everyone knows what's going on and there is pretty high transparency. Not just about the election but about all the hard issues facing our nation. But, it seems everyone continues to maintain the strategy of Always Betray.
I think this election campaign is going to end badly. No one can hope to emerge from the two-year long slog through the morass of opposition research and media scab-picking with anything resembling the political legitimacy required to lead our fractured and fractious nation in the coming years.