Racing to the Bottom
Power, Competition, and Deterrence in American Politics
First Civil Act of the Republic of Athens, Pierre Michel Alix, c. 1799–1804
It is often comforting to believe that political competition is not an existential struggle for the fate of one’s political faction. The more intense a political competition grows, however, the greater the incentive becomes to use the awesome power of the State to permanently destroy one’s adversaries.
When political parties are constrained to the same ideological1 structure, there is a lower cost to defeat. While you may disagree on the course that the Ship of State will take—you are not attempting to create a different ship entirely. The existence of an opposition party does not endanger in any way the core set of assumptions that you have about who you are.
It is the difference between political disagreements and an enemy whose defeat you are seeking.
To be clear here—I’m not making some kind of judgement over who is right or wrong. It’s irrelevant to the question of hand. It’s a matter of how one’s perception drives decision-making, and how reciprocal actions drive responses.
If you believe that stakes are existential, you will behave in a manner that reflects that—and your adversary will do the same. Even if there was no intent from one party to do so, the perception that an act is aimed at the defeat of another will be treated as such.
I tend to believe our politics can be viewed through the lens of escalating retaliatory actions aimed at deterring political adversaries from using tools at their disposal to harm their adversaries.
We spend quite a lot of time lately debating the merits of ideas around legally pursuing political opponents, eliminating various government departments, or engaging in hyperpartisan gerrymandering.
I see these actions as having the function of operating by a rational calculus that confers advantage over domestic enemies.
It is—at least for this2—irrelevant to me if Trump did anything worth being arrested for. It matters only that he perceived the attack on him as being a partisan political move towards weakening a political foe.
You can think of it as akin to the concept of deterrence in international affairs. If you allow what is perceived as an attack on your person to pass without challenge, you’re opening up further movements against you.
You need to respond in kind (or escalate) to adequately return to the status quo ante—namely, that your political opponents cannot use legal means to deprive you of power.
Likewise, you can see Trump’s attacks on the media, universities, judiciary, institutions, or law firms in a similar light. It’s not so much a question of whether any of this is accurate in any sort of objective sense as it’s a question of if the MAGA movement believes it to be true.
These institutions, if you sincerely believe they’re an arm of liberalism, are being used as a tool to attack you. It’s in your rational self-interest to impose costs on them to protect yourself. Failure to impose sufficient harm on those adversaries serves to signal your weakness and will only further embolden them.3
It is, of course, also true in this scenario that with fundamentally irreconcilable ideological beliefs, your adversaries will perceive any of these actions as being existential threats to them. Especially so when you control the levers of power and they do not.
Trust, in such circumstances, is fairly difficult to come by. What would usually be seen as normal politics can in the course of events quickly be seen as moves being made to destroy the other.
In this situation, your adversary almost certainly has to raise the costs against you for threatening them. When you have the State behind you, the costs of their being unable to reassume power can potentially amount to never being able to hold power again.
Moreover, once this process is underway, there is very little that can function as a break to arrest a descent into competition towards an absolute end. It either requires the establishment of credible deterrence, for one side to straightforwardly win the contest, or for the opposing parties to decide to unilaterally disarm and step back from the ledge.
However, unilaterally disarming when you have an entirely different ideological framework is essentially impossible. If you take a step back, you’re operating in an uncertain terrain wherein your adversary may just press their advantage and use your weakness to establish their ideological vision. You might just lose permanently by ceding ground.
It is part of the reason that we used to have norms and guardrails surrounding our politics.
In the absence of those norms, the structural logic of obtaining an advantage over one’s adversary will probably only drive further escalation over the next three years. Nobody is going to disarm, and nobody will win this contest in the final sense.
Thankfully, we live in a democratic society. When there are elections, and a legitimate pathway towards regaining power through the assent of the electorate, deterrence is a credible option.
Any action taken by a party in power is never the final act taken until voting becomes an impossibility. You can at least keep raising the costs to keep the worse abuses at bay.
Yeah, I’m citing myself. Sue me.
For the record, his criminal charges were completely legitimate. I just don’t think legitimacy has anything to do with the political calculus currently driving events.
Regardless of how conspiratorial any of that would sound—it only matters that the person perceives it to be true for their decision-making.