Two individuals sit in separate interrogation rooms. Accused of a crime together, each prisoner has an option: lie and protect the other or implicate their partner and walk away. The problem, though, is that if one person protects and the other turns their partner in, the protector gets punished for doing the “right thing.”
This is the prisoner’s dilemma. It is also a solid metaphor for the current Democratic agenda.
I was reminded of this thought experiment when Associate Justice Stephen Breyer announced his forthcoming retirement. Now, everyone remembers President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the bench. This is a brilliant step toward transforming the Supreme Court into a more representative crew –– but this is Biden’s pick. And I mean “Biden” in the pejorative sense, the same way people use it when talking about his unrealized promise for a pathway to citizenship and lie about canceling student debt.
A list of his potential nominees reportedly includes Justice Leondra Kruger, an associate justice on the California Supreme Court. She’s described as the court’s swing vote from left to conservative. Notably, she’s been part of several majorities that upheld the death penalty. A Black woman on the court is revolutionary, but don’t celebrate too early. Remember Breyer, a usually moderate justice whose progressive decisions came as surprises, could be replaced by someone ideologically identical.
The prisoner’s dilemma unfolds when one focuses on the fact that this replacement only maintains a three-to-six minority in a conservative court. Celebrations over a symbolic change that will maintain but not improve a sputtering left agenda is par for the course of the Democratic Party. Of course, to make the dilemma metaphor work, I do have to reduce “the left” into its dominant stream of power: moderate bullies like Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
The leftist institution is the prisoner in the room, protecting the partner, while the Republican partner rats on them at every available chance.
As Republicans remove voting rights protections to maintain their majorities for decades to come, Biden’s statement that “if we miss the first time, we can come back and try a second time” on his voting rights bills is not too convincing. Satirical headlines like “Democrats plan even more strongly-worded letter asking Trump to follow the rules please” may have been funny in 2019, but the joke is getting old now.
Late last year, Democrats joined with election reformers to place redistricting power in the hands of nonpartisan commissions. It would be a relinquishing of power “in the name of good government.” But in this case, “good government” merely expands Republican potential. States like Colorado, a Democratic stronghold, are now at risk of losing their house majority. At the same time, Republicans in Texas, Arizona and other states blocked legislation that would create nonpartisan commissions.
I don’t advocate for Democrats to gerrymander each state into decades of voting security to hold as bargaining chips. One thing, though, is clear: At this rate, the prisoner’s dilemma our democracy is in only means jail time for the Democrats. Statistics agree. Democrats are projected to lose in 2022 and 2024. They are not sure how long it will be until they can win if they lose those two.
It is hard to advocate for Democrats to stop playing by the rules when the party’s own members refuse to do so. Bought off faux-leftists like Manchin and Sinema have made sure of that. And it is exhausting to hear celebrations over a new member of the Supreme Court when we are unwilling to expand the court to foster a progressive, representative majority. It is even harder to do so when political experts and other democracies forecast a collapse of the nation’s democracy in a few years.
Playing by the rules while your opponent is rewriting the rules against you is a flawed strategy. Protecting the fellow prisoner, when they greedily defect at every chance, is futile.
