Do you support Medicare-for-all?
Would you like to expand public education to include opportunities for college and trade schools?
Do you a think the US should exit the Middle East wars and shift funding towards constructing a world-class, sustainable energy grid?
If your shared goal is to implement progressive policies; we can apply game theory to determine the optimal strategy that realistically gets it done.
Lose the 2020 election in a landslide
I’m serious. The optimal strategy is to get annihilated.
In 2016, progressive voters chose the lesser-of-two-evils and voted for Hillary. We kept her competitive. The election was close, so the DNC stayed the course.
It’s four years later and Joe Biden is the nominee. History has repeated itself. From the perspective of the progressive movement, voting for the lesser-of-two-evils turned out to be a failed strategy.
It got us nowhere. Let’s not make the same mistake again.
A better strategy is not to vote for the lesser-of-two-evils.
If Trump wins the 2020 election in a humiliating landslide, the DNC will be have no viable alternative but move in a progressive direction.
Choose not to vote. Vote third party.
Game theory: The 2020 election strategy
Recall that our objective is to implement progressive policies. If that’s the goal, the two outcomes of the ‘try to lose’ column are strategically better than those in the ‘try to win’ column.
If the election is close, the DNC can-and-will justify business as usual and we can all have this same debate again in 2024. If Trump wins in a landslide, the party has no choice but to onboard progressive policy.
But orange man bad!
Yes, Trump is a terrible president.
Unfortunately, the optimal path for implementing progressive policy involves giving Trump a second term. Is Biden really a significant upgrade on what we have now?
Let’s view this from a wider perspective.
The Biden-Obama administration’s failure to implement meaningful societal change is what gave rise to the orange man. Voters expected transformational policy, but got status-quo, corporatist and neoliberal governing philosophies instead.
They reacted by electing the pigmentary opposite.
A Biden administration would rekindle all the worn Obama-era policies that brought us here. In this light, the “orange man bad” actually argues against electing Biden and makes the strongest case for restructuring the DNC.
Game theory endorses a restructure as well, further indicating that a landslide election loss is the best way to achieve it.
What about the supreme court nominations?
Let’s be honest, Biden probably won’t win this election anyway. His campaign isn’t exciting, he has difficulty speaking and there is already audible buzz about replacing him before the convention. Trump will eat him alive in the debates.
A Biden administration would appoint liberal supreme court judges; this is admittedly important. That said, between his similar policy set and low-probability-of-victory, Biden’s upside isn’t remotely interesting enough to risk another four-year progressive setback.
This is a progressive doomsday device
In the Stanley Kubrick film Dr. Strangelove, Russia builds a doomsday device that will automatically trigger global nuclear annihilation if they are attacked. The mistake they make is that they never tell anyone about it.
The doomsday device is pointless unless everyone knows about it. When everyone knows, it’s extremely powerful.
Progressives need to be crystal clear that getting pummeled in 2020 is our best strategy. The progressive movement is best served by sitting this election out, and doing it loudly.
Executed properly, a 2020 election post-mortem won’t even be necessary.
Read more about how the progressive movement needs to rebrand itself.
Note: You still need to go to the polls. Down-ballot candidates need our support.
