On Being Worse than “Literally Hitler”

As the election draws nigh the Democrats have, to no one’s surprise, dialed up the “Trump is Hitler” rhetoric to eleven. Watching their commentary is like listening to the jabberwoky of a street person ranting about chemtrails and aliens that hypnotize people through the TV. For a moment you stop and wonder if he’s the sane one, and you’ve made a grave error trusting your perception of the world. Then you shake it off and go on with your day, perhaps offering a brief benediction for the troubled soul.

This is all well worn territory by now.

But what struck me today was what it says about the Democrats if they are right. Let us grant for argument’s sake that Trump is actually a fascist holding Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden who will do all the terrible things they imagine in their nightmares. In that case the whole tragedy is on them.

They have virtually all the media, academia, Hollywood, the power of the government, the smarts of all the experts, all arrayed on their side. They hold all the cards and call all the shots. And yet they can’t convince more than half the country of the obvious truth that we are on the verge of electing a second Hitler—for a second time!

Do they not realize that in their scenario, they are Weimar Germany, a regime of such incompetence and decadence that the German people turned to a neopagan, genocidal maniac to save them?

They are deemed so untrustworthy and so unreliable that when a wolf comes prowling, we villagers just laugh and shrug and tell them there is no wolf.

They had it all, and they somehow squandered it and convinced half the country we are better off with an orange dictator than with them. Because they’re worse.

On Close Elections

As the American people increasingly become convinced that in every Presidential election the opposition party represents an existential threat to the country, one might expect to see larger and more decisive victories. And yet, there seems to be a direct relationship between the perceived direness of the election and the narrowness of the victory.

Certainly, the increasing “divisiveness” of political rhetoric, about which we hear and debate often, is part of the reason—but why? Why is the rhetoric becoming so divisive? From within the logic of each camp, the simple answer is the other side has become so radical, so extreme, so hateful, so racist, so weird—whatever the superlative demerit may be—that strident and forceful rhetoric is warranted to convince, cajole, frighten, perhaps even to inspire, the voters to do the right thing and vote for the party that will save them from the other.

Let’s step back, though, and consider the metadynamics for a moment. Imagine this thermodynamic analogy. Each political party is like a well insulated water tank, one hot, the other cold, connected by a pipe. Over time, water and heat will be exchanged between the two tanks until they reach the same temperature, until they are in thermodynamic equilibrium. The system wants to reach equilibrium. The heat transfer in this analogy is like the flip-flopping of the “moderate” voters, the undecideds, a few percentage points of which in key districts in swing states seem now to determine every election. Voters move back and forth across the permeable boundary between the two camps until both sides are in virtual equilibrium, a shift in one demographic to one side balanced out by a shift in another demographic in the opposite direction.

Considered in this way, the closeness of our elections seems inevitable, even natural. Both parties want to win, and they do not need decisive victories to win. They only need to get past 50%. They would like a decisive victory with a wide margin, but they’ll take a narrow victory if they have to. So each candidate up and down the ticket figures out how to win a few more voters without losing too many to the other side. They push and pull and focus group and trial balloon their way to eking out a victory. The parties are engaged in a kind of stochastic optimization algorithm that drives toward equilibrium.

As equilibrium is reached, it becomes harder and harder to shift large numbers of voters each election. Those stubborn and indecisive swing voters in the middle, if they were easily convinced by each party’s positions, would not be swing voters. So, each side turns up the rhetoric to try to move those voters to their side, which naturally creates a positive feedback as the other side must also dial up their own rhetoric to match pace.

But it is not just rhetoric. Politics, while largely performative, cannot be merely performative. At a certain point, politicians must back up their rhetoric with real action and real law or else the voters who liked the rhetoric will not trust the politicians to follow through. On the other hand, parties being big tents, too much real action might upset other voters in the tent, so to avoid losing too many voters, there is an incentive to only do so much as is necessary to satisfy those voters who were swayed by the rhetoric in the first place. This becomes a new vector along which the parties optimize: how to do just enough to keep voters happy and not so much that other voters are unhappy and stop being voters. This means that in their actions they are less radical than in their rhetoric, but increasingly over time they must necessarily become more and more radical in their actions as well.

Therefore, those who think the divisiveness is merely caused by rhetoric are wrong. The division is very real, and as the parties drive toward a more entrenched equilibrium, it seems likely that the country will become more divided, not less.

Tragically, although this process appears to be a natural outgrowth of two parties optimizing for victory, it is altogether unhealthy for the body politic. For a body at equilibrium is a corpse. On the other hand, as Lincoln reminded us, a house divided against itself cannot long stand.