Is politics a game?
Brian Weatherson and Eric Schliesser’s respective discussions of how “we” relate to our political counterparts has me rethinking the question of whether democratic politics is best modeled as a game.¹ I agree with Weatherson that being principled in one’s promotion and defense of the genuinely good is more important than being principled in general. This is a familiar point to anyone who’s considered the status of loyalty as a virtue.
Schliesser argues in his piece that Weatherson implicitly makes use of Chantal Mouffe’s distinction between political enemies and political opponents or adversaries. One’s enemies are those who work towards ends one can’t endorse and one’s opponents are merely those who work towards ends one doesn’t endorse (but could).
Schliesser goes on to make a case that democracy will be fragile (by which I take him to mean “unstable”) unless it assumes a certain relations among citizens between citizens and their democratic representatives. I’m less interested in that question than I am in the more general question of whether the framing of democracies as composed of citizens in adversarial relationships is the best way to model politics. I don’t think so for two reasons.
First, consider a game of chess. I can admire my opponents skill at the game of chess while simultaneously being unable to endorse their end. Assuming the normal rules of chess, their end is beating me in the game (or at least, to not lose to me) and my end is exactly the opposite! I admire their skill at the game which is, I suspect, the way in which most liberal politicians and pundits admired McCain.
In a game, my opponents are my enemies. The distinction collapses. There’s no way to understand ends I fail to endorse but nevertheless could, because the way ends are established and states of affairs are evaluated has collapsed to a single dimension. Of course, not all games are like this but even games with multiple winning conditions still have a single end: to win.
Human lives and social relations obviously are not games, but capitalist economies have a tendency to collapse our ends in a similar way. All the ends we happen to have are attenuated into a single dimension (capital accumulation) because the only means available to realize those ends is likewise winnowed down to capital.
Second, modeling politics as a game between agents with ends only some of which are compatible with one another mistakes the pieces for the players. If politics is a game, it isn’t being played out by individual actors with competing ends. Individuals and capital are the pieces of the game.
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1) I say “we” because while both Weatherson and Schliesser talk about the praise heaped on John McCain but the overwhelming majority of this praise is by members of McCain’s own class: pundits and other politicians.
Photo by Charlie Solorzano on Unsplash