To create More and Better Democrats means to increase cooperation. Punishing cooperation, even among themselves, is the declared Republican mission. The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod, says they lose, and recommends strategies to make it happen faster. What we want to know, of course, is when and how they lose, and how those strategies speed things up.
Well, they lose this year, faster and faster as we come together, and as they shoot each other in all of their feet.
Grokking Republicans: The Non-Cooperator's Dilemma
I wrote up the theory of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, and its applications to a variety of problems, at some length six years ago. I am not going to repeat all of that. You should definitely have a look. Suffice it to say, today, that theory and experiment and social history all tell us that cooperation is one of the most powerful forces in the world, when tempered with a moderate amount of non-cooperation, aka defection, with the non-cooperators.
The most successful Prisoner's Dilemma strategy, Tit For Tat (TFT), begins by cooperating, and then defects once in response to every defection by an opponent. A modest number of players running Tit For Tat can hold their own against much larger numbers playing all sorts of other strategies that try to get away with something. At some fraction of the population, the TFTers actually win and take over.
Examples:
- The survival of Jews and Judaism in the face of millennia of persecution
- The survival of Roma ("Gypsies") in Europe, including their language and culture, for a millennium since their ancestors left India.
- The radical transformation of business practices under the influence of the Society of Friends ("Quakers")
- The slow but inexorable advances in human rights for the formerly enslaved and their descendants; Asians (once the "teeming hordes" and the "Yellow Peril"; Latinos; women; Native Americans; LGBTQs; teachers of science; workers; and many other groups.