It is rare that I see something that truly makes me outraged. As trendy as it is these days to raise your fist and shout at the world, that’s something I generally try to avoid. But recently, I saw something that I just cannot let fly without addressing it directly.
It’s this:
The Good
Extra Credits gets it right that modern politics (in particular, American politics) is a winner-take-all game for the independent vote. On that point, they’re spot on. Elections are indeed won on the marginal voters, exactly as they state.
Approaching political systems from a game design perspective is actually quite brilliant, and they do a good job of laying out the basic rules. Players start with a limited number of action points, and a (relatively) fixed number of victory points. The key to winning is to use your action points to grab the victory points that are in play—or to prevent your opponent from doing so.
My problem with this video isn’t with the concepts they lay out. It’s with the concepts they miss—and how those concepts completely overturn the examples that they give.
The Bad
First, they completely miss how the game board actually works. There isn’t a single game board on which both sides play. Rather, each side has their own game board, which may or may not accurately represent reality. Information shortfalls cause players to draw up an inaccurate gameboard, and thus waste action points by spending them poorly.
That’s exactly what’s wrong with the example at 7:51. President Trump didn’t win by “growing the previously tiny fear of refugees circle,” he won by recognizing that the Washington establishment was completely ignoring a large cohort of marginal voters. They didn’t even show up on the game boards. Over time, Democrats and Republicans became so far removed from their voting base that their politicking ceased to represent reality.
It all goes back to the Tea Party. Actually, it all goes back to Woodrow Wilson, with significant turning points at FDR, Social Security, Clinton, and NAFTA, but the Tea Party is a good place to start.
As our first black president, Obama was considered sacrosanct. He received a Nobel Peace Prize before he set foot in the White House, which is highly ironic considering how he went on to become the first US president to be at war every day of his presidency. But I digress. The point is, he was held above reproach. Anyone who criticized him was immediately branded as a racist. After all, how could you possibly attack our first black president??
As a side note, this is why the quip at 10:20 is so damned infuriating:
Luckily, elections aren’t the only battlefield in politics. The United States of America isn’t a “sit down and shut up, you lost” kind of democracy.
From 2008 to 2016, that’s EXACTLY the kind of democracy it was! Obama even said as much: “Elections have consequences… I won.”
Obama’s response to the Great Recession was a massive increase in government spending, and an explosion of the national debt. When the Tea Party organized to protest this, they were painted by their political enemies as racists. This scored the Democrats a cheap victory, but it also distorted their game board. By deliberately mischaracterizing the opposition, they failed to account for them and began to suffer from information shortfall.
The establishment Republicans thought they could win by playing on a game board that matched the one the Democrats were using. Normally, this is a winning strategy. When the political landscape shifts, you don’t want to be stuck playing on yesterday’s board—you want to keep up with the times.
But the Democrats had deliberately distorted their board so that it no longer represented reality. In other words, they began to believe their own lies. The more the opposition pushed back, the more they doubled down, and the more distorted the boards became.
This is where political capital comes in, and it’s something that Extra Credits completely missed. Players don’t just have action points, they also have a certain amount of political capital that acts as a sort of multiplier for their action points. This capital is basically the good will and trust built up with the other side. It takes a long, long time to gain this capital, and once it’s spent, it’s gone.
Obama spent all his political capital in his first term, mostly on the Affordable Care Act. At that point, our politics became deadlocked. Combined with the fact that his game board no longer represented reality, Obama suddenly found himself in a position where he couldn’t get anything done.
The Republicans saw this, and decided to save their political capital instead of spending it. If only they could win a few more seats—if only they could win both the House and Senate—then they could defeat the Democrats. Until then, they’d just have to play along, building their capital until the time came to spend it.
In Obama’s second term, he doubled down on identity politics, playing the race card at Ferguson. This won him some quick victory points, but it also set race relactions in the United States back almost forty years and further distorted the playing board. He also played fast and loose with foreign policy, pandering to the Iranian Mullahs, the Cuban Communists, the Japanese Imperialists, etc. The reason President Trump was able to back out of the Iran deal so easily was because Obama completely bypassed the Senate, which is the only body with the constitutional power to ratify treaties with foreign governments.
All of this combined to create a perfect storm that President Trump rode to victory in 2016. There was a massive reserve of marginal voters who hadn’t had a voice for years, and were completely unaccounted for on the Washington establishment’s game board. By playing identity politics, the Democrats had completely ignored them, and now they were desperate for a champion. That champion was Donald Trump, who—unlike the establishment Democrats and Republicans—was playing on a game board that actually represented the political reality. Furthermore, he had a massive reserve of political capital to draw on—capital that the Republicans had been hoarding for years. The Democrats had already spent all of theirs, not only with Obama, but with the DNC’s primary rigging and betrayal of Bernie Sanders. Suddenly, a bunch of the “gimmie” points slipped out of their hands.
The Ugly
And here we come to the worst part about the Extra Credits video—the part that really gets under my skin. The view of American politics that they present is so distorted by their own ideological possession that it completely lacks all self-awareness. It’s precisely this ideological dogmatism that pushed Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and will most likely push him to victory again. As someone who voted for Obama in 2008, I’ve already decided to vote for Trump in 2020.
Consider the animation. All of the political symbols are blatantly pushing left-wing causes, from the rainbow flag and the neon pink hair to the guns and the female symbols. Why not throw in a Gadsden Flag, just to round things out a bit? Even the thumbnail shows a “person of color” (I really hate that term) in liberal blue scheming against two conservative reds.
If that was all it was, though, I’d roll my eyes and ignore it. But it goes much deeper. Much, much deeper.
Consider how they define civil rights:
Civil rights is the fight for equal treatment under the law and in daily life. Sometimes it’s a defensive battle to ensure that people keep the rights they have, and sometimes it’s a proactive battle, like fighting for people who do not currently enjoy equal status.
Those are two completely separate things. The first is a negative right, the second is a positive right—or in other words, the first is a right from government overreach, the second is a right to government intervention.
The civil rights movement of the 60s was all about tearing down Jim Crow laws on the state and federal levels. These laws enforced segregation and made black second-class citizens. It was not about forcing Christian bakers to bake cakes for gay weddings. Those are two totally separate and incompatible things.
The American Revolution gave us the Bill of Rights, which is essentially a list of things the government is not allowed to do. In contrast, the French Revolution gave us the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is a list of things that the government is obligated to do. The American Revolution succeeded, while the French Revolution failed. The American Revolution gave us the most powerful and prosperous nation in the modern era, while the French Revolution gave us the guillotine, the Reign of Terror, and two centuries of catastrophic European wars.
But never mind all that. Let’s just throw out these two separate and incompatible things under the same issue banner, and paint everyone who disagrees as opposing “civil rights” entirely:
But what if you’re a conservative candidate? At first, you might look at this and think: “Yikes, barely any marginal votes and the Liberals have this circle on lock! Not even worth trying.” What if you were to spend a few action points here by, say, taking an opposing stance to a current civil rights movement, whether you do that directly by, say, supporting a bathroom bill or indirectly through dog whistle tactics? You might manage to shock the liberal majority of gimmies in that circle, who will then demand a liberal response.
What about the Overton window? The Left has been using it to gaslight conservatives and libertarians for years. Case in point, this video by Freedom Tunes:
If calling the Left on their bullshit is “dog whistle tactics,” then we aren’t even living in the same country anymore—and that’s what makes this so dangerous.
For a democracy to work, both sides need to be able to talk with each other in constructive way, where both sides genuinely hear each other. When that becomes impossible, we fall back to political tribalism, which grows like a cancer, tearing our society apart with political violence and, ultimately, civil war.
If you are so locked into your own worldview and beliefs—so entrenched in your own echo chamber—that you cannot acknowledge what the other side believes about themselves, then we’re done. The United States is over. Our republic has ceased to function. Democracy dies in darkness—not the darkness of bad journalism, but the darkness of ideological possession, which blinds us from seeing each other as we really are.
And this is why Extra Credits’ conclusion is so deeply, horribly wrong:
We are in this 24/7. Even outside the election cycle, a civil rights activist can always push whoever is in office to take action. Exactly how to go about this will probably require a few more episodes to cover.
No. That is NOT the solution. Doubling down will only make things worse—much worse. The only way out of this cycle is to genuinely listen to what the other side is saying, not to force everyone else to listen to you.
We’ve entered a very dark time in American politics, and not because President Trump is a Nazi. The fact that so many people can legitimately believe something so ridiculous is symptomatic of the underlying problem. If identity politics and political tribalism prevail, then the United States will break apart. Whether by secession, insurgency, or some other form of civil war, the American experiment will end, and we will revert back to the cycle of tyranny and chaos that has defined human history since the invention of the sword.
Guns, gold, and food storage. If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.
