Too many games and too many game metaphors in our politics

By BILL CHAISSON
In the most recent mid-term election we were once again subjected to politics presented as a competitive game. And since the election government officials in many states have been playing political games within the government, trying to limit the power of incoming elected officials. While in office some elected officials have tried to rig the rules of the game with gerrymandering and by complicating the act of voting. Politics, which once involved at least some political philosophy, now seems to be primarily a brutal game. Government, which was set up to administrate commerce and to protect rights and borders, is now a political arena wherein two camps take sides with respect to moral issues and the regulation of business.

American society is obsessed with games and the language and perspective of game playing. In virtually all games the idea is that one player will win and the other will lose. Games are abstractions or representations of various human activities that pit opponents against each other. Games about war or business take the inherently competitive nature of these human cultural behaviors and put them on a board. Other games impose competition on knowledge of trivia or powers of recollection. Sports are games of physicality. There are team sports, which are often spoken of using the metaphors of war, and individual sports, where people compete with each other or against a clock, pushing the limits of human ability.

One of the many problems with treating everything as a game is that people cheat at games in order to win. Sports are games, but they are now also a very big business. If you win, you end up with more money. Early 20th century journalist Grantland Rice famously wrote “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” This gentlemanly approach was superseded in the 1950s by the philosophy of UCLA football coach Red Sanders, who said “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” By the 1960s Vince Lombardi was telling us that winning should become a habit.

At the recent passing of George H.W. Bush many noted his decency, his manners and sense of decorum. The elder Bush was very much in the patrician mold of Grantland Rice. But it was during his presidency that Newt Gingrich and his followers changed the rules of the game. Bush reversed a campaign promise not to raise taxes and sided with Democrats to do so. The president was thinking like a government official rather than an ideologue; he didn’t feel the need to win, but instead chose to do what he thought was right for the country. The younger Republicans publicly castigated him for compromising, even though compromise is an essential part of democratic government. Instead they led a “Republican revolution,” choosing to shut down the government when they did not get their way.

Over the last 25 years this kind of gamesmanship has become pervasive in our society. People now choose sides in every issue and refuse to listen to opposing views. The media has become balkanized into ostensibly left- and right-leaning sources, so we are now free to choose to listen to ideology instead of information. It is now permissible to feel about your political party the same way you feel about your favorite sports team: you always want them to win and you will hear nothing negative said about them.

But when your team runs the government, you have not won the right to carry out your team’s agenda and none other. Democracy is not “winner take all.” Not even sports work like that. In many sports the side that wins a particular stage of the game is given or retains certain advantages — keeping the serve in tennis, getting an inside lane in car racing — but the players don’t get to change the rules of the game. But we have watched as businessmen have changed the rules of professional sports to suit their agenda, so why not do it in government?

Does the ubiquity of video gaming contribute to this mentality? Do the hours that people spend trying to win in some virtual reality carry over into how they see the real world? And in so many of these video experiences the “game” is war. In the dim and distant past there was a video product called Sim City; the organizing metaphor was economic development. You made decisions that caused your city to become a sustainable place. There were many sequels, but they are outnumbered by games where the sole object is to come out on top.

There are signs that this trend may be at an end. In the 2016 election, Sullivan County, which voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, went with Trump in 2016. It was one of many “pivot districts” across the country. And more recently in the 2018 mid-term several incumbents — both Republicans and Democrats — were unseated, a sign that voters were casting about for change, any change. Last month people pivoted yet again, electing Democrats in several districts that had voted in a Republican president two years earlier. Now we have a “divided government” and there are fears it will simply lead to gridlock. Now that one team does not entirely “control the field” perhaps there will be endless “time outs” and “player-coach conferences,” anything to delay what has come to be thought of as the game of governing. And meanwhile we will wait for the highways to be repaired, for privacy laws to catch up with reality, for telecommunication regulations to figure out the internet, and endless other projects that are at present hostages in a game that looks a lot like war.

 

Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times, and a Monday morning quarterback every day of the week.