Showing up to a knife fight with a chicken
Classes about International Relations are mostly theory. Lacking a TARDIS, or similar device, it’s impossible to run a statistically valid study on occasions when nuclear war did not break out, and contrast them against times when it did. Science can still be done; mostly by constructing elaborate models (called “games”) and seeing how they can approximate real-world conditions. All of which explains why I know how to win a game of chicken: the winning player is the one who throws away their steering wheel.
Seriously. that’s what I was taught in class. The professor was talking about nuclear conflict, telling us that if both sides knew they were both equally trigger happy (ie: neither side could move their own car), neither would let things get bad enough to press buttons. In practice, this worked- spectacularly- once (the Cold War) and failed- spectacularly- once (The Great War).
Since roughly 1980, America has been going slightly crazy. We call it the culture war; most Americans hate it. We hate it so much that in 2008, we elected a guy President on the basis of a four year old speech in which he agreed with us that he, too, hated it.
In 2008, America elected a steering wheel. Watch that speech. Barack Obama is promising to be a steering wheel. In 2010, progressives stayed home on election day. Because of that, a whole hell of a lot crazy people got in office. The Republican party took the House with a specific promise to throw away the steering wheel.
There is, in my mind, no question why the last month of American politics played out the way it did. Both sides showed up ready to do the job they were elected to do. The deal that Congress reached was the inevitable result of those dynamics.
The damnable part is that a different president couldn’t have gotten a much better deal through Congress. That’s a different post.
