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About a year ago I correctly predicted the outcome of the “Arab Spring.” Pats on the back for me. Now the Syrian state is on the ropes, and we’re all wondering: when will it fall? We can use the same tools as earlier to answer that question. Also, I can use the word “whither” in a headline which, let’s face it, I never get to do. So, let’s get to it!

When the Arab Spring initially broke out, I predicted that Syria would fail to fall based upon strong group identification by its citizens as “Syrian”; the fairly recent record of military success in Lebanon; and the “liberalization” policies Bashar Assad[^1] put in place early in his regime. But it’s been a year, and it’s worth revisiting and seeing where we stand here.

Decision Chain

Our first stop is this (sadly low-quality scan, sorry!) diagram that looks at the overall process in an individual’s choice to join a revolution.

Walking through this in the context of Syria reveals changes in the last year. Of course, at the first level, citizens of Arab countries can now see truly how deprived they are, thanks to outlets like Al Jazeera that show them the opulence of the Gulf states and the everyday life of people elsewhere; but what’s changed is the context of joining in the revolution.

And the #1 Mistake Our Audience Voted That Dictators Make Is…

Especially in the wake of the Arab Spring — although, indeed, ever since his accession to power — Bashar Assad has pursued policies to “consolidate” his power[^2]. The problem with power consolidation in any political system is representativeness. A military dictatorship may not seem like a representative government, but the reality is that every government represents some group of people; it’s just that, with a democratic form of government, that group is much, much wider.

So dictatorships are never just arbitrary implementors of the will of one person without any regard to the needs of others; it’s simply that the dictator doesn’t have to feel the need to express will and desire in terms of society, broadly.[^3] However, in order to take power initially, the dictator does need a pretty large direct support base — enough to exert either military or moral force, or some combination of the two, in sufficient quantity to defeat opposition. That means that the initial policies of the dictator need to represent the will and desires of some good-sized chunk of society.

In Assad’s case, his father came to power with a core group of supporters from the same religion and region, but also broader support within the military and broad swaths of the Syrian power elite. When people talk of Bashar Assad “consolidating his power,” they always talk about how he’s increased the power of individuals who share his religion and region. But empowering one ingroup means creating a new outgroup, and, in this case, the new outgroup is made up of the former regime supporters who just didn’t match the right ethno-religious profile. That’s worth saying again: the regime has supposedly increased its power by shrinking the circle of individuals it represents and who can expect positive outcomes from that regime.

So are the new power centers more reliable and less likely to ever break with Assad? Sure. But the old groups who were marginally in power and now in the outgroup? They’re entirely sure to break with Assad, because the regime is no longer representative of their wills and desires. The return they might get on investing in the long-term stability of the Syrian government is sure to be zero.

Revolution or Not?

The next diagram looks at individual vs. group orientation and how the way groups express their perception of the world.

It’s interesting to think about this in the pre-Arab Spring context and in the current situation for the new outgroup member described above. Pre-Arab Spring, the group context was pan-Arab, and the injustice frame involved blaming Israel. Power Discontent was steered towards acts of terrorism against Israel, and occasional wars.

Now we clearly have groups within Syria that have been able to attract the affiliation of a wide variety of individuals, individuals who have taken up arms against the Syrian state. So, in this case, we can easily work backwards and see that these groups have been able to walk their members through each of the steps above. For the individuals “consolidated” out of power, we have a new injustice frame that never existed before; discontent with power that they couldn’t have had before because they had access to that power; and a collective orientation forced on the individual by the rationale behind power consolidation. (The only question is: where did these anti-regime groups come from in the first place?)

Violent or Not?

The flip side of the Pan-Arabist strategy pursued by Syria for so long is that they ensured that any discontent would go down the extrapunitive path. With power consolidation blocking all opportunities, a violent uprising is guaranteed.

In this case, Assad has decreased his options with his power consolidation — he’s removed his options to create open opportunities for individuals to effect change within society.

Now: will Syria fall?

This is the tough question. As we saw from Saddam Hussein-era Iraq, clearly a consolidated state can survive for years after it would appear to be ready to fall. In the case of Iraq, our aggressive sanctions probably paradoxically strengthened the group identification of Iraqis as Iraqis, which short-circuits the whole “group challenges legitimizing frame of status quo” thing.

So then the question is: will we do something like this for Syria? The good news is that, to the extent the Arab League takes the lead, all that work that the Syrian regime did to make Syrians identify with a pan-Arab community should prevent an Iraq-style regime hardening. If things really start looking up in Libya and Egypt, then broader swathes of the Syrian polity may start perceiving relative deprivation vis-a-vis other, similar Arabs.

But that’s a lot of ifs. On the flip side of all of those, Assad has the firepower to put down the rebels, and we probably can’t deliver enough counter-firepower to make a difference in any brief period of time, short of actual airstrikes. So time is against the groups rebelling against the regime. If Assad can beat these groups and then de-consolidate under the banner of complying with Arab League instructions — and the former certainly seems likely — then he has the opportunity to liberalize slightly and create a quasi-one-party democratic state, under the protection of the military; really, an Egypt-style outcome.

Ironic, huh?

[^1] Hey, compared to what was there before, “liberal” isn’t a hard moniker to earn.

[^2] In fact, for the first couple of years after he took over, I believe it was mandatory to mention power consolidation in every article about him.

[^3] Although one does see dictators, such as Pinochet in Chile or Franco in Spain, who have broad support and represent the will of some substantial plurality of the populace.

The death of Trayvon Martin is probably one of those things that will be hashed and rehashed for generations. It’s sad all around, but one thing that’s not come up is that George Zimmerman went out with a tool that’s good for only one thing: killing someone:

Guns, Hey, Good God Y’all, What Are They Good For?

This isn’t your standard liberal “let’s take away all the guns!” post. I’m prepared to agree that the possession of a firearm has value as a political statement, and that, further, it’s important that we live in a world in which the government knows it’s dependent on the non-guaranteed assent of its citizens. (Although: good luck taking on the US military with your handgun!) Second Amendment? Whether it means we should have guns in the closet or a people in arms or just a shotgun here and there to protect against Indian raids, it’s an important part of our Constitution.

But there’s a difference between guns as a political statement and guns as something you carry around on a day-to-day basis. Face it: a gun has one mode of operation, and that’s to propel a small piece of metal into something at a very high rate of speed. There’s no stun mode, shoot-to-wound is only a myth, and the value of a gun as a threat only lies in its potential use to kill. So, when Zimmerman went out, he went out with a tool designed specifically and only to kill. He might not have planned to kill that day, but that strikes me more as a misunderstanding of the tool than anything else.

The Soft Bigotry of Not Packing

Now, Trayvon didn’t have a gun. Which apparently means that he wasn’t, in the legal sense, standing his ground: Zimmerman was. But a reasonable interpretation of events seems to me to be that Trayvon felt threatened, turned to confront his assailant — I presume that he had no legal requirement to avoid the conflict — and the two ended up in a physical altercation. Perhaps Trayvon went for Zimmerman’s gun and Zimmerman shot him. Apparently, because Zimmerman was packing, he was defending himself: Trayvon was the attacker.

This comes back to the issue of the purpose of a gun: in this altercation there was a tool that had no purpose but to kill. If Trayvon knew that there was a gun there, then he of course went for it, because he knew there could be no purpose to it but to kill him. If Trayvon went for the gun, Zimmerman had to shoot him, because there could be no purpose to Trayvon taking the weapon but to kill Zimmerman. Someone was ending up dead.

(Although I suppose there’s an argument for everyone having a gun in this conflict: perhaps if Trayvon had drawn down, there would’ve been a stand-off and the police would’ve arrived in time for everyone to live. Perhaps there’s an issue in the disparity of force that itself drove the situation.)

So Whose Fault Was It?

Being a good liberal, I probably sound like I’m blaming Zimmerman here; but really I’m not. It’s common to think that carrying a gun adds to security, but really all it does is give you a threat, and then one additional level of response that really you must use if you’re called on that threat. Most people don’t appreciate that part of the reality.

No, what I think we have here is a poor man — probably mentally ill, actually, based on the descriptions I’ve read of him — who tried to find some level of authority and meaning in that threat and promise of security that a gun can provide; and a second poor boy who perceived that threat and responded aggressively.

Why I Sympathize With Trayvon

Sure, I sympathize because I used to live in a bad neighborhood and I’d walk to the Jack in the Box at midnight wearing my USC hoodie. We all look scary in hoodies, I guess. But more than that I sympathize because I’ve been confronted with force before (although not a gun pointed at me) and I’ve responded with aggression myself, pretty consistently, and I can see myself attacking a guy with a gun who threatened me. I’d perceive that as my best self-defense, and I’m pretty sure that everyone reading this would, if I did defend myself this way, compliment me for having stood up to the other guy. I mean, it’s the modern ethos of self-reliance and self-defense, right?

So there’s the thing: if you pointed a gun at me, I’d try to take it away from you. (And I know how.) And then you’d have to shoot me, because otherwise I’d shoot you. That’s why I sympathize with Trayvon: he didn’t start the situation, but he responded the way I think I would have, and he paid with his life because someone else had chosen beforehand, for no good reason, to bring a tool to the tussle that required someone die once combat ensued.

So What’s the Solution?

To not carry a gun around, silly. I’m not saying don’t own a gun, just don’t carry it around unless you intend to shoot someone with it. That’s a simple rule, no? You can’t really threaten with a gun unless you intend to use it, and you shouldn’t intend to use it unless in self-defense, and almost nobody is going to walk down the street and be able to effectively use a firearm against an attacker. (That mugger will have a gun to your head before you can draw down.) 

So don’t carry a gun. And, if for some reason you do, take responsibility for whatever it is you do with that gun. Make sure that shooting the person you shoot is important enough that the consequences are worth it.

In the abstract, I’m all for going against the Lord’s Resistance Army; they seem to be really, really bad people who should be dead or maybe in prison.

But, in reality, I’m not sure what we hope to achieve by getting involved in there. It’s not that we can’t kill LRA members; it’s that the Ugandans already did a good job of that, destroying their military capability and driving them into Congo. The problem seems to me to be that, now that they’re in the stateless east of Congo, the tiny (250 men?) LRA is guaranteed endless space to retreat into and to be generally strong enough to annihilate any small village.

All that adds up to: what does having, or not having, Americans achieve in all of this? I can’t imagine we’d help the Ugandans, Rwandans, or Congolese at junglecraft; that’s why I look to you, my intrepid readers, to explain to me what the larger geopolitical picture I’m missing is.

This is what bothers me about Obamacare’s individual mandate probably being struck down by SCOTUS in their next session:

Obamacare is a plan in which privately-practicing physicians treat patients who privately select them, in a privately-owned environment, for which they are privately paid, by insurance which these patients have privately bought.

I believe in the power of the government to do great things that we are incapable of doing individually. But I also believe that the market can inspire us to do creative, revolutionary things. I can also see the evidence that healthcare systems with large private components – France, Switzerland, Singapore – seem to return great results at moderate costs. While the idea of a mandate to purchase a product makes me philosophically uncomfortable, the result seems just what I’m looking for – and meaningfully about certain kinds of personal freedom and business competitiveness too.

But we’re not getting that system. And that means that we’ll continue with this current set-up that costs a ton, delivers only-okay results, reduces personal freedom, and imposes vast costs that bankrupt individuals and corporations, holding back our national competitiveness.

That, obviously, can’t stand. But get rid of a couple of those “privates” in my second para and the rest are untenable and irrelevant. And that means, with market-oriented solutions like Obamacare and Hillarycare off the table, we’re headed for the thing the right fears most: British-style state-owned and -operated healthcare.

Oh well, at least it delivers fairly good results at an extremely low cost.

But this is what bothers me about our conservatives: by offering no solution except what we have now, they’re limiting the paths future solutions can take, while opening no new directions. They’re like Russian boyars, resisting the end of the czar’s rule and theor own social privilege, dooming themselves to an end in front of a Red firing squad, unlike the landed gentry of Britain, giving up their traditional perquisites and power in return for Empire.

Seems like every day, I hear “Obama did this” or “Boehner said that” or “Polls show the other thing.” So nobody can seem to agree about the debt ceiling. Meh; I’m not worried. See, I’ve learned an important lesson in life: don’t worry about the things that are going to happen for sure, no matter how bad they are. And we’re going to default on our debt for sure, no matter how bad an idea that is.

Now, clearly Wall Street disagrees with this assessment; and, despite the clear evidence that markets are not always rational, I do tend to think that the stock market knows a few things. In this case, I think they know too much: they know how bad it will really be for the economy if we default on our debt. But our pending default has much more to do with the dynamics of negotiation than it does with the economy. Let’s break it down.

How Negotiation Works

Here’s how a simple two-party negotiation works. Both parties live in a world of facts:

Based upon those facts, the two parties have separate opinions and positions:

There’s an area of intersection of those opinions and positions:

And the resolution lies somewhere in that area. It may move back and forth; it may be on the edge of one party’s acceptable opinions and positions; but that’s where you’ll almost always find the resolution.

Of course, sometimes there’s no overlap in opinions and positions:

In these cases, there’s really no room for an agreement.

When parties fail to reach an agreement, both are stuck with what the pros call their BATNA — their Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement. In other words, they agree to disagree, and they both end up with whatever consequences they’ve prepared for themselves. Based on their failure to agree, the world of facts changes, and they live in a new environment:

Perhaps that environment leads to overlap in opinions and positions; perhaps not. Since these are imaginary people, we don’t care. Let’s move on to real people.

Where We Are

Now, right now, it appears to many that the problem that we have is that the GOP and the Democrats don’t have an overlap in opinions and positions:

However, the problem is actually much more serious than that: they don’t have an overlap in facts at all:

In this case, you can’t move the two circles of opinion to overlap, because you can’t move either out of its enclosing square of facts, and those don’t overlap at all. You’re stuck with a negotiation in which you’re horse-trading facts — “I’ll agree that the sky is green, if you’ll give me that grass is orange” — and that just leaves all the negotiators furious and their supporters feeling betrayed if an agreement is made.

Not only that, but the two sides BATNAs are also unrelated. If no agreement is reached, here’s what the two sides think will happen:

Not only not only that, but there’s a whole separate set of political facts perceived by each side, and those create substantial upsides in both parties’ BATNAs:

I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked to hear that I don’t see any overlap in each side’s perception of the political facts on the ground, any more than I see overlap in their perception of economic facts on the ground.

How to Solve Our Problem

Shoot the bastards. Ha! Just kidding. Well, sort of not. Shooting the bastards is how, historically, most of these disagreements about locus of power in Presidential systems actually have turned out. But I don’t mean that on the small scale; generally, these kinds of situations either resolve themselves by one party massively overplaying its hand and losing power, or by the two parties shooting it out at some length. The fun historical note is that the party that overplays its hand usually is empowered and unified by the experience and becomes a much more potent extra-governmental force. Usually with guns. Yeah, you knew I was going there.

No, there’s really no solution to this particular problem. Fortunately, this particular problem is only a consequence of another problem, one we’ve been struggling with meaningfully since 1980. Fundamentally, we’re not disagreeing on what to do about the economy; we’re disagreeing about what it means to be elected.

This is the source of our problem. The voters put in Obama as the executive. They also, more recently, put the Democrats in charge of the Senate. At the same time, they put the GOP in charge of the House. Question: whose agenda gets advanced given this split system?

Well, in the past, our electorate seems to have split majorities in the houses and holding of the Presidency in order to minimize the risk that radical policies get followed. This resulted in nobody doing anything too crazy, but it also meant that nothing happened on real issues like healthcare and tax reform. At Microsoft, they have this term “Strategy Tax” — that is, any strategy levies “taxes” on subsidiary or marginal activities, keeping these from being all they can be in the name of the larger strategy. I also say there’s such a thing as a “Lack of Strategy Tax” — that, as you delay making decisions about a difficult questions, your possible responses become more and more limited, until you’re stuck with only responses you considered non-optimal or even unacceptable earlier. In effect, your past you levied a tax on your future you by not making a decision.

And that’s the problem with the path we followed through the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s: we didn’t do anything too radical, but we levied a lack of strategy tax on our future selves, in things like healthcare; taxation; the responsibilities of government; how to grow jobs; social mobility; education; and more. And now we can see that those taxes have either come due, or are about to come due. Yet, by doing nothing, we’ve left ourselves only a set of edge responses.

And that’s the fundamental source of our problem. Our solutions are all a bit crazy, at least compared to what we’ve generally agreed to in the past (at least during quieter times). That means that someone needs to take the reins and either lead or pull us to the uncomfortable truth of what we do next.

Except here we went and split our government, and now nobody is clearly in charge. Did we elect the GOP and their crazy answers when we put them in charge of the House? Did we elect the Democrats and their crazy answers when we left them the Senate? Did we put Obama in charge of it all when we elected him back in ‘08? That’s the discussion we need to have. And, if we can have it in the next week or so, then we’ll resolve the situation. However, most countries that have this discussion without shooting at each other (or, without shooting at each other much) take months to years to resolve this situation.

And that’s why I’m not worried about the debt ceiling talks. No way are we going to resolve the underlying problem; no way are we going to come to agreement on proximal problems; nope, we’re going to default for sure. I might as well worry about Tuesday following Monday. Nope, the only thing I plan to worry about is: what do I want to make for my Debt Default party? Who’s on the invite list? I think that Court and I have a great deal of overlap in both our circles and our squares as we negotiate those out.