We humans love our metaphors. We think of political struggle in terms of waging wars and fighting battles. We think in terms of games like poker or chess. In particular, we hold chess in high esteem. We use terms like "11-dimensional chess" to show forward thinking, a plan for every contingency, reacting to any possible move the opponent might make.
But our opponents are playing a very different game, whether they (or we) know it or not. And because they're playing this very different game, they are winning. And until we start playing the game, they will continue to win.
Follow me over the 11-dimensional knight's move to find out what that game is, and how we can learn to play it.
As many, if not most, of us know, the object of chess is to put one enemy piece – the king – into a position where he cannot avoid capture (known as "checkmate"). The other pieces on the board are subordinate to this, and if you have to lose your queen (the most powerful piece on the board in terms of movement and capture) in order to avoid checkmate, you do it or you lose the game. Similarly, if you can checkmate the enemy king by sacrificing all but one or two of your pieces that will deliver the fatal blow, you do so without hesitation.
It's like a military battle where there is a strategically important piece of ground, and the object is either to capture or defend that particular objective, expending whatever resources and manpower necessary in order to do so. This makes those objectives very important.
We often tend to focus on particular objectives in politics. The Presidency, for instance, is one of those objectives, and of course it's very important to either capture or defend the Presidency. If nothing else, for the ability to nominate Supreme Court justices.
There's another game that we can use as a metaphor for political battle in this country, though. I doubt that most of the GOP strategists out there know this country exists, or if they do, that they are consciously using it as a pattern to advance their agenda. But they are doing so all the same.
Go was invented well over 2000 years ago in China. It has changed remarkably little over the years and today is the primary board game of China, Japan and Korea, and probably other parts of East Asia. It's very different from chess, and I don't want to bore you with all the differences, but there are three major differences between chess and go:
- The go board is about five times as large as a chessboard (361 points vs. 64 squares)
- The pieces are all the same (except each player has their own color, of course). It's the way pieces are played on the board that determine their strength or weakness, since the pieces never move unless they're captured, in which case they're removed from the board
- The object of the game is to capture territory, not any one particular piece or group
The size of the board makes go more like a campaign than an individual battle.
Skirmishes break out all over the board as players attempt to create uncapturable (or "live") groups, usually first in the corners (where it's easiest to do so), then on the edges, and finally in the middle. One player will attack the other's position to see if they can either destroy the group, create their own live formation inside it, or at the least cut down the size of the opponent's territory.
I encourage you to read up on the game of go; Wikipedia's entry is a good start.
Whether or not they have been doing it consciously, the GOP has been following the go paradigm for a long time now. They go into a territory and establish a foothold, either creating their own territory or chipping away at ours, and then force us into a reactive situation where we are trying to contain them rather than make advances of our own.
In my opinion a lot of that is because we focus over-much on high profile races like anything at the federal level, plus maybe governorships. And I'm not saying those positions aren't important. Far from it. But the GOP is taking their territory at the state legislature, county council, city council and even school board and water district levels.
Those are the corners and edges of the political go board. And we need to pay more attention to them.
Can we do it? Yes.
Is it going to be easy? No.
How are we going to do it? Retail politics, convincing one voter at a time to do one thing.
As to how to implement this, that's unclear. I think technology will be involved, but I'm a tech guy so I always think technology will be involved.
We are getting a certain amount of help from the Republicans themselves. As they overreach, people will start to see that them for the frauds they are. But the burden of work is on us, and the sooner we adjust our thinking just a bit, the sooner we can take this country back.
Your move.