The Problem: The Politics of The Widening Gyre
The co-founders of Epsilon Theory, Ben Hunt and Rusty Guinn, offer some of the most insightful commentaries on the power of narrative in the political economy. While most of their essays look at financial markets through the lens of game theory, a number of them deal with the political shifts that are shaping our lives in the United States and globally. The newsletter writings of Epsilon Theory helped me see the political problems of our day through a clear lens.
As partially referenced in Common Sense Paper No. 2, in late September 2022, I read a note by Ben Hunt entitled “The Widening Gyre” that introduced me to Hercules battling the multi-headed hydra as a context for understanding our modern political landscape. In our earlier encounter with Hercules at the crossroads, we covered the inner battle—the need for personal virtue that extends into the sphere of public virtue. In this essay, we cover the outer battle—the nature of competing choices in society based on individual and group incentives. Understanding the inner battle and the outer battle are both necessary to choosing the ultimate path to victory—a functional political system and a healing moment for the soul of America.
The Poem—The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?1
Yeats wrote this remarkable poem in 1919 on the heels of World War I (and the Russian Revolution, and the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion in his native Ireland) and well into the devastating toll of the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1918. The poem was written in January, the same month that the Irish Declaration of Independence was adopted (21 January 1919) by the revolutionary parliament of the Irish Republic at its first meeting. Also, Yeats almost lost his pregnant wife to the flu just one month earlier, in December (he thought she was going to die), but she recovered and gave birth to their daughter, Ann, about two months later. Yeats was living through death—the death toll of an inner battle (flu) coupled with the death toll of an outer battle (war)—that turned his vision of a Second Coming into a nightmare, rather than a Christian era of peace.
Key: For an individual in any society, both inner and outer battles take their toll.
The Widening Gyre
“The Widening Gyre” essay from Hunt takes its title from the Yeats poem and speaks of a world where political polarization and a loss of innocence (harmlessness) snowball in a doom-loop fashion. The explanation for the unfortunate turn of events is grounded in certain principles of human nature (inner battle) and the behavior of institutional systems (outer battle). Here is Hunt’s opening question and response: “What is the widening gyre? It’s the instrument of the Beast, working across the centuries in every civilization to lay humanity low.” The Beast represents the base qualities of human nature that play for power or survival, or both. The Beast takes advantage of others to serve its own needs—it’s predatory. The Beast is institutionalized loss of virtue.
We are the falcon. The falconer is either your conception of God or your personal moral compass for living—it’s your true north. The falcon is riding the vortex of a gyre—a circular or spiral path. Imagine flying upward on the circling wind currents of a tornado. As the falcon circles wider and higher, it can’t hear the falconer—the true guide. To what outcome? Things begin to fall apart—the inner world crumbles and the outer world goes with it. The center can’t hold. In other words, instability, polarity, and gyration are the only reality. Polarization is the new normal. Untethering from norms that hold people together, especially political norms, gives way to anarchy—lawlessness. Innocence, the striving for harmlessness toward oneself (the inner peace) and toward others (the outer peace), is lost. The best lack conviction because institutionalized trust has been shredded, so the passionate warrior class emerges and intensifies institutional warfare. Recognizing this development in our current moment, we can now introduce the shift in political game theory that has emerged.
Key: Polarization, whether it be driven by ideas, emotional reasoning, or identity (us vs. them), and loss of innocence (virtues that bring cooperation to society), are both omnipresent in our current political system.
Political Game Theory
Game theory describes the interaction between multiple players in any scenario with a certain set of rules and quantifiable outcomes. One can use this theory to analyze situations, particularly economic situations. As The Common Sense Papers will discuss later, there is no separation between the economic and the political—it’s all political economy in society as we know it. One aspect of game theory helps illuminate the difference between games that are cooperative and those that are competitive. Let’s pick up the explanation in “The Widening Gyre” from Hunt:
The hallmark of a Coordination Game is that there are two equilibrium outcomes possible, two balancing points where the game is stable. Yes, one of those stable outcomes is mutual defection, where everyone pursues their individual goals and everyone is worse off. But a stable outcome of mutual cooperation is at least possible in a Coordination Game, and that’s worth a lot. Here’s a graphical representation of a Coordination Game, using Rousseau’s famous example of “the stag hunt”.
Fig. 1 Coordination Game (Stag Hunt)
The basic idea here is that each player can choose to either cooperate (hunt together for a stag, in Rousseau’s example) or defect (hunt independently for a rabbit, in Rousseau’s example), but neither player knows what the other player is going to choose. If you defect, you’re guaranteed to bag a rabbit (so, for example, if the Row Player chooses Defect, he gets 1 point regardless of Column Player’s choice), but if you cooperate, you get a big deer if the other player also cooperates (worth 2 points to both players) and nothing if the other player defects. There are two Nash equilibria for the Coordination Game, marked by the blue ovals in the figure above. A Nash equilibrium is a stable equilibrium because once both players get to that outcome, neither player has any incentive to change his strategy. If both players are defecting, both will get rabbits (bottom right quadrant), and neither player will change to a Cooperate strategy. But if both players are cooperating, both will share a stag (top left quadrant), and neither player will change to a Defect strategy, as you’d be worse off by only getting a rabbit instead of sharing a stag (the other player would be even more worse off if you switched to Defect, but you don’t care about that).
The point of the Coordination Game is that mutual cooperation is a stable outcome based solely on self-interest, so long as the payoffs from defecting are always less than the payoff of mutual cooperation. If that happens, however, you get a game like this:
Fig. 2 Competition Game (Prisoner’s Dilemma)
Here, the payoff from defecting while everyone else continues to cooperate is no longer a mere 1 point rabbit, but is a truly extraordinary payoff where you get the “free rider” benefits of everyone else’s deer hunting AND you go out to get a rabbit on your own…. There’s one and only one equilibrium in a competition game — the “everyone defect” outcome of the bottom right quadrant — meaning that once you get to this point (and you will) you can’t get out. The stability of the Competition Game is the stability of permanent conflict.2
So, how and why did politics become a competition game instead of a cooperation game? Or better yet, how and why did it become a toxic and dysfunctional competition game?
We need to examine the rules of the game, the players of the game, and the outcomes of the game. All have shifted in the past 30 years.
Key: In a two-party system game, when the way to govern and win reelection is through toxic competition, not cooperation, the incentives attract political warriors rather than thinkers, leaders, or healers.
The Politics of The Widening Gyre
When we talk about the need to look at the rules of the game, the players of the game, and the outcomes of the game, we also bump up against the economics of industrial organization. One area of analysis in industrial organization theory is the structure-conduct-performance (SCP) model. This paradigm links the structural environment to behavior and outcomes.
The answer to why the American political system is dysfunctional is simple—the incentives embedded within the structural game have turned negative for healthy outcomes. What incentives? The incentives behind elections, party politics & power, campaign finance, legislation, regulatory policy, lobbying, and governance. These are the incentives that are now captured by special interests, typically corporate interests—the few at the expense of the many.
We have the following structural issues to digest:
A presidential system with an unstable balancing act between the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the administrative departments of the federal government.
National political parties operate and compete as a duopoly.
A voting system that favors a two-party structure to the detriment of other players.
A sometimes-closed political primary system governed by a patchwork of state laws.
A failure by parties to offer a healthy gatekeeping system.
Money in politics and powerful corporate interests.
The nature of public unions wielding political influence.
We then have the conduct of political actors responding to affective and ideological polarization in our constitutional Republic. The engaged portion of the electorate within the dominant two-party system appears more polarized based on both emotional factors—the fear or hate of the other side—and ideological factors—goals and methods of organizing society that set boundaries on permissible activities. The major parties have sorted voters according to ideology and geography so that most congressional districts are uncompetitive in general ballot races. The major parties have used gerrymandering to influence national election outcomes, again making for uncompetitive general ballot races. Party factions add to political infighting on both sides of the duopoly. Identity politics has emerged with the rise of social media, media analytics, and the nationalization of party politics.
While various forms of polarization divide the party bases, the corporate sector has determined that rent-seeking is a necessary step for profits and self-preservation. The army of lobbyists attached to the federal government vastly outnumbers the influence of groups representing citizens. This influences campaign finance and regulatory policy in significant ways.
So what performance outcomes does all this produce? It ain’t pretty, as you know. Bipartisan compromise is no longer acceptable to party bases, so compromise has turned to competition, which has turned to sabotage of the other party in order to win—this is the politics of existential survival. The system has driven a number of virtuous people out of office to install more warriors and bullies into the political game. We see temptations to change, abuse, and corrupt election outcomes to gain the power advantage in Washington politics. We see money flooding into political campaigns to win an edge. We see campaign tactics that are deceitful and destructive. We see the capture of federal regulatory agencies by big corporations to ensure that business as usual protects corporate interests. We see a broken budgetary process that never works according to design, trillions of dollars in debt and deficits, and almost no accountability from public servants. Yeah, it ain’t pretty.
So, here is a quick preview of where The Common Sense Papers will take this discussion.
In Part II, we look at the nature of a presidential system and try to understand exactly how our system of federal government was made to operate (address structural item #1). Part II ends with an essay on dignity since this concept necessarily influences the debate that determines the services a government may ultimately choose to provide. In Part III, we look at mental models that impact political economy—namely power, freedom, economy, and identity. This section of The Common Sense Papers speaks to critical ideas pertaining to structural items #2 and #6. Part IV of these papers will address the defects of the two-party system operating today in our modern political economy. We look at the interplay of polarization and voting behavior, as well as issues impacting candidate selection and party gatekeeping. Discussions on Big Politics, Big Media, and Big Corporations highlight the problems that are making our political system toxic. This section speaks to structural item #2 (again) and item #5. Structural items #3 and #4 are not addressed since we assume that we are stuck with the voting system as given, so we have to reboot the system without expecting to change voting laws until later. Structural item #7 is ignored as other authors have covered this issue.
Key: We have at least seven structural issues in American politics that sit on top of the conduct issues involving polarization and loss of virtue (temperance, wisdom, etc.) among the party bases and their candidates.
The Empty Political Space – Concerns About Political Theater: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate
In the language of the legendary English theater and film director, Peter Brook, we have arrived at Deadly Theater in politics.
Brook identified four types of theater—Deadly, Holy, Rough, and Immediate.3 Deadly Theatre is the theatre of commerce set up to make money for its producers. The corollary of Deadly Political Theater would be as follows: money for the military-industrial complex, money for the bio-pharmaceutical complex, money and resources for the prison industrial complex, power and influence for the partisan nonprofit industrial complex, and money and brinkmanship for the unholy trinity of Big Politics, Big Media, and Big Technology. We will introduce those last three actors shortly. Deadly Political Theater is just performative politics—speeches for show, congressional votes for show, congressional hearings for show, media appearances for money and for show, etc.
Where Deadly Theater plays the audience (the voting public) with rinse-and-repeat cycles of the same old narratives for profit (flowing to entrenched interests), Rough Theater is defined this way: “Salt, sweat, noise, smell: the theatre that’s not in a theatre, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables, audiences joining in, answering back: theatre in back rooms, upstairs rooms, barns.”4 Rough Political Theater is the theater of demagogues, riots, mass protests, underqualified politicians, grandstanders, small-scale grifters, and a host of other characters. It can also take a gentler form with animated grassroots rallies, neighbors gathering to organize and educate, parents agitating for educational reform, and politically-driven boycotts. Rough Theater seems to emerge when Deadly Theater has sold too many tickets to the same old disappointing show and the masses can’t take it anymore. With the rise of the Tea Party movement, then the Occupy Wall Street movement, and finally the emergence of Donald Trump, Rough Political Theater is battling Deadly Political Theater for audience attention.
Immediate Theater is something less staged and more transitional. Its impromptu nature makes it fleeting—thus it tends to be innovative while addressing traditional subjects worthy of performance. Immediate Political Theater often comes on the back of coups, revolts, or elections (primarily outside of the United States), or with other moments of crisis (9/11, the Great Financial Crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic, etc.).
Lastly, Holy Theater is unique and transcendent. It is where the invisible issues in society can capture our attention. According to Brook, “A holy theatre not only presents the invisible but also offers conditions that make its perception possible.”5 Brook says this about Holy Theater:
There are two ways of speaking about the human condition: there is the process of inspiration—by which all the positive elements of life can be revealed, and there is the process of honest vision—by which the artist bears witness to whatever it is that he has seen.6
Inspiration and honest vision can be powerful guides to humanity. It is this aspect of Holy Political Theater that is wholly missing from our national political leadership in relation to our human condition and societal needs. The debates that flow from inspiring new ideas related to complex societal problems are not happening for public understanding. The honest dialogue that public servants and government officials must provide in their service is lacking.
Key: The broken political theater of Washington D.C. is stuck between Deadly and Rough theater offerings—it can’t seem to allow anything Holy (inspiring, uniting, and virtuous) to enter the stage from the left or the right.
The Center Cannot Hold
Yeats poetically declared that a widening gyre position means the center can’t hold. We return to Hunt and data provided by the Pew Research Center from 2017. This data set has not been updated since that time—its message won’t be any better.
The Pew Research Center does consistently excellent work on U.S. voting patterns. In this long-running research series, they tend to focus on the distance between the median Democrat voter and the median Republican voter, and that’s all well and good. What I’m focused on however, is the shape of the Democrat and Republican electorate distributions, such that the overall distribution in 2017 is no longer a single-peaked something-akin-to-a-bell-curve as it was in 2004, but is instead a double-peaked or (to use a $10 word) bimodal distribution.
The bimodal distribution began to take shape in 2014, well before Trump came on the scene, but it’s just gotten more and more pronounced since his 2016 election. There’s a time-lapse animation of these charts that’s cool to watch, and I’ve put a solo shot of the 2017 results below.7
So what’s the problem with a bimodal distribution? The easiest way to think about it is to compare the size of the purple area (where both the Republican and the Democrat electorate overlap) with the pure blue area (Democrat with zero Republican overlap) and the pure red area (Republican with zero Democrat overlap). When the purple area is smaller than both the blue area AND the red area, a centrist politician (someone between the median Democrat and the median Republican) can win neither a national nomination nor a national election in a two-party system. For any centrist candidate or policy, there exists a winning majority of voters on both the left AND the right who will favor a competing candidate or policy on both the left AND the right. This is what it means to say that the center cannot hold.8
Now let’s take one more look at the same chart, and same survey, and only look at those described as politically engaged. These voters drive candidate selection and primary voting outcomes. In this picture, the overlapping center looks even worse. This is ideological polarization in graphical form. This raises serious concerns.
One final point about how the center cannot hold. The next two graphics from 2021 highlight that the average engagement level of those who poll in the middle 37% of the political spectrum is low. It’s awfully low, which makes us ask hard questions. Can anyone engage those who don’t want to be engaged to solve some of the political divisions of our day? Can anyone create a nontoxic entry point, or on-ramp, for the unengaged to join with others and become a clear voice for political reform? If the political center doesn’t exist in a meaningful way to hold power within the two-party system, what structural design change can help America renew democracy and representative government for all?
Key: The engaged voters are deeply polarized while the voters in the middle are much less involved, so the appeal to the middle presents tough math to overcome the structure of the two-party system with its current incentives.
Back to Hercules and His Encounter with the Multi-Headed Hydra
We return to Ben Hunt and “The Widening Gyre” to look at three key actors in our political economy theater, operating much like the multi-headed hydra that fought Hercules in Greek mythology.
In the widening gyre, we are deafened by Big Media and its New Songs of schadenfreude and I-got-mine-Jack, unable to hear the precepts of our better natures or the lessons of the past…. The widening gyre is political polarization, where a mad rush to more and more extreme positions is the dominant political strategy, presided over by the institutionalized, unquestioned power of Big Politics…. There’s no escape from the widening gyre! Big Tech brings mere anarchy—quotidian, ordinary, boring anarchy—to every aspect of our daily lives, so that all of our social ceremonies of association and friendship—all of them—are drowned in a relentless, implacable tsunami of “news” and “social media”.9
The actors are Big Media, Big Politics, and Big Tech. The intertwined role of these three forms a huge part of the structure that locks division in place and drowns out the voices of ordinary citizens. Controlling the narratives that flow through major channels of communication is the role of the Beast—it’s a program of protection for the status quo, or for the advancement of such ideas and issues that cater to those who stand to gain the most from controlling the narrative. This is far from a healthy democracy where institutional trust is built and earned, where the voice of voters is honored, and where the overwhelming focus of public policy addresses the common good of all citizens in society.
Yet Big Politics plays a confusing double role in the Deadly Political Theater of our day. During portions of the show, Big Politics is the embodiment of Team Red versus Team Blue—Republicans vs. Democrats—with all the virtue symbols and linguistic triggers needed to appease or galvanize party bases. At other moments in the show, Big Politics is referred to as the Uniparty.10 The Uniparty simply performs the necessary constituent services that citizens need while serving the lobbyists that seek to maintain the status quo, but also provide war chests of money to keep actors on stage for another reelection season. Again, it’s the perverse incentives that drive the political machinery to favor the corporate good over the common good.
Back to Ben Hunt and “The Widening Gyre”:
Our true, common enemy and the structural source of the widening gyre that is killing our country is the three-headed hydra of Big Politics, Big Media and Big Tech. How do you kill a hydra? Well, if you remember your mythology, just cutting off a head isn’t enough. Hercules could whack at the hydra all day long, but for every head he bashed to a pulp, two more would just grow back in its place. It wasn’t until he had his nephew cauterize the neck stump with fire that he finally got on top of the situation.
To kill a hydra you must prevent it from regenerating itself.
Cutting off a head—by which I mean winning an election, even a major election, or breaking up a media or tech company, even a major media or tech company—is useless.
Instead, you must burn away the tissue which regrows the heads—by which I mean shifting the common knowledge regarding politics, media and technology. If a [political movement] could do THAT … if a [political movement] could change what everyone knows that everyone knows is possible when it comes to politics, media and technology … well, now that is very interesting to me!11
Unless we have a structural change that truly puts the needs of citizens ahead of all other organized institutional actors, it will be hard to reboot the American political system. Some theory of change experts believe that local, bottom-up change will save the day. I disagree. But even if I’m wrong, that strategy will take the rest of our lifetimes to play out. We don’t have that much time.
My concern with the theory of political regeneration through local politics is best explained with a simple analogy. Our Federal Republic of today now resembles a political old-growth forest. Imagine planting a fresh garden in an old-growth forest. Your biggest issue will probably be the blocked sunlight that never reaches the ground due to the heavy canopy layer (federal regulation, federal mandates in exchange for money, federal infrastructure issues, etc.).
In such a setting, if you want more resources, you raise taxes. You raise taxes, and people vote with their feet. Lastly, you beg for federal bailouts to patch the system, which brings you back to the control function of Washington D.C. and duopoly or Uniparty politics. It’s a circular doom loop of a system that didn’t prune itself along the cycle.
Given the structural shift of the game (from cooperation to competition to sabotage) and the incentives that now feed the Beast (Deadly Political Theater for profit), I see only three possible outcomes at hand:
The status quo persists, oligarchy reigns, and we move from crisis to crisis with occasional political effectiveness.
An Article V convention of states, based on the Constitution, is held to rebalance the political system in favor of states. This might solve major structural problems but has a plethora of unknowns.
We the People scramble the political party structure with a new movement that can reboot the democratic functions of representative government according to the issues of our day and time.
Given those three possibilities, Common Sense Paper No. 5 will present option number three—a possible solution to the political widening gyre of our politically polarized, toxic, and dysfunctional moment in American history.
Final thought: This essay lays the groundwork for why a competition game in the two-party system (instead of a cooperation game) is dysfunctional and leads to our destruction of the system. Many factors are to blame. These factors will be explored in much more detail in Part IV of The Common Sense Papers. Any movement to solve the political widening gyre and produce genuine Holy Political Theater must structurally address the inner and the outer battles of our modern human condition in our constitutional Republic.
William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming," in Poetry Foundation, Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming (accessed July 18, 2023).
Ben Hunt, “The Widening Gyre,” epsilontheory.com, September 19, 2022, https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-widening-gyre/ (June 19, 2023).
Peter Brook, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate (London: Penguin Books, 1968).
Peter Brook, The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996) 78.
Ibid., 67.
Ibid., 70.
Ben Hunt, “The Widening Gyre.”
Ibid.
Ibid.
Uniparty is a term and a theme that has appeared on the right and the left to critique the times when Washington seems to work together in unity, usually at the expense of citizens and in favor of special interests, because its power is being threatened by outside groups with outside ideas. For more info, see this Politico Magazine source.
Ben Hunt, “The Widening Gyre.”