The Right doesn't play right.

People do not like playing Scrabble with me. I am no spelling bee genius with a memorized Q without U word list. No, I just do not play right. The typical player finds their longest word and drops the tiles. Not me. If I cannot get the Triple Word Score hanging out there, well, you are not either. I will drop all sorts of squirrelly small words to hamper the other players. Plus, I have a knack for dropping a letter between words to grab points far in excess of the tile played. In short, I am a pain in the ass.

And it is this very attitude that affords Trump et. al. their wins on election day.

Do not pass Go

My Scrabble strategy is a touchstone for an analogy to the story of AlphaGo. an AI program designed to play the board game Go. This effort was a much more complicated project than any AI chess program, because there are exponentially more possible moves in Go. This is why many people thought GO would forever resist the digital—until 2016 that is.

The day came when AlphaGo squared off against the Lee Sedol, a world-ranked 9th Dan professional in a five game match. The first game began and onlookers were confused by what the computer chose to play, dropping pieces in places that made no sense to the humans. Eventually, the strategy unfolded and it became clear the human would lose. Not by much, but the computer did not care about how it won or what it looked like. That is a human bias in playing. No, the computer did the math and figured out how to win by just a few points. It was unexpected and untidy to the onlookers, but the computer followed the letter of the rules and won. And as the system played against Sedol, the stronger it got, winning the next two handily as the he tried various strategies, against his usual playing style, to find a pathway to win.

What seems like a lifetime ago, I wrote a short piece on Trump before his 1st election. Trump is worse than a Republican, he’s a developer. The upshot was developers build reputations by winning with little regard for rules, and their narrow audience appreciates how ruthless and morally-flexible a given developer is. And this is how Democrats and progressives are caught flat-footed by Trump. So much of politics and government is guided, not just in rules, but by a certain aesthetic. Good sportsmanship is in the shared expectations between players, not a book. Then, a player comes along who doesn’t care about that sort of reputation, which is an advantage in technically winning. Trump follows the rules enough that no one disputes we all play the same game. It is not like he is bringing a football team to a tennis match. However, he is not bound by any decorum and will gather votes by going anywhere and saying anything.

The Left and its Progressives are always looking to build up coalitions, which is admirable The Right does as well. But the difference is the Right is happy to monkeywrench while the Left is eschews the tactic . Trump focused on what it took to win in a way the Democratic Party universe could not. Trump’s audience does not care for niceties, they care about winning. Lay into the misogyny then, who cares? So you crack the traditional support from Hispanic voters by focusing on men. The effort is not to win over an entire ethnicity, but draw down its support.

Game 4 and Progressives

For those of you who tracked the match above, back to AlphaGo. Lee Sedol found a way to beat the AI in Game 4. AlphaGo was on track to win, although Sedol was holding his own. Then he set one stone, a wedge it was called, set between two of AlphaGo’s. The system then slowly melted down, like a Star Trek android caught in a logic puzzle, because it could not handle the 1 in 20,000 move Sedol put down. If you watch the documentary, you can almost feel Sedol thinking through the screen as he considered the board. Then he saw the way to bar the system from its fourth win and he pounced.

Now progressives think it horrible and unfair, knowingly pressing divisive buttons to break voting blocks. I am not proposing we need to be as “dirty” as Trump to win elections. But when we ignore his base and make no attempt to win away a few points, we will consistently lose. Just think about election night. State after state, Harris won the large counties. Then, there was the death of a thousand cuts as small county after small county would run up Trump’s numbers. We need to address this.

Everything is on our political board now for progressives to win. We just need to understand who we are playing against. For example, reaching out to rural voters on issues they face—and there are plenty—is not an appeal to their worst natures, but a recognition we understand their issues. Progressives will not get them all, by far, but like water on the planet Dune, there is more blue out in the red than we think at the moment. But if we keep playing Go or Scrabble without recognizing the true nature of our opponent, we will never gather these votes and will lose again.

Epilogue of sorts—Lee Sedol lost the final match against AlphaGo by a few points. He retired from playing Go in 2019. Losing to AI was crushing and changed his outlook on Go— "I could no longer enjoy the game. So I retired.” The advantage AI has in board games is all such games reduce to crunching numbers. Computers do not get tired. They never argue with a spouse before a match. They just grind away with greater and greater computing resources. Fortunately, politics is not so easily quantified.