The Chess Game of Politics
by Robert Russo
I was once an active chess player, but when the software used by Yahoo Games and other providers was upgraded several years ago I could no longer play online, and have been out of practice ever since. A friend of mine gave me some chess books to get me back in the game, which gives me an analogy to describe the political crisis in this country.
My friend is a chess club member and champion who has beaten me in every match. But his conclusion from these victories is that his particular strategy is the only way to win (at least against him). These books say the same thing. Bobby Fischer and most other chess greats believed that certain opening moves, controlling the center of the board, assigning a points value to each piece and not sacrificing unless it meant taking a better piece was the prescription for success. Personally, two players trying to outguess each other while a pin drops, unwilling to move a piece that is not protected and if necessary taking five minutes to decide how to do so, is neither my idea of fun nor mental exercise, and takes away my purpose for playing the game. The political arena is a lot like this.
Once any good idea is used enough times it becomes a pastiche for success (like the board game Dots where a perfect game can be prescribed from the first move). Chess, like politics, is supposed to be a battle of wits, so if everyone subscribes to the same school of thought my natural conclusion would be to take advantage of this common belief. Playing by someone else's rules will never beat them because they have defined the parameters of your strategy and will always have the advantage, that is why they share their technique. In the teacher/pupil relationship the teacher knows something the pupil doesn't, which must be reversed if the pupil is ever to overcome. This means coming up with something on his own, a play that makes no sense to his opponent. Any win requires breaking what you're anticipated to do even if the player doesn't realize it. A traditional formula is what holds libertarians down in the political ring, and the fact that we have knowledge apart from the other parties is what will eventually bring us victory.
This is not to say long-studied strategies aren't practical because they are, or at least they were to the person who first invented them and applied them. The reason they still work today is their success has garnered so many students it disadvantages them, every match ending with either the greater student of this formula expected to win, or a stalemate resulting from two people with the same goals striving toward futility. It is time for something new. The possibilities in a mental contest are supposed to be infinite. Of course it is more difficult to win this way, so I suppose it depends on your definition of success. Mentoring, like all academia holds the most keys to success but manipulates people into a contest of the prescriber's choosing. Originality is righteous and fair, but at a great statistical disadvantage. Does this sound like the current presidential race?
American politics has become an increasingly prescribed routine in which the voter is instructed to avoid risk at any cost (i.e. Walmart training its employees to vote McCain because Obama supports unions), and to weigh everything by its fiscal advantage (like smearing a candidate's character when one's gripe is policy differences). That is not how I vote and not how I would run. A true libertarian front-runner is not just out to beat his opponents at their own game but to defeat their game, sending the table spinning. An even better metaphor is the card game Hearts, in which the player with the least points wins. If one has already accumulated most of the hearts in the deck there is little reason to continue playing, unless he has a hand that's so bad it's good. "Shooting the moon" is when a player loses every single hand, in which case he sticks 30 points to all the other players. This is what a candidate must do. Ignoring the rules, doing everything a candidate is not supposed to do, will rally a people who don't care anymore.
Here are some examples of such a strategy. Against a stronger player with well-coordinated attacks, one should consider sacrificing whenever possible to lower the number of pieces on both sides, thus making it hard to coordinate and even the odds. (Trying to match his coordination by preserving your pieces will fail every time and play right into his hands.) Likewise all traditional players agree the strongest piece is the queen, so a "queen's gambit" will rob your opponent of his strongest piece while you're prepared from the start to play without the queen. (In the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer a play like this was used.) My friend says I only win this way because I have weaker opponents, which is probably true, but the same applies to his method.
Respect for one's own knowledge and experience leads to victory even if it means losing the short-term battle, as we libs have found countless times, sometimes discovering the reward for following someone else's rules is not a win at all. A libertarian president with a republican/democratic congress will certainly find himself under threat of override and impeachment at every turn, so anyone who aspires to be the first must naturally throw convention to the wind and be fearless, even reckless, or watch himself be compromised into nothing. Education is an example of a platform where people have eaten, breathed and slept the same notions for so long it is impossible to beat them at this game, but under a new model everything they stand on evaporates. The same is true of economy and the press, two masters every candidate submits to, until the rise of a libertarian who snubs them both and makes them meaningless. One who shoots the moon.
If you have responses to add to this thread, send them to russo@richmondliberty.org and they will be posted. We welcome your input!