Maybe Life Under Fascism Is a Lesson We Will Have to Learn

History has no patience for mistaking rules for power, or cowardice for restraint

Trump wants Texas to redraw their districts so Republicans can get more seats in Congress. Gavin Newsom is calling for a vote 3 months away to potentially redraw California’s.

This isn’t a maps story. It’s a power story.

One side moves first and forces facts on the ground. The other files paperwork and waits for permission. Guess who wins that exchange.

The pattern isn’t new. In every brutal contest—the trenches of World War I, the Cold War, even the simplest iterated games—the winner isn’t the one with prettier rules. It’s the one with credible retaliation delivered fast.

Democrats keep confusing procedure with virtue. We hold hearings, press releases and protests while they take hold of the field.

This piece isn’t about voting districts. It’s about tempo, deterrence, and why “we’ll consider it in November” reads as surrender in August.

Either we begin to respond in kind and in time, or we will lose all the norms, traditions, and freedoms we claim to care so much about.

The Rules of the Game

The rules are brutally simple. Game theory has been spelling them out for decades.

In the prisoner’s dilemma, two players face the same choice: cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, both win. If one defects while the other cooperates, the defector takes everything. If both defect, both lose. It’s a trap designed to punish unilateral restraint.

Axelrod and Rapoport showed how to escape the trap. The winning strategy wasn’t ruthlessness or endless escalation. It was reciprocity—nice, retaliatory, forgiving, clear.¹² Cooperate when the other side cooperates. Retaliate immediately when they defect. Forgive if they return to cooperation. Above all, be clear so no one mistakes your move. That is how stability emerges.

This isn’t just theory. In the trenches of World War I, soldiers facing each other across no man’s land developed informal truces.³ Don’t shoot at breakfast, and the other side doesn’t either. Fire low, and they’ll fire low. A fragile peace born from reciprocity—until some officer demanded aggression, and the spiral resumed.

During the Cold War, the same rules scaled to nuclear brinkmanship. Mutually assured destruction was nothing more than tit-for-tat with world-ending stakes.⁴ Deterrence only worked because retaliation was credible, proportional, and above all, fast.⁵⁶ Even the hint of delay would invite a first strike.

The lesson is harsh but consistent: whether the stakes are a single meal in a trench, a patch of mud, or the survival of civilization, unilateral restraint is suicide.⁷⁸ In brinksmanship, the only thing that preserves order and balance is the clear expectation of immediate, reciprocal retaliation. The moment you hesitate, you invite defeat.

The Republican Playbook

Republicans understand the rules of the game, even if they’ve never opened a book on game theory. Their instinct is simple: defect first, defect fast, and never wait for permission.

They had no problem stealing a Supreme Court nomination from Obama, claiming that a nomination should not go through during an election year, just to do a 180 by nominating a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg just months before an election. Why? Because they knew that Democrats would do nothing about it.

The Supreme Court had no problem declaring that the president has near absolute immunity to keep Trump out of prison, even though Biden was still president. Why? Because they knew that Democrats would never abuse it, leaving Republicans to be the only beneficiaries of immunity.

They consistently gerrymander districts in order to gain the political edge. Why? Because they know that even if Democrats might gerrymander, they’re much more likely to pass independent commissions that lock their districts into fair distributions, such that on net, Republicans will hold a massive advantage.

They purge voter rolls with abject abandon. They pass laws that make it harder for Democrats to vote. They pass laws that enable the most psychotic amongst them to go on mass murder rampages driven by their stochastic narratives. Why? Because Republicans know Democrats will never do anything about it but wag their finger in disapproval while they wish “thoughts and prayers.”

The Democratic Illusion

Meanwhile, Democrats justify it on “standing for the norms and traditions,” or “the rule of law.” But the very definition of a rule is the set of principles that govern the conduct of both sides. “Rules” that both sides do not operate under are not rules at all: they are concessions. That’s not to say that there are no rules between Republicans and Democrats, because there are some things that never seem to change:

• When Republicans break the “rules”, Democrats genuflect to bipartisanship.

• When Republicans seize power, Democrats grovel.

• When Republicans escalate, Democrats cower behind “norms and traditions”.

These are the only actual rules you will find between the two as far as the eye can see. This is precisely why Republicans keep escalating. They’ve been trained to expect no immediate consequence. If the other side insists on “process,” then the rational move is to exploit that hesitation again and again. In game theory terms, Democrats have locked themselves into the sucker’s strategy—always cooperating, never punishing defections, hoping the rules will protect them.

And for what? Democrats will say: “But Democracy!” while Trump continues to consolidate power towards a fascist hellscape where there will be no norms, only mandates, no tradition but the boot on the neck, no rule but his own. There is no righteousness or moral ground in cowering behind rules while a wannabe dictator burns democracy to the ground right in front of our eyes. For all the fears Democrats may have about “becoming like” Republicans if they break the rules, the answer is simple: If Democrats choose to break the rules to save democracy while Republicans do the same to bring about its end, history will remember them with much more fondness than if they choose to help Republicans in their quest by strapping themselves to their norms and process.

So, if Trump wants Texas to redraw their maps tomorrow, we should finish redrawing our maps today, process be damned. Let the courts stop us today, so that tomorrow they have no choice but to stop them. Because history has already taught us this lesson: that retaliation must be reciprocal in kind and in time. And if we refuse this, then maybe life under fascism is a lesson we will have to learn.

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1. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation, Stanford (1984)
Demonstrates through repeated prisoner’s dilemma tournaments that tit-for-tat succeeds by enforcing reciprocity — rewarding cooperation and punishing defection quickly.

2. Anatol Rapoport, Tit for Tat and Beyond — The Legendary Work of Anatol Rapoport, University of Michigan (2019)
Outlines how Rapoport’s tit-for-tat strategy proved the most successful in Axelrod’s tournaments: cooperate first, retaliate immediately if defected against, forgive if cooperation resumes, and keep rules clear.

3. Virginia Tech University Libraries, The Morality and Practicality of Tit for Tat (2019)
Applies tit-for-tat logic to historical examples, including trench warfare in WWI where reciprocal restraint created fragile “live and let live” systems until one side escalated.

4. Lawrence Freedman, From Crisis Management to Realignment of Forces, MIT Press (2022)
Explores Cold War crisis management and the role of nuclear deterrence, showing how immediate and credible retaliation structured U.S.-Soviet interactions.

5. Reid Pauly, The Psychology of Nuclear Brinkmanship, MIT Press (2023)
Analyzes deterrence psychology during the Cold War, emphasizing the importance of credibility, speed, and clear signals in preventing nuclear war.

6. Philosophy Now, Mutually Assured Destruction (2002)
Explains the logic of MAD as a form of reciprocal deterrence: stability relies on each side’s ability to retaliate immediately and proportionally.

7. George Milburn, Triumph of the Golden Rule (2010)
Frames reciprocity as a timeless moral and strategic principle, showing its application from small-scale social dilemmas to existential struggles.

8. NIH PMV, Direct Reciprocity with Costly Punishment — Generous Tit-for-Tat Prevails (2010)
Empirical study confirming that reciprocal strategies remain evolutionarily stable across contexts, even when punishment is costly.