It wasn’t that long ago that everyone was talking about the “libertarian moment” in the US. Now, libertarianism/propertarianism is pretty much dead. The support base, advocacy groups and so on have gone full Trumpists, while the intellectual energy has shifted to “liberaltarianism” or, a more recent variant, Tyler Cowen’s conversion to “state capacity libertarianism“.

Most of those departing to the left have mentioned the failure of libertarianism to handle climate change. It was critical for two reasons. First, any serious propertarian response would have required support ofr the creation of new property rights (emissions permits) and the restriction of existing ones (burning carbon). That would imply an acknowledgement that property rights are natural relations between people (owners) and things (property). They are socially constructed relationships between people, allowing some people to use things and to stop other people from doing so. Second, the effort to deny this inevitably result in denial of the scientific evidence that climate change was necessary. That contributed to a situation where most former libertarians are now Trumpists, happy to deny the evidence of their own eyes if that’s what the leader requires of them.

I’m working on a longer article spelling all this out. In the meantime, comments welcome.

I asked Flood if he realized the importance of the prisoner's dilemma when he and Dresher conceived it. "I must admit," he answered, "that I never foresaw the tremendoust impact that this idea would have on science and society, although Dresher and I certainly did think that our result was of considerable importance ...

Two prisoners are arrested. When they are taken to the police station, they refuse to say anything and are put in separate interrogation rooms. Eventually, a police officer enters the room where Prisoner A is being held and says: “You know what? Your partner in the other room is confessing. So your partner is going to get a light prison sentence of just one year, and because you’re remaining silent, the judge is going to stick you with eight years in prison. Why don’t you get smart? If you confess, too, we’ll cut your jail time down to five years.” Over in the next room, another police officer is giving exactly the same speech to Prisoner B. What the police officers don’t say is that if both prisoners remain silent, the evidence against them is not especially strong, and the prisoners will
end up with only two years in jail each. ...

To understand the prisoner’s dilemma, first consider the choices from Prisoner A’s point of view. If A believes that his partner B will confess, then A ought to confess, too, so as to not get stuck with the eight years in prison. But if A believes that B will not confess, then A will be tempted to act selfishly and confess, so as to serve only one year. The key point is that A has an incentive to confess, regardless of what choice B makes! B faces the same set of choices and thus will have an incentive to confess regardless of what choice A makes. The result is that if the prisoners each pursue their own self-interest, both will confess, and they will end up doing a total of 10 years of jail time between them. 

But if the two prisoners had cooperated by both remaining silent, they would only have had to serve a total of four years of jail time between them. If the two prisoners can work out some way of cooperating so that neither one will confess, they will both be better off than if they each follow their own individual self-interest, which in this case leads straight into longer jail terms for both.

Trump’s Madness Has Spread to Rudy Giuliani, His Rank-and-File Supporters and Much of the Republican Party 

By Bandy X. Lee

Bandy X. Lee

The president’s personal lawyer and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani wrote an opinion piece, “The Supreme Court Should Step In to Rule this Impeachment Unconstitutional.” The Washington Post reports him as donning the “constitutional scholar” cap in “very colorful terms.”

Giuliani said earlier he was prepared to testify at the president’s upcoming impeachment trial and would even try the case. Because Giuliani has mystified observers for some time, I am responding to a request to analyze his words.

First, allow me to remark on methodology. Ordinarily, I state that analyzing a public figure is complex and have previously declined comment on Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin. To offer a responsible, medically sound analysis, an abundance of high-quality information is necessary.

Rarely do we have the amount that Donald Trump offers, with decades of candid interviews and clips; numerous collateral reports by close associates, many under sworn testimony; and direct, unfiltered, near-hourly reporting of thoughts. A full diagnosis needs more, although a personal examination is not the deciding factor, as it can in some cases be harmful in assessing personalities that deceive or charm.

With Giuliani, however, I can use different means.

Power may corrupt ordinary individuals, but it radically transforms dangerously pathological figures beyond what people can imagine.

I can do so because, like many of Trump’s followers, he seems to be an extension of the president’s psychology.

How is this possible? There can be a contagion of symptoms, as in the phenomenon of “shared psychosis,” further explained below. I also have some references on Giuliani as a long-term New Yorker that corroborate my assessment. Finally, I feel justified in sharing the findings because of the danger he poses. As a strong adherent to the original Goldwater rule, I am opposed to commenting frivolously on public figures unless they pose a danger to public health.

I have regularly been “translating” Trump and his followers as a public service, using my understanding of the president’s defense mechanisms, repeatedly validated against other data. Whatever he says about others is very revealing about himself. I apply the same method for his followers because their shared psychosis, or the transmission of mental symptoms among close contacts over time, including via the media or the Internet, renders their psychological structure extremely similar.

Adopting Trump’s Delusions

Unlike Trump, I have closely interacted with many Trump supporters and can personally attest to their uniformity in many psychological respects. Especially when the primary pathology rests in a powerful figure, otherwise healthy people can adopt his cognitive distortions, delusions and other symptoms as their own. My experience with multiple cases in state hospitals and among gangs in prisons, in my 22-year career as a forensic psychiatrist, has been impressive. Shared psychosis disappears just as dramatically when the contact is interrupted. Consider Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen, now jailed.

Here is a sample “translation” of Giuliani’s words, or interpretation of what his subconscious may be telling us, from his opinion piece: “Republicans’ obsession from day one not to impeach President Donald J. Trump, without regard to substance or process, led us to change the grounds for our argument every couple of months. In doing so we have punted everything from Russian collusion to obstruction of justice, to quid pro quo, to bribery.”

Projecting Trump’s Criminality onto Biden

By offering to try the case several days ago, Giuliani revealed a grandiosity so high, he does not seem to notice how he often harms his client or reveals how corrupt he is willing to be by trying a case for which his client is defendant, and he potentially a co-conspirator. When he said he would prosecute “as a racketeering case,” he was inadvertently “confessing” his and the president’s level of criminality by projecting it onto rival Joe Biden. He even narcissistically added that he “kind of invented” such prosecutions.

DCReport’s editor-in-chief, investigative reporter David Cay Johnston, says not so. Johnston countered that Giuliani’s subordinates tried and won “the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) cases Rudy claims credit for” and that other prosecutors won cases “years ahead of his subordinates.” The RICO law, Johnston says, was the brainchild of a professor, G. Robert Blakey.

This pattern is consistent with my own experience of Giuliani as mayor of New York City, where I grew up in an environment of violence that I once considered the norm.

I witnessed, through the late 1980s and early 1990s, numerous activist groups entering our neighborhoods, building gardens and bringing art projects. When one of them came into my bullet-hole- and gang-ridden school, it had an inspirational effect on all the teenagers, including myself. Robust literature now proves that positive reinforcement is far more effective in preventing violence than any level of policing or punishment. Thus, when the mayor belatedly intervened with his police force and claimed all credit for the drop in violence, it already seemed disingenuous then; I know it to be blatantly false now.

Trump Unable to Handle Power

Why is this relevant? I believe it is important for mental health professionals to make distinctions, where applicable, between normal style and pathological traits that can cause harm.

A pathologically narcissistic individual, for instance, would not be able to handle power—even as one hungrily seeks it—but would more likely develop delusional levels of grandiosity or impunity. Delusions, in turn, are more effective at mobilizing mass psychology than rational strategy, and puzzling features emerge even from formerly respectable attorneys such as Jonathan Turley and Alan Dershowitz.

We have seen a comical and innocuous-seeming Trump morph into a grotesque authoritarian willing to destroy every facet of civilized society to build and maintain his cult of personality. His irrationality ironically helps make his supporters fervently anti-interventionist one day and supportive of an obvious wag-the-dog war the next, according to his desires.

Power may corrupt ordinary individuals, but it radically transforms dangerously pathological figures beyond what people can imagine or prepare. Needless to say, those who are suffering from similar narcissistic wounds are the first to be attracted to such a power figure and to succumb to a shared psychosis. Giuliani may exemplify how severely it can affect a person.

Dr.  Bandy X.  Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine, president of the World Mental Health Coalition and editor of  The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.

The post How Trump’s Psychosis Infects His Followers appeared first on DCReport.org.

• Jeff Cockrell. "Does America have an antitrust problem?" in the Chicago Booth Review (Winter 2019/2020)
• Tim Sablik and Nicholas Trachter, "Are Markets Becoming Less Competitive?" in an Economic Brief from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond (June 2019, EB 19-06)