How to Hate the Game (As Well as the Players)

A Field Guide to Principled Cynicism in the Age of Performative Democracy

Fresh in my inbox this week: Oregon Democrats asking for money to support Texas Democrats who fled the state to break quorum and block Republican redistricting. "The gloves are off," they announced, "and Texas Democrats are doing everything they can to fight for our democracy."

Wait—isn't breaking quorum to stall legislation exactly what Oregon voters banned in 2022 with Measure 113? The same tactic Oregon Republicans used during their walkouts that Democrats called an attack on democracy itself? The very behavior that now automatically disqualifies lawmakers from re-election?

Apparently, quorum-breaking is heroic resistance when Democrats do it in Texas, but anti-democratic sabotage when Republicans do it in Oregon. And not only are Oregon Democrats celebrating the tactic they criminalized—they're monetizing it, asking for donations to be split between Oregon and Texas Democratic parties.

This isn't hypocrisy. It's something more systematic: the perfect encapsulation of how American politics has become a performance designed to extract money and maintain power rather than govern competently.

The POSIWID Principle

There's a useful concept in systems thinking called POSIWID: The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does. Strip away all the noble mission statements and rhetoric about serving constituents, and look at what the political system actually produces.

What the system claims to do:

• Represent voters
• Solve public problems
• Advance policy solutions
• Promote democratic governance

What the system actually does:

• Keep incumbents in office
• Generate continuous fundraising revenue
• Create content for social media engagement
• Maintain party organizational power

The beautiful efficiency becomes clear:

Outrage = Engagement = Donations = Power

Why would you solve immigration when a "crisis at the border" raises $50 million every quarter? Why actually codify abortion rights when "Roe is under attack!" generates better turnout than "We fixed it"? Why govern competently when the other team's incompetence is your best fundraising tool?

Politicians who solve problems lose their talking points. Parties that compromise lose their distinctiveness. Voters who get what they want stop donating. Media that reports nuance gets fewer clicks.

The system isn't broken—it's working exactly as designed. The real constituency isn't voters; it's the professional political class, fundraising infrastructure, and engagement-hungry media ecosystem. We're just the renewable resource that powers the machine.

Case Studies in Selective Morality

But the players aren't just trapped by these incentives—they're actively optimizing for them. Politics has professionalized around dysfunction.

Meet the apex predators: Campaign consultants who get paid specifically to manufacture viral outrage moments—the angrier the better, because anger converts to clicks and clicks convert to cash. Political media personalities who build entire brands around performative conflict because nuanced analysis doesn't scale on social platforms. Party chairs who'd rather fundraise off perpetual crisis than solve problems that would eliminate their talking points. Lobbying firms that represent both "sides" of manufactured controversies, ensuring they profit regardless of outcomes.

The revolving door between campaigns, consulting, media, and lobbying ensures everyone has a financial stake in keeping the conflict machine running. These aren't people accidentally caught in a broken system. These are professionals who've turned systematic dysfunction into a sustainable business model—and they're very good at their jobs.

Measure 113: Rules for Thee, Not for Me

I opposed Measure 113 from the beginning, not because I support obstruction, but because I recognized the obvious trap: procedural weapons always change hands eventually. What seems like justice when your side holds power becomes a cudgel when the tide turns.

Sure enough, Oregon Democrats who cheered when Measure 113 kneecapped Republican walkouts are now fundraising off Democratic walkouts in Texas. They've managed to criminalize minority dissent at home while celebrating it as heroic resistance elsewhere.

If breaking quorum is a principled stand against gerrymandering in Texas, it was a principled stand against harmful legislation in Oregon. You can't have it both ways without revealing that your objection was never about democratic process—it was about losing votes.

Closed Primaries: Democracy for Members Only

Speaking of procedural gatekeeping, let's talk about closed primaries. Roughly 40% of voters are registered as unaffiliated or independent, but they're locked out of the process that often matters most. In safe districts—which is most of them—the primary IS the election.

So non-party voters get taxation without representation in the most literal sense, while parties claim they're "private organizations" that can exclude whoever they want—but please use public money and infrastructure for our member selection process.

The result? Candidates only need to appeal to the party base, pushing both sides toward extremes while the broad center gets ignored. Then everyone wonders why we're so polarized.

The Gerrymandering Shell Game

"One party's gerrymandering is another's redistricting"—and yes, I'm running from the "bothsideism" artillery barrage as I type this. But it's true. Both parties gerrymander when they can; they just have different branding strategies.

Democrats gerrymander in Illinois, Maryland, and Oregon, then justify it as "defensive" or "correcting historical injustices." Republicans are more openly strategic about it, justifying it as giving voters "what they want" based on existing electoral dominance. The result is the same: representatives pick their voters instead of the other way around.

Everything Is Tribal Warfare

Every major issue has been weaponized into tribal point-scoring instead of problem-solving. Immigration, abortion, LGBTQ rights, guns, climate policy—all filtered through "Will this make our enemies mad?" rather than "Will this actually improve everyone’s quality of life?"

The social media architecture accelerates this dysfunction. Outrage performs better than nuance because platforms reward engagement over accuracy. A politician's thoughtful 12-point housing policy gets three likes; their dunk on the opposition's "radical agenda" gets 50,000 shares.

So we get Red team messaging: "Build the wall/roll coal/ban books to trigger the libs!" and Blue team responses: "Sanctuary cities/Green New Deal/defund police to trigger MAGA!" The substance decays in transmission, leaving only the tribal signaling.

Meanwhile, every crisis becomes a product to be monetized. Housing crisis spawns nonprofit grants and consulting contracts. Climate crisis generates tech accelerator funding and carbon offset marketplaces. Education crisis creates charter school investment opportunities. These responses don't solve the underlying problems—they financialize them, ensuring there's always money to be made from perpetual dysfunction.

The boring work of governance—infrastructure maintenance, budget balancing, regulatory coherence—gets pushed aside because it doesn't generate shareable content or fundable crises.

Where Outrage Becomes Extortion

Here's the part that breaks your brain: there are literally lives at stake.

While politicians perform outrage theater for engagement metrics, real people are dying from lack of healthcare access, living in tents while housing policy gets filtered through culture war framing, watching their kids' schools crumble while education becomes a proxy battle over book bans.

The moral obscenity is that most of these problems have known, boring, technocratic solutions that get zero political oxygen because they can't be weaponized for tribal combat.

But here's the perfect cruelty of the system: the people most harmed by this dysfunction are also the ones forced to defend it. When you're facing deportation, or dying without healthcare, or watching your rights ping-pong between elections, you can't afford the luxury of stepping back to critique the system's incentive structures.

It's extortion disguised as democracy.

The system creates existential stakes for vulnerable people, making it impossible for them to step back and fix the system, so the dysfunction continues, creating more existential stakes, which locks more people into the rigged game, which protects the system from reform.

I have the privilege of not being directly invested in either party's poke-in-the-eye tactics. That detachment gives me clarity about the system's dysfunction, but it also means I'm not the one making life-or-death calculations about which performative bullshit might be slightly less likely to kill my friends.

The people running this game? They're completely insulated from the consequences either way. Whether Team Red or Team Blue wins, the professional political class keeps their jobs, healthcare, and kids' college funds.

The Principled Response

So how do you hate both the game and the players without falling into false equivalence or nihilistic paralysis?

Recognize that "both sides suck" isn't bothsidesism—it's pattern recognition. When the rules only matter when the other team breaks them, you don't have principles. You have tactics with better branding.

Understand that systems create incentives. The problem isn't that politicians are uniquely awful people (though some are). It's that we've built a system that rewards performative conflict over competent governance.

Demand procedural consistency. If walkouts are bad for democracy, then they're bad, period—not just when the other team does them. If closed primaries are exclusionary, fix them. If gerrymandering is wrong, oppose it everywhere.

Support boring competence over exciting incompetence. If a politician never shows up in your feed, check if they're the one keeping the lights on. Re-elect your city auditor—nobody else will. Fund the council member who reads the whole budget instead of the one who livestreams their outrage about it. Reverse the formula: Competence → Results → Trust → Sustainable Power.

Design counter-systems that reward outcomes over engagement. What would a POSIWID political system look like if it optimized for results instead of fundraising? Start local: support ballot measures that create accountability mechanisms, fund candidates who publish detailed policy implementation timelines, participate in boring city council meetings where actual decisions get made.

Recognize that even reform gets co-opted. Every procedural fix—ranked choice voting, ethics reforms, campaign finance limits—has to fight not just opposition, but absorption into the performance economy. The system is remarkably good at turning solutions into new forms of the same problem. Stay vigilant.

Acknowledge the trap without surrendering to it. Yes, vulnerable people are forced to choose sides in a rigged game. That doesn't mean the rest of us have to pretend it's not rigged.

The goal isn't to stand above the fray feeling superior. It's to be angry enough about the human cost of this performance to demand something better—while recognizing that "better" requires changing the incentive structures, not just swapping out the actors.

In the meantime, feel free to hate the game. And the players. And the extortion disguised as democracy that has turned citizens into renewable resources powering a machine designed to extract engagement rather than deliver governance.

Some problems deserve principled cynicism. When the alternative is being complicit in our own exploitation, this is one of them.