UPDATE: Tariq Ali has a good commentary on Chavez’s defeat.

Sunzi and the Greek historians describe various tactics of commitment, like burning bridges and ships to destroy any avenues of escape, that galvanize soldiers to fight to the death. Swedish berserkers committed themselves to battle through intoxication. Fanaticism, however, makes such measures redundant, and fanatically loyal elite units of every era have demonstrated this, as have guerrillas and freedom fighters of many kinds. It is not only from dispersion, anonymity, and other elements of asymmetry that guerrillas derive their power, but from the rightness, real or perceived, of their struggle.

The United States might have learned Scaevola’s lesson before applying the policy of controlled escalation and punitive bombing in Vietnam. Aside from positing too much North Vietnamese control over the will of the Viet Cong, it ignored as irrelevant the beliefs and motives of the South Vietnamese fighters, which gave them the strength of soldiers whose route of escape has been closed to them. Ironically, the master theorist of cold war American strategic doctrine, Tom Schelling, seems to have neglected justice as a factor of commitment in conflict, despite the popular cliché that people will fight hard when they have nothing to lose. The rightness of a struggle is sometimes crystallized in an explicit ideology, as in the US war of independence, the Sandinista revolution, or the Indian Swadeshi movement; and ideology in one of its senses, as explicit and deeply held conviction, can have much the same power as fanaticism, when it explicates a struggle for justice.

Ideology and belief are sources of power in a conflict, whether as avowed belief, which creates commitment, or tacit, framing assumptions shaped by power and social relations, which obstruct social change. Yet aside from Marxism or the plotters of hardline neoliberalism, who learned many of their strategies from Marxism, there seems to be very little explicit thinking about how to create an ideological force suited to one’s strategic purpose. The “mainstream” academic literature on agenda-setting focuses on the manipulation of popular opinion by elites, but has little to say about the formation of intellectual leadership and opinion elites themselves, or how they change over time, taking these as largely given. A recent issue of Critical Review devoted to a revisit of Philip Converse’s 40-year old paper on “Belief Systems in Mass Publics” is a case in point. Yet shifts in ideology do happen over time, sometimes dramatically. No theory or practice of political strategy is complete without a sense of how, and why.

Two, the NDP doesn’t have the talent that Harper’s team has. Harper’s senior team is certainly very smart, with a diversity of skills each of which contributes to a successful electoral team. Flanagan, Harper, and Chief of Staff Ian Brodie all have a ruthless, calculating sensibility disciplined by study of economics and politics through the lens of social choice theory and game theory. They have an appreciation for what William Riker calls the art of heresthetic; they study and learn from successful strategies of the past. (Heresthetic: “the activities by which a person frames, primes, or otherwise sets the agenda and provides the context and interpretation for a subsequent decision.”) Patrick Muttart is a brilliant marketer and campaign tactician, with a fine psychological sense, and an encyclopedic knowledge of electoral campaigns in English-speaking countries. Doug Finlay is a top-notch campaigner. There is no one on the NDP team of this calibre, and little chance that there will be. This comes down to another vital difference.

One way of expressing this difference is in terms of self-calibration. The Conservatives are better self-calibrators and better calibrators of others than the NDP. The senior leadership of the NDP, especially Layton, Chow, and Gallagher, fancy themselves as smarter than smart but they’re not half as smart as they think they are, and they’re certainly not as smart as Harper and team. As I wrote yesterday, in any strategic encounter, the accuracy of your self-assessment and your assessment of others is decisive, all other things being equal.

The NDP team suffers from emotional flaws that are easy to exploit: not only the belief in their own smartness, but the need to believe they are smart; in the case of Layton, the need to always feel liked, and always feel on the up-and-up; in the case of Chow, an utter intolerance of criticism, and a vengeful, grudging spirit. Another weakness: Layton can’t and won’t ever fire Chow from his central leadership team, which might be the single best HR decision he could make. This compounds his team’s collective weakness. Not that Harper doesn’t have his own flaws, but all of the Layton team’s flaws are easily exploited, and it’s obvious to any shrewd observer that the Conservatives enjoy playing Jack Layton.

Another way of thinking about the disparity in self-calibration is in terms of propensity to groupthink. After the Conservatives’ 2004 election showing, Patrick Muttart wrote a savage criticism of the campaign. Harper rewarded Muttart by making him a central part of the ruthless debrief that followed, and eventually promoting him to a senior position in the PMO, responsible for strategy. Layton, Chow, and Gallagher respond to ruthless criticism with hygiene, isolating the critics and preserving the groupthink that has always been endemic in NDP inner circles.

Not that Harper and team are all-knowing or all-powerful. The lesson of Karl Rove’s demise is that even great strategists can be overwhelmed by history or the mistakes they make in one domain (in Rove’s case, policy) that eventually cost them in their field of strength (in Rove’s case, elections). Events are unpredictable, fortunes change, incompetence can be rewarded, and competence thwarted. But Harper’s team has many of the qualities a good strategic team needs, and Layton’s team doesn’t.

Lost in all of this, though, is that a serious force for left-wing ideas can’t achieve them through the ruthless gamesmanship of the sort employed by Harper’s team. On the left, the agenda and how it is achieved are inseparable. At this point, Marxism 101 is instructive. The state in capitalist society exists to manage and preserve capitalist economic relations, through the rule of law, protection of property rights, and so on. The state has relative autonomy to broker compromises which might diminish profits or threaten narrow sectoral interests, in the interest of preserving the system as a whole. By and large, though, the state and its ancillary estates, including the media, reflect the dominant consensus, and this reflects the various interests and power of capital. No serious left-wing agenda can be achieved through parliamentary means without a fundamental relation to social forces that create power outside the state and challenge the power of capital. All major progressive reforms have been achieved in circumstances where the “left” had some kind of external leverage on the state and capital to force concessions. No parliamentary gamesmanship can deliver this. From which it follows that the current leadership of the NDP are either naive, or insincere, or both. At any rate, they don’t represent a serious force for progressive change.

The short version is: it’s a rare person who gets their head in the game while keeping their principles and their strategic goals pure.

Philip Tetlock, in his excellent book, Expert Political Judgment, begins by enumerating sceptical arguments against the possibility of forecasting. One of these is the game-theoretical argument — in a game between evenly matched players who know they are evenly matched, and know that they know they are evenly matched, and so on, the outcomes are a random walk. In practice, however, players are not evenly matched, and part of the skill in any strategic encounter is calibrating the other players’ abilities. Tetlock refers to a Financial Times experiment which asked readers to guess a number that was 2/3 of the mean guess of all the respondents. The ‘correct’ game theoretical answer here, assuming all the other players are rational, is 0 (2/3 of 50 is 33, 2/3 of 33 is 22, and so on until 0). The actual winning guess was 13. Mathematically sophisticated but psychologically naive players lost this game. The skill in the game was entirely in the calibration of other players’ guesses, and their guesses about other players’ guesses, and so on.

On one level, this is not news. The importance of intelligence to military operations, and the importance of maintaining an asymmetrical position in intelligence, has been known since war was first practiced. Some aspects of intelligence gathering are straightforward–in battle, estimating the enemy’s physical complement; in politics or business, the competitor’s financial position, and so on. Other aspects, though, involving morale, character weaknesses, competences, motivation, in sum, the mind and heart of the opposing strategist, and the minds and hearts of one’s own personnel, have been less well documented. Sunzi and the Chinese strategists describe assessing one’s personnel and the opposing general. But this knowledge has never been systematized. There are reasons to believe it can’t be. But that will come in a later post.