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Back in August 2015, based on a TPM Reader making the connection, I described how a concept from the world of military intellectuals — the OODA Loop — helped explain the uncanny power of Donald Trump’s impulsive and thoroughly un-theorized way of engaging in political fights. It’s not the point of this discussion, but I need to explain the basic OODA Loop concept to have it. So I’ll summarize it quickly: In any fight or combat, each side is in a process of seeing what’s happening, understanding it, making a decision how to react based on it and then attacking. John Boyd, the military theorist who devised the concept, called this Observe, Orient, Decide, Act — OODA. If you move fast enough, you can act and thus change the observed reality to something new while your opponent is still in the process of making sense of and reacting to the old one. Conventional military theory captured the same insight, albeit in a less analytic way, in its emphasis on taking and maintaining the initiative. Act and make your adversary react to you, not vice versa.
In Boyd’s formulation, faster loops drive not just an advantage but a cascading failure on the part of your adversary. They’re continually reacting to an outdated reality while you’re creating new ones further to their disadvantage. This is what was happening as Trump was dispatching one GOP primary opponent after another in 2015-16. While they were convening their comms teams and deciding to release a statement or arrange an impromptu press avail he was on to the next Twitter attack or calling in live to CNN.
I thought of this yesterday when David’s must-read Morning Memo flagged TPM Alum Brian Beutler reacting to Jack Smith’s latest power play, escalating Trump’s latest immunity claim directly to the Supreme Court. Quoting Brian: “When was the last time you recall a Democratic leader responding, like Smith or like Republicans, to a new development with a confident power play? Or seizing an opportunity to test and expose the depths of the institutional right’s bad faith before God and everyone?”
I often find myself in the “Okay, but …” mode in these conversations. That is even though in many ways the whole TPM thing was originally based on espousing and modeling a more aggressive and confrontational way of approaching politics and political questions. Some of that is characterological. Maybe some of it is age. But most of it is based on the observation that people get themselves riled up about doing X when X actually isn’t possible. They want to pump the balloon full of air. But the balloon has a hole in it. So they’re actually wasting their time. In fact they’re doing more than wasting their time. They’re riled up about doing X, and when X doesn’t happen — because it couldn’t, the balloon has a hole in it — they get demoralized. They decide they’re in a club that doesn’t care about filling the balloon. Or maybe their leaders actually want to keep the balloon empty for hidden and sinister reasons? It all leads to demoralization, enervation, a collective spinning of wheels to no effect.
But this role of explanation can easily, imperceptibly, drift into a counsel of inaction. I noted on Tuesday that we’re well past the point where the turn of our politics after 2016 can be written off as the product of chance or accident. A working near-majority of the country is wedded to right-wing populist authoritarianism. We need to do everything conceivable in our power to keep Team Authoritarianism out of power and have a plan and the resilience to act when they do get into power. Because no one wins every election. But having a plan is a throwaway line. Have a plan! No plan survives first contact with the enemy. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. Plans are less important than the determination to act, to stay on the attack, to lunge into the opportunity for every power play that is on offer, to create the ones that aren’t on offer. Plans run downstream of that determination. They grow out of it.
Brian is right in the subtext of his question. Not just elected politicians but all of us in our roles in the public square, large or small, need to find ways not just to act but to go on the offense, taking and holding the initiative. Be making the story rather than reacting to it or telling it. It’s not just that politicians need to be making power plays like prosecutors. Prosecutors need to be acting like prosecutors. How is it we can be in this place where Trump may successfully, through an accumulation of individually absurd motions, put off his legal reckoning to the date when his return to the presidency will render it all moot?
Speaking of which, it’s time to pledge to pass a Roe Law in 2025 if Biden wins and Dems hold Congress. Because there’s going to be a national abortion law. It’s just a question of what kind.
See how that’s done?
There’s no time to waste. Napoleon said it: always attack!