To preface, let’s start by acknowledging that this is an incomplete theory, one in development. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and with how ambitious this theory is, it’s important to be humble.
We’ll also be using some pretty controversial terminology, so let’s dive right in and define our terms.
“Critical […] Theory”: Basically, I’m playing on Critical Race Theory, but not for nothing here. As defined for our purposes, we’re really only going to gloss over CRT as being “the idea that all issues in American politics can be boiled down to originating from race”1. The goal is to generalize CRT to something that provides a useful framework for analysis on the level of all of human political history, not to contest it, so we don’t really need much more detail than that, although we will touch on some critical details as we go on.
“Intersectional”: If you believe the media caricature, intersectionality is supposedly a conception of identity as a linear system of equations applied in “oppression Olympics” fashion, where you add up all of an individual’s oppressions, factor in multipliers for cross-correlated oppressions, and end up with a composite score that tells you just how oppressed they are.
That’s if you even get a decent explanation of it.
And that’s definitely NOT what it is.
Rather, intersectionality is merely the statement that identity exists along many different dimensions, which can and do intersect with each other in every individual. The core of the analysis is that you have to take each possible individual identity as its own thing, not as a sum of parts - a Black woman is not equivalent to the sum of “Black” and “woman”, and a gay Black woman is not equivalent to the sum of “Black woman” and “gay”. You take each as they are.2Zero-Sum: Specifically, we’re referring to zero-sum dynamics - any dynamic whereby there is only one thing that can be won by one person or group at a time.
In the historical and political contexts, a throne is an obvious zero-sum dynamic: only a single ruler can reign at a time. I won’t belabor my previous analysis on zero-sum dynamics in American politics, but it bears repeating that Single-Member Districts, First-Past-The-Post, and Winner-Take-All electoral college delegations are all examples.
In general, the observation of zero-sum dynamics is that they lead to a binary polarization of factions. I’ve been calling this “Dave-rger’s Law”, after Duverger, because I consider it a generalization of the concept Duverger was getting at with First-Past-The-Post. The specific mechanism is that in any given zero-sum election (IE single-winner and/or single-vote), the smallest faction will be a spoiler to larger factions, and this creates an incentive for the losing side to join up together.
I also want to note that the process I’m trying to describe here isn’t inevitably predetermined, nor instantaneous, nor complete. Sometimes it operates quickly - dynastic succession struggles tend to see factions line up on either side rather quickly3 - and sometimes it operates slowly, as in America. Sometimes it fails to happen, or happens incompletely. But none of that invalidates it as a general principle! They’re the exceptions that prove the rule.
One last thing that rankles critics of Duverger is that supporters often try to use it to make dire pronouncements about their electoral systems, precisely from these mistaken suppositions of inevitability, instantaneity, and completeness: “Unless Britain abolishes First-Past-The-Post, it’s going to end up with only two parties, and it’ll collapse into civil war!”4. Such statements are obviously absurd. But it’s not a tool intended for forecasting like this to begin with! It’s best thought of as a theme: the analytical spine that runs up and down our historical narrative, shaping where it goes, but not predetermining its outcomes.
“In The Beginning…”
The genesis of this theory was my reading Heather McGhee’s book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together”. She makes a pretty convincing case that racism in America has operated as a zero-sum dynamic, and she wants to light the path towards a positive-sum future. Her most vivid example is that of the Whites who, in the face of 1960’s desegregation, chose to deprive themselves of public goods like pools - literally draining them in front of their crying children - rather than share them with Blacks. This sentiment of “if we can’t have it to ourselves, no one can!” is classically zero-sum. More broadly, racial appeals to Whites have always featured a zero-sum framing: “You must exclude others, or there won’t be enough for you”.
I think McGhee’s work can loosely be considered to rest within the frame of Critical Race Theory. She doesn’t explicitly place it there, and she doesn’t make the argument that everything in American history can be analyzed in her framing, but it’s not hard to read between the lines. And this is important, because it helps us understand this next point in the necessary context:
To wit, McGhee has linked Critical Race Theory and a form of zero-sum theory: “zero-sum is the mechanism by which race has taken a central role in American political history”.
This is a profound statement! Many of us are familiar with some form of what is today called the “Race-Class Narrative”, whose most famous incarnation came with DuBois’ “psychological wage of whiteness”. But the underlying conventional presumption is that the wages, and human tendencies towards “tribalism”, “out-groups”, and “other-izing” are the sole reasons why Whites “vote against their economic self-interests”.
And yet, that’s only half of the explanation! Yes, these are all human tendencies, not even unique to Whites. But if we lived in an entirely, comprehensively positive-sum world - in other words, if it were always and inherently true that sharing resources led to an increase in overall resources, and this was a universally understood fact of existence - then the wage of whiteness would be a wash, politically. Why vote to discriminate if you can still have all you want? Why vote against sharing if that actually decreases your slice of the pie? Tribalism, xenophobia, and just plain spite, alone aren’t enough to explain how the scales get so thoroughly tipped towards the odious equilibrium described in the Race-Class Narrative.
But zero-sum thinking is.
That’s what’s so profound about McGhee’s contribution here. You don’t just tell people to hate others, and they happily comply. They need a reason. Back in college, I was told all kinds of stereotypes about other fraternities, often presented as a matter of fact. But if I’d meet one of their members in class or socially, and they just kind of seemed like an ordinary guy, I’d of course withhold judgment, or even reassess. However, the minute that we played a match of Greek-league soccer against the Sigma Nus, and they played dirty AF, all that equanimity turns into “fuck those guys”.
Most people are the same way! We don’t hate others until it costs us something. Positive-sum thinking defeats that hate, or at least keeps it at bay. If one of those same Sigma Nus wingmanned for me, I’d have had no reason to hate him. But pitted against each other, with the meager honor of winning a soccer match at stake, there’s only room for zero-sum thinking. Hence my — really, McGhee’s — original point: getting people to think in zero-sum is the missing explanation for how tribalism turns into racism and other systems of oppression.
A Political Theory Of Everything
Now, what stood out to me was that this isn’t unique to America, and it’s not even unique to racism; those being the fundamental contextual pillars of Critical Race Theory.
Take transgender bathroom bills, towards the latter point. The pitch uses the quintessentially zero-sum construction: “You must exclude trans people from bathrooms, or they’ll assault your children”. I don’t know how to make it more plain or obvious: this isn’t a racial appeal, it’s a transphobic one. And yet, it’s clearly zero-sum, clearly associated with the same politics of racism and exclusion that McGhee described. The point practically proves itself.
As to the former point, even as early as America’s founding, the Framers were beginning to develop an understanding of the danger zero-sum dynamics had posed, although the context of their primary concern was that of dynastic and intra-confederacy struggles5. In today’s polarized era, Federalist 10 is popularly cited as a warning about the dangers of allowing parties to exist - as if banning them were a realistic and desirable goal, let alone remotely what Hamilton’s point was6 - but what’s far less widely known is that he wasn’t just making an ad-hoc argument. Hamilton’s essay was merely the latest entry in a long-standing debate about the role of monarchy and faction in the various civil wars England and the continental powers had endured. Intellectuals of the 17th- and 18th-century Enlightenment had noticed that succession crises and foreign meddling tended to see entire nations polarize into two relatively evenly-matched opposing coalitions. Thus, the American experiment in eschewing monarchy and embracing union was not simply a rejection of one particular sovereign - the British king - but part of a larger attempt to prevent the ruinous civil wars and broken nations that resulted from traditional monarchical power.
But I digress.
So, if zero-sum isn’t unique to America, and isn’t unique to racism, then what are we to make of McGhee’s thesis linking America-centric Critical Race Theory and zero-sum? My humble proposal, dear reader, is to intersectionalize Critical Race Theory beyond the bounds of racism alone, and to universalize it beyond the limitations of America’s physical borders and short temporal span7. Furthermore, I propose to make explicit our incorporation of Dave-rger’s Law into the proceedings.
Hence, I dub this “Critical Intersectional Zero-Sum Theory” (CIZST for short; my suggested pronunciation is “see-zist”).
It’s Critical because, like Critical Race Theory, it seeks to explain a broad range of world historical and political phenomena.
It’s Intersectional because we are taking each struggle as its own thing, not attempting to force them all into the myopic lens of present-day America’s problem8 with race.
And it’s a Theory about how Zero-Sum dynamics operate within any given struggle.
Theories Of Everything Are Dangerous, But Here Goes…
Many readers are by now familiar with the ubiquitous 5-second explanation9 of Critical Race Theory, so let’s do the same for CIZST:
[CIZST] is the idea that every struggle throughout world history can be analyzed in terms of zero-sum dynamics playing out against a backdrop of stochastically distributed10 intersectional identity; and that every instance of progress is the result of mitigating said dynamics through positive-sum means.
One of the best explanations of Critical Race Theory I’ve ever heard, is that it’s a framework ‘intended to serve as a jumping-off point, so people don’t have to keep explaining and relitigating an entire worldview of American history and politics all over again’11. And I think this is rather useful here as well! This essay, after all, is already several pages long. It’s based on a worldview I’ve been building for years. That’s a lot of background to absorb or lay out every single time I want to have a conversation analyzing a popular topic or current event from a CIZST perspective. Better to just write it all down here on the Discourse just the once, and be able to have people refer back to it, right?
One potential criticism that occurred to me, and I think quite relevant to the theme of this section, is the potential resemblance to the Marxian/Hegelian dialectic. Like the dialectic, CIZST does superficially seek to explain history. But where I depart is that I don’t see history as a deterministic system. Marx wanted to predict all of history, now-and-forever, based on rigidly fitting his new model onto his idiosyncratic ideas about the past. I’d rather embrace humility, and avoid such delusions of grandeur. All I’m trying to do is add another tool to the toolbox of historical analysis. CIZST, for instance, doesn’t by itself elucidate Mike Duncan’s “Entropy of Victory” theory, despite the fact that he’s describing a phenomenon common to zero-sum systems. CIZST is a tool. Not the only one.
But what does CIZST mean as an historical “Theory of Everything”? Well, I’d venture that there are 3 broad periods of analysis, to serve as the foundation for later discussions:
Pre-State Societies. Before states developed as organized structures with a monopoly on violence, there were all kinds of societies12. Some were hierarchical, some were not. Some had militaries, some did not.
But what’s important overall is the lack of any kind of state. Life was mainly defined by its zero-sum struggle against nature. You hunted, or were hunted. You killed, or were killed. You reproduced, or didn’t. Violence may have been organized or not, but what uniquely characterizes the struggles of this era is that violence is not oriented towards power.
That’s not to say that there were never positive-sum outcomes. Some primitive sharing-based societies, for instance, were quite positive-sum. But without a state, there was nothing more to fight over. Survival was the basic zero-sum struggle.
Because there’s no politics, and it’s so far removed from today, there’s not much that’s relevant to us right now, except that it does demonstrate that zero-sum is not the inherent state of nature, and that positive-sum is just as natural a dynamic. This is a definitive rebuke to those who would call positive-sum a form of “unnatural” or “unattainable” utopianism. It’s been attained, and naturally at that, and crucially, within the single least forgiving environment for the individuals who achieved it.The Era of the State. As the first civilizations rose, so did the state. And so did the nature of zero-sum struggle progress, to seizing the power of the state.
This took many different forms. The earliest known states were dynastic in nature, and several times already we’ve mentioned succession crises as a form of power struggle. During the collapse of the Roman Empire, the localized need for stability and leadership led to the rise of the feudal nobility: former Roman officials, ex-military types, and religious leaders alike, rushed into the power vacuum to become local strongmen, whose descendants maintained power as a new class of nobility. Power struggles also occurred within confederations and republics. The Roman Republic famously divided into what we today recognize as a left and right - the Populares and Optimates - who failed to successfully process the impacts of growth through conquest. Dynastic China was constantly uniting and fracturing. The Byzantines, Ottomans, Persians, and Mongols all had their own turns at empire, and collapsed in different ways.
Although most of the world lived under some form of feudalism or monarchy, and these arrangements were incredibly diverse in form, they can almost all be boiled down to two primary zero-sum dynamics: (1) struggle between elites and the crown, and (2) struggle of the elites to maintain control over the population.
What uniquely characterizes the struggles of this era is that violence is oriented towards power. The state consolidates its power through violence, and the only way to wrest it away is through violence. And it came from within and without. Xenophobia rightly gets pilloried today, but the line between internal and external threats was much blurrier even as late as WWII, and remains blurry especially for states who have not successfully progressed to the next Era.The Era of Elections. Modern democracy may be quite advanced and complex, but elections themselves are old. Greece experimented with forms of democracy. Long before that, there’s evidence of traditional African forms of elections. I’m not as familiar with ancient Asian history, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were other examples.
Popular votes are not the only form of election, nor alone in being ancient. The Romans had the most famous of the early legislatures, where various types of majority and supermajority rules carried the day. Whether performed by elites or by elected representatives, the fundamental methods of legislation are elective in nature.
In stark contrast to the Era of the State, what uniquely characterizes struggles in the Era of Elections is nonviolence in the exercise of power. Elections are the innovation that allows humans to mediate struggle without violence. As much as monarchy has dominated for much of human history, the smattering of republics here and there speaks also to the human impulse to elect, to exercise power without violence.
I think it could be argued that elections themselves are a form of positive-sum dynamic, but that’s also debatable. On the one hand, elections stabilize society. No more dynastic struggles, fewer civil wars, fewer great man-made cataclysms13. Society is organized, and endlessly reorganized and iterated. On the other hand, certain voting rules can quite easily make elections behave in a zero-sum manner (like First-Past-The-Post). And as we’ve seen that play out in America, reintroducing the logic of zero-sum through elections can turn stability into ossification14. After all, do you know anyone who seriously thinks America’s two-party system will elect to abolish itself, to melt away into a multitude of parties? Of course not. Most indications are that it will suffer some crisis, and even then that a multiparty system is only the most optimistic possible outcome of that crisis. This is because of America’s zero-sum electoral nature!
Some key caveats apply. These periods are not uniform, nor mutually exclusive. They overlap. And that’s okay! Remember the lesson of intersectionality: We take things as they are. We don’t need to insist on arbitrary divisions of history. We don’t need to insist that everything has always been the same. CIZST simply allows us to see what a political system was founded on, what its social divisions are, where zero-sum and positive-sum thinking dominate those divisions both along their axes and at their intersections, and what all of it means going forward.
In Closing
So, that’s it for today. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll see my attempts to apply this framework to various cases. It’ll be a mix of current events, and reviewing some of my favorite narratives and historiographies, as well as addressing the various objections our readers have, to see where the strengths and weaknesses of CIZST lie, and perhaps figure out if our analyses can tell us anything about the near future.
This is a gross oversimplification, but it suffices for our purposes here. My apologies for anyone who’s cringing right now.
Where this loops back to intersectionality’s origins, is that it’s a formulation which allows you to stipulate that Black women aren’t simply discriminated against as women or as Blacks, but as specifically Black women. For instance, the stereotypes of the “Mammy” or the “Sassy Black Woman” can only be understood as stereotypes of Black women, not as stereotypes of women and Blacks respectively. Intersectionality merely allows you to recognize this truth, whereas a strict construction of identity as separate, never-intersecting axes doesn’t.
Although, it’s arguable that coalition formation happens like the famous quote about bankruptcy: “slowly, and then all at once”. IE, most challenger-aligning factions are pretty good and disgruntled well before the succession crisis, and the crisis is just the perturbation that upsets the existing unstable equilibrium.
Or, at least that’s the strawman/boogeyman that critics imagine supporters to be. One of my blind spots is that it’s kind of hard for me to take seriously anyone who buys the rebuttals to Duverger, because they’re so clearly “exceptions that prove the rule”, so I readily admit that I can’t really tell what the landscape of support is here.
Then again, very few people are actually arguing about Duverger out in the wild in the first place.
Since they were rejecting a dynasty, and attempting to knit together the most permanent and successful confederation ever seen.
See: Federalist 6, 9, 16-19, 69.
Spoiler: It wasn’t. Hamilton’s point was basically that (1) since it’s impossible to prevent people from forming parties - by which he meant enduring political coalitions - without either (a) restricting their right of free expression and association, or (b) just brainwashing them all, then (2) the best way to prevent enduring coalitions from arising would be to dilute their power by dividing their representation into a reasonably diverse number of districts.
Hamilton was correct in principle, but the execution left a lot to be desired. It only took 40 years for Van Buren to start knitting together the first enduring coalition, but the writing was on the wall for a while.
That is, the 400 years or so that America’s been a meaningful political entity in one form or another, since it’s clearly far from the only relevant unit of analysis.
I recognize that “problem” is… putting it lightly.
Again, the mainstream version, not its deranged conservative media caricature.
In other words, not exactly “randomly” distributed, but distributed unevenly due to underlying phenomena that are at once too complex, granular, and chaotic to describe succinctly.
Paraphrasing the podcast I linked to, but I think I got the gist of it.
The “Tides of History” podcast is a really great resource here, since it’s spent the past season talking about prehistory.
Before anyone brings it up… Dave’s position is that Nazi Germany was a result of zero-sum thinking and systems - in other words, it’s a perfect example of the other side of this argument, not an invalidation of CIZST.
I suspect this objection will keep coming up, though, so it’s getting added to the list of historical case studies that we will have to address.
The UK exception is another one we’ll have to address. The UK has historically managed to make the *right* decisions despite having a decidedly zero-sum politics, albeit an incomplete one. Perhaps this actually will make it a perfect case study of what happens when the completeness criterion is not satisfied.