The Seditionist's Dilemma: Why Waiting for Republicans to Turn Is a Losing Bet

Note from the author: I have a daily practice. Before I let myself pick up my phone to watch something mindless or play a game, I “eat my vegetables” first: a few minutes in my journal, chatting with my subconscious. Sometimes small talk, sometimes much more. It has been good to me over the years. If you want to try it, you can do it with anything, but we make Existentialist Republic journals at theexistentialistrepublic.com if you want one. Free downloads of everything else, guides, booklets, full-length books, at buymeacoffee.com/THEER.

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There is a thought experiment in game theory called the prisoner’s dilemma. Two people get arrested. The police separate them and offer each one the same deal: give up the other person and walk free. If both stay quiet, both go free anyway. If one talks and the other doesn’t, the one who talked walks and the silent one gets the worst punishment in the scenario. If both talk, both take a moderate hit.

The experiment assumes strangers. People who don’t know each other, can’t communicate, and have no idea what the other person will do. Under those conditions, betrayal looks like the safer individual bet.

But Republicans in that room aren’t strangers with no way to read it. They’ve been in this room for years, and they all know what happens to the ones who talk.

Liz Cheney lost her primary by thirty points. Adam Kinzinger didn’t wait to find out what his margin would be. Mitt Romney spent his final Senate years isolated before announcing he wouldn’t seek another term. Jeff Flake and Bob Corker both saw what was coming and left before it arrived. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of Trump’s most visible loyalists for five years, pushed back on the Epstein files and was called a traitor within days, a primary opponent funded against her before the week was out. The New York Times described what happened to Republican dissenters across the board as being driven into retirement, defeated in primaries, or cowed into silence.

Now look at the other side. January 6 participants received pardons. Loyalists received cabinet positions and ambassadorships. Corporations and foreign interests that poured cash into the inauguration fund bought access to the president. People who purchased enough of Trump’s memecoin earned a seat at a private dinner with him. Regulatory problems and legal exposure had a way of disappearing for companies that made the right contribution at the right time.

This is how the mob works. It runs on a code established long before anyone gets put in a separate room. Keep your mouth shut and everybody benefits. Everybody knows everybody else knows it. Talk and the people you work with every day will make sure you suffer far more than you ever would have gained.

Republican officials are not paralyzed by uncertainty about what their colleagues will do. They already know. The enforcement is consistent, it is public, and it is carried out by the same people they work with every day. They cooperated. They did it around the decision to stay quiet, and it holds because the punishment flows in one direction and the rewards flow in the other.

For that to change, someone outside the room has to make defection feel less dangerous than loyalty. That requires institutions with both the independence and the will to apply real pressure. The Justice Department and FBI have been hollowed out, their most principled people pushed out, the ones who remained left to run the same calculation themselves: speak out and lose everything while changing nothing, or stay quiet and tell yourself you’re doing what you can from inside. The Supreme Court handed a sitting president near-total immunity from criminal prosecution. The six justices who made that happen were appointed by the same criminal organization that benefits from it.

That is where states come in. State attorneys general can open criminal investigations into federal conduct wherever that conduct touches their state’s criminal code. DOGE’s access to state residents’ federal data has potential exposure under the criminal statutes of nearly every state in the country. The Epstein files implicate conduct that occurred in multiple states with their own criminal codes and their own investigative authority. States can pass laws right now that explicitly criminalize the federal corrupt behavior happening in real time, closing the gap between what the federal government is doing and what state prosecutors can charge. This changes who is sitting outside the room with leverage.

So the enforcement is internal. The rewards are real. And every individual actor inside the structure, running the same numbers, lands in the same place.

One more thing worth saying plainly. This does not stop at the edge of one party. The prisoner’s dilemma extends inward, like an onion. Any politician calculating survival inside an electoral autocracy knows they will largely be unimpeded as long as they don’t fight back in the ways that actually work. Perform opposition without threatening the arrangement and keep your seat. Fight in ways that actually threaten it and get made an example. We don’t have to look hard to find politicians outside the Republican Party who have chosen the first path and called it strategy. That is a different article. But it would be dishonest to describe this as if only one party has people making that calculation.

The room holds because everyone in it already knows what happens to the person who talks. We have been waiting for individual courage to break a code specifically designed to make individual courage the most expensive option available. That does not change through moral appeals. It changes when the threat from outside gets large enough to compete with the threat from inside. Right now, Republican officials calculate that their donors, their base, and the people enforcing the code are more dangerous to their careers than we are. Every Republican who has decided that quiet collaboration is a safe career move needs to find out that it isn’t. That means phone calls they cannot ignore, campaign events they cannot run without loud disruption, donor meetings that turn angry, and a name that becomes toxic in their communities. Make sure all your neighbors know that your representative is a traitor or a lamb or whatever the facts show. It all amounts to sustained, legal, relentless pressure that makes riding this out not worth it, whether they are driving or just along for the ride.

I have a daily practice. Before I let myself pick up my phone to watch something mindless or play a game, I “eat my vegetables” first: a few minutes in my journal, chatting with my subconscious. Sometimes small talk, sometimes much more. It has been good to me over the years. If you want to try it, you can do it with anything, but we make Existentialist Republic journals at theexistentialistrepublic.com if you want one. Free downloads of everything else, guides, booklets, full-length books, at buymeacoffee.com/THEER.

• No Kings Day is March 28, 2026. Find your nearest action at fiftyfifty.one.

• Sign a general strike pledge card at generalstrikeus.com.

• Find or build a mutual aid network in your community at mutualaidhub.org.