From Game Theory to Trumpism: The Idiotization of Strategic Rationality and the Mood History of the American Century
Preface The logics of formal rationality, geopolitical abstraction, and American exceptionalism became progressively entangled over the course of the 20th and early 21st centuries—and, in figures like Donald Trump, they culminate in the idiotization of social reality. What began as a set of highly abstract, formalized tools for thinking the world (automata, deterrence, strategic choice) has, through successive degenerations, been embodied in performative forms of power that no longer simulate rationality, but parody it.
1. The Strategic Turn: Von Neumann and the Formalization of Rationality
John von Neumann stands at the root of this genealogy. In modeling economics, warfare, and even biology as systems of formal logic, he initiated a powerful abstraction: human beings as strategic agents, interaction as games, life as computable pattern. His work birthed game theory and cellular automata, sowing the idea that human behavior could be managed and predicted through mathematical formalism.
This was not merely an intellectual project. It aligned with a national mood: mid-century America, facing the Cold War and commanding planetary scale, needed tools to manage vast complexity without losing control. Game theory offered the illusion of rational mastery, enclosure through comprehension.
2. Cold Abstraction: Kahn and the Thermonuclear Mind
Herman Kahn extended von Neumann’s logic into the thermonuclear domain. For Kahn, even nuclear war could be modeled, strategized, and won, so long as one remained emotionally detached enough to treat mass death as a variable.
This was the next phase of enclosure: not just mapping the game but inhabiting its cold logic, turning apocalypse into a scenario. American exceptionalism here becomes explicit: while the world might burn, the U.S. could endure.
Kahn’s work reflects a shift from isolationism to strategic exceptionalism: America would not simply retreat, but govern global chaos through calculation. Kahn's posture mirrors the national affect: paternalistic, distant, and singular. (Kahn, notably, served as one of the real-life inspirations for Stanley Kubrick’s character Dr. Strangelove—a parody that may, in retrospect, have undershot the reality it satirized.)
3. Tacit Signals and Social Systems: Schelling and the Interface of Strategy and Behavior
Thomas Schelling softened this logic, introducing the human back into the model. He studied how agents coordinate not just through commands, but through tacit signals, expectations, focal points, and credible threats. His models of segregation, brinkmanship, and commitment mechanisms made clear how micro-decisions could create macro-patterns.
Schelling’s great insight: even limited preferences, bounded rationality, and social signaling could lead to large-scale enclosures. But he left the political stakes largely unexamined. How these enclosures are legitimated, maintained, or weaponized would fall to future actors.
4. Homo Economicus Ascendant: Trump as Strategic Idiot
Trump represents the performative degeneration of this trajectory. He is not the rational strategist von Neumann envisioned, nor the detached planner Kahn embodied, nor even the social modeler Schelling portrayed. He is instead a synthetic product of all three: he preserves the outward form of game logic—competition, leverage, advantage—but strips it of coherence, proportionality, and rational structure. His moves are impulsive rather than calculated, improvised rather than strategic, theatrical rather than credible.
In Trump, all interaction is reduced to “the deal”—a hollow transactionalism that desaturates schmooze-level social reality. Where others used game theory as model, Trump treats it as ontology. There are no deliberative processes, no shared frameworks, no community. There are only wins, losses, leverage, and spectacle.
His America is the idiotized imagined community: a national ego wrapped around grievance, projection, and brute negotiation. And at the core of this performance lies a grotesque metaphor: auto-erotic sovereignty. Power is exercised not as responsibility, but as gratification; diplomacy becomes dominance theater; international relations are reenacted in the register of “if you're famous, they'll let you”— with the world cast in the role of the submissive other. The nation becomes not a commons, but an extension of his libido and his brand.
In Trump, Homo economicus is no longer metaphorical. He is the game—and the only rule is him.
5. Mood and Machine: National Affects as Systemic Drift
This history isn’t just intellectual. It’s affective. Each phase of this genealogy correlates with a national mood:
- Postwar anxiety seeks mastery (von Neumann)
- Cold War fatalism seeks survivability (Kahn)
- Late-century ambiguity seeks coordination (Schelling)
- Post-2008 decline seeks vengeance (Trump)
What binds these is not ideology, but a progressive enclosure of interpretive frameworks into systems of calculation, control, and strategic egoism. Sociality becomes strategy. Meaning becomes leverage. Deliberation becomes posture.
6. Toward a Counter-Genealogy: Communitaria and the Resaturation of Meaning
The Communitarium Project emerges as a counter-move: not rejecting enclosure per se, but recognizing that it has been captured and idiotized. Rather than surrender social interaction to strategic modeling, the project insists on rebuilding ensembles of mutual interpretation, where meaning is not extracted or computed but co-constituted.
The Communitarium doesn’t long for a lost intimacy or preach anti-rationalism. It proposes a resaturation of schmooze-level sociality through collective deliberation, shared interpretive labor, and contextual moral economies.
In short: to resist the idiotized legacy of von Neumann, Kahn, Schelling, and Trump is not to deny structure or strategy—but to re-embed them in community, where computation serves life, not the reverse.