Tragedy of the Commons Word

My phone buzzed four times on the evening of November 3, all of them texts from campaigns, all of them asking for money, and three of them using the same word. A progressive champion needed me before midnight. A progressive majority was within reach. One candidate, whose platform I happened to know, promised to fight for progressive values in a Congress that had just changed hands. The platform was Medicare for All, tuition-free public college, a federal jobs guarantee and a large public housing program. It is a coherent program, and it has a name. Its author’s party, in another decade, would have called it democratic socialism, and the candidate’s own biography says she joined the Democratic Socialists of America in college. The texts never used the word.

Nothing in those messages was false. The word was simply standing in for another one, the way a familiar face is sent to the door when the stranger behind it might not be let in.

The television was on while the texts came in, and the word was there too. Anchors sorted the night’s winners into the progressive wing and the moderate one, a correspondent asked whether progressives had overreached, and a panel argued about what the progressive base would demand of a new majority. Nobody on the screen said what the word meant, because nobody needed to. Repeated a few hundred times in an evening, on every network, by people paid to sound sure, a word stops being a claim that can be checked and becomes part of the furniture. A viewer who asks what progress, toward what, sounds like a pedant at best and at worst like someone who has lost touch with the world everyone else lives in. Husserl called that unquestioned world the natural attitude: what goes without saying, so thoroughly that saying it out loud seems odd. A culture whose natural attitude is set by repetition has a particular weakness. Its people can argue hard about which side of a word they belong on and still be unable to ask what the word is doing, and a disagreement they can’t name is one they can’t settle, only win or lose. The words that most need questioning are then the ones it feels least sane to question.

A word held in common

Picture a field at the edge of a village where every family may graze its cows. Nobody pays rent on it, nobody is turned away, and a poor household with one cow has the same claim to the grass as a rich one with twenty. It looks like one of the best things a community could own, and for as long as everyone takes a modest share, it is.

In 1968 Garrett Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons” in Science, borrowing the parable from an 1833 lecture by William Forster Lloyd, to show why such a field doesn’t stay that way when it is open to all. Each herdsman gains the whole benefit of an extra cow and bears only a fraction of the cost that the extra grazing does to the grass, since the damage is shared by everyone. Game theorists later wrote the same situation as a prisoner’s dilemma with many players. Whatever the others do, each one does better by adding a cow. If the neighbors hold back, the extra cow eats grass they left; if they don’t, holding back alone only leaves more grass for them. Restraint feels like virtue and works like a donation to whoever has none.

So in a field open to all, the cheater doesn’t have to be common. One is enough. The first family to graze past its share profits from everyone else’s restraint, and the others, watching their grass go to his cows, have every reason to start grazing harder themselves before it’s gone. The field ends one of two ways: stripped to dirt by a race nobody meant to start, or fenced by whoever was strong enough to take it all and call the taking good management. Either way it is ruined by people none of whom set out to ruin it.

A word is held the same way, open to all. No one owns “progressive,” and everyone who speaks the language can graze it. Its value is its reputation: what a listener expects to find when it’s used. A speaker who borrows that reputation for something it doesn’t describe gains the whole benefit, a warmer reception or a larger donation, and the cost is spread across every later speaker who needs the word to mean what it used to. Spend enough borrowed reputation and the word stops carrying any. It becomes a team color.

“Progressive” had a lot of reputation to spend. A century ago it was the name of a reform movement aimed at machines and trusts, run by people like Robert La Follette in Wisconsin, whose program was the direct primary, the initiative and referendum, civil service in place of patronage, regulation of railroads, and a faith in trained expertise. Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party platform of 1912 added social insurance and a minimum wage for women, so the word was never free of provision. Under all of it lay the plain sense of the word, which Irreconcilable Differences traced: an attitude toward change, a readiness to try the new thing.

“Socialist” had a different reputation, heavier and more contested, and in American campaigns a costly one. The Democratic wing that now goes by “progressive” took its present shape from the rise of Bernie Sanders, and Sanders is the nearest thing American national politics has had to an avowed socialist. He called himself one as mayor of Burlington in the 1980s, sat in Congress as an independent rather than a Democrat, and stood at George Washington University in June 2019 to define democratic socialism, by name, as the completion of Franklin Roosevelt’s economic bill of rights. His 2016 and 2020 campaigns drew a generation of organizers into politics, and membership in the Democratic Socialists of America grew from a few thousand to tens of thousands in the years after. In the plain sense of the word he is not a progressive at all. His program has barely changed in forty years, its center is provision by the state rather than the trial of anything new, and his 2020 climate plan called for a moratorium on new nuclear plants. He used the word “socialist” and paid for it in every debate that followed. Most of the campaigns that share his program have taken the cheaper course. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which Sanders helped found in 1991, carries the older name. A program whose center of gravity is the state as provider of health care, education, housing and work travels under a word that once meant breaking up the trusts and letting voters write their own laws.

None of this is peculiar to the left. “Conservative” now covers tariffs, a stronger executive, and a preservationist politics that would have startled Edmund Burke. “Liberty” has been grazed so hard that this collection has to keep saying which kind. “Commons” itself suffered the fate in Hardin’s hands. His pasture was open to anyone with no rules at all, which is not what a commons was, and Elinor Ostrom spent a career showing that real commons, with known members and enforced limits, often last for centuries. The phrase “tragedy of the commons” came to mean that shared things always fail, which is roughly the opposite of what the record shows.

How the grazing pays

Words have always drifted, and most drift is harmless. What gives this drift its charged pace is that, in a politics driven by media and money, a word survives by what it earns, not by what it describes.

In 2012 Barack Obama’s reelection campaign tested hundreds of email subject lines on small samples of its list before each send. The plainest of them, “I will be outspent,” raised more than any other, about $2.6 million.

A cable chyron is chosen the same way, by what holds a viewer through the next break; a search ad is bought on the word people type, not the word that fits. Each test is reasonable, and each selects for reception over description. Run millions of them a year and the meanings that survive are the ones that raise money.

Social construction is the name scholars give to the way a shared meaning is made and held by the people who use it. Every word is constructed in that sense, and that isn’t the trouble in itself. The trouble is it gets constructed by whoever pays most to use a word, for an audience that mostly hears it while doing something else.

Epoché

Edmund Husserl had a name for this condition long before campaign texts existed. In the Logical Investigations (1900–01) he separated an empty intention, a word meant without anything given to fill it, from a fulfilled one, where the thing meant actually shows up. Most speech, he thought, runs on empty intentions, and that’s fine: no one can stop to fill every word.

Late in his life, in the fragment published as “The Origin of Geometry,” he described what happens over generations. An original sense sinks under layers of use, sedimented the way silt settles in a riverbed, and the word passes from hand to hand without anyone reactivating what it first meant. It keeps working long after the sense under it has gone.

His remedy, first set out in Ideas in 1913, he called the epoché, a Greek word for holding back. In the epoché a person suspends the natural attitude, bracketing the beliefs and associations that come attached to a thing, not to deny them but to see what remains when they aren’t doing the seeing. His slogan for the whole method was zu den Sachen selbst, back to the things themselves.

When I bracket the word “progressive” in that third text, the first thing I notice is how much falls away: a party, a color on a map, a set of people I am supposed to like or dislike, a feeling of being on the side of the future. What’s left is thin. Progress toward what, and by what means? The word in the text has no answer, because it was chosen for the feeling and not for the reference. When I set the platform beside it instead, the program reads clearly, and so does its own name. Democratic socialism is a position people hold for reasons, argued in public by people like Sanders under its own flag, they have a significant organization world-wide, but it is expected that in the US the true word ‘socialism’ for a set of positions and core beliefs will never be accepted.

The epoché doesn’t land on a dictionary. Husserl wasn’t after a word’s first definition but its fulfillment, the thing it is about given in experience. Bracketed and refilled, “progressive” turns back into a stance toward change and perhaps technology, one any party can take or refuse on a given question, and its program-holders recover a name that says what they want.

Both words become more useful, not less, because each now does work the other was covering for. A word that means one thing can be used powerfully, to persuade, to bind, to promise, because a listener knows what is being promised.

The factions under the word

The confusion costs more than precision. A word stretched over a whole party hides the party’s factions, and since November 3 the factions are what matter. Democrats now hold both chambers, and After the Shellacking followed what the loss meant for the other side. What the win means for this side depends on which of its wings steers, and “progressive” spread across all of them makes the wings hard to see.

With the word bracketed, at least two are plain. One is the Blue Dogs, the coalition of fiscally conservative Democrats formed in 1995, mostly from districts a Republican could win: wary of deficits, friendly to progress, cautious about the program on my phone. The other is the democratic socialists, in and around the DSA, for whom that program is the floor rather than the ceiling. They differ on what may be owned and on how much the state should provide, which are the questions Irreconcilable Differences kept apart from the question of change. Calling the second wing “progressive” and the first “moderate” files both on the wrong axis.

The other party has the same blur under a different word. “Conservative” covers Republicans who want a strong executive, loyalty enforced through primaries, tariffs set by decree and the security services pointed at domestic enemies, and Republicans who want the state small everywhere, its wars declared by Congress and its debts paid.

On the Nolan chart the first wing is authoritarian and the second libertarian. Thomas Massie, who lost his Kentucky primary in May after voting against the president once too often, belonged to the second. The two wings agree on little beyond a dislike of the Democrats, and the word “conservative” lets each pass for the other.

Put “progressive” back on its own axis and it cuts across all four.

A Blue Dog who wants permits for data centers, new transmission lines and a reactor in her district within this decade, over the objections of her own party’s review process, is progressive in the plain sense on that question. So is a democratic socialist who wants a city to try social housing on the Vienna model, or a public bank, instead of another round of vouchers.

A libertarian Republican who wants a state to license a new kind of medical clinic, or let a school open without the usual charter requirements, is progressive about that. So is an authoritarian Republican who wants to run the border, or the census, on facial recognition and AI nobody has tried at that scale. Progressive in the plain sense is no compliment; it says only that the new thing is welcome. A member of any wing who defends zoning that freezes a neighborhood, a coal plant past its time or an agency’s slow review because it protects a constituency is conservative on that question, whatever the caucus is called. Some of each are progressive in the true meaning of the word, and none of it shows while the word is a team color.

Pastures with rules

Ostrom’s commons survived because the people who used them knew one another, set limits on use, watched for cheats and paid a cost when they were caught. Words have such commons too, smaller than a national campaign: a guild’s vocabulary, a field’s technical terms, the language of a town meeting where the person who stretched a word last week is sitting across the table this week. In those places a speaker who borrows a word’s reputation is noticed and pays for it. The Fairest Tax of All was one such small rule, set down by this collection for itself, to call a tax by its mechanism instead of by its founder.

In a national campaign there’s no one across the table. The text arrives, the donation clears or doesn’t, and the next test runs. I read the fourth message last. It came from a candidate I had never heard of, in a district I don’t live in, and it asked me to stand with real progressives before the deadline. The adjective had been added to rescue the noun. By the next cycle, someone will be testing which word rescues real.

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Sources

• Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968)
• William Forster Lloyd, Two Lectures on the Checks to Population (1833)
• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)
• Progressive Party platform of 1912
• Robert M. La Follette, La Follette’s Autobiography (1913)
• Bernie Sanders, speech on democratic socialism at George Washington University, June 12, 2019
• Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, “The Green New Deal” platform, on new nuclear plants
• Democratic Socialists of America, membership reports after 2016
• Congressional Progressive Caucus, founding history (1991)
• Blue Dog Coalition, founding history (1995)
• David Nolan, “Classifying and Analyzing Politico-Economic Systems,” The Individualist (January 1971)
• Al Jazeera, Republican Thomas Massie who stood up to Trump defeated in Kentucky primary
• Joshua Green, “The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails,” Bloomberg Businessweek (November 2012)
• Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations (1900–01), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913), and “The Origin of Geometry” (1936, published 1939)
• Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality (1966)

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A note on how this piece was written: every argument, source, and structural decision in this essay is mine. I chose the examples, worked out the logic connecting them, and directed what each paragraph needed to say. The sentences themselves were drafted with AI assistance from that outline and then edited by hand. I’d rather say that plainly than have a reader guess at it.