A “Pareto improvement” (named for the 19th-century polymath Vilfredo Pareto) is a useful idea from economics: It is change that makes at least one party better off without making anyone worse off—because different people have different preferences and priorities, it is possible to reallocate goods in a way that is not zero-sum.
E.g.: Imagine that you have a peanut butter cookie in front of you and that you are sitting across the table from the Cookie Monster, who has a chocolate chip cookie in front of him. (There’s been a lot of Sesame Street in my life lately.) Maybe you have a peanut allergy, or maybe you simply do not like peanut butter, but you do not want that peanut butter cookie that is in front of you—while the prospect of the chocolate chip one near to hand is agonizing, because you do want a cookie in the worst way. The Cookie Monster, however, is a friend to all cookies, and he does not care whether it is a chocolate chip or peanut butter cookie going into his fuzzy blue face: C is for cookie, and that’s good enough for him. If you trade cookies, then you are better off and he is no worse off. Differences in preferences and the related issue of marginal utility (the Saudis do not very much need one more barrel of oil and would happily trade some oil for … pretty much anything else) are a big part of what makes free exchange (including free exchange across borders) such an effective way of improving life for everyone involved: It isn’t only about comparative advantage and specialization.
Being able to spot a Pareto opportunity is also a big part of how political negotiation works—at least it was back when negotiation and compromise were what politicians normally did with their time instead of being part-time pundits and full-time social-media trolls. Donald Trump likes to present himself as the great deal-maker—there is a rumor he may even have read The Art of the Deal, though I do not believe it—but he is not very good at it, especially when you set him alongside such capable men as “master of the Senate” Lyndon Johnson or Sam Rayburn or a canny presidential negotiator such as Harry Truman. If you consider Trump’s vacillating inconstancy in—to take one of dozens of examples—the Ukraine matter, it is clear that he cannot calculate the trade-offs, because he lacks two pieces of information critical to any negotiation: He doesn’t understand what the other guy wants, and he doesn’t know what he wants. Ukraine presents a dramatic example that is geopolitically and historically significant, but consider the incredible fact that we are now a decade into waiting for a Trump health care plan that has been, supposedly, three weeks away since people who are eligible to vote today were in the second grade. (Senate Republicans have an idea of tinkering around at the edges of the so-called Affordable Care Act, and the most Trump can say is: “I like the concept.”) Trump is the Cookie Monster of presidents: All id, no superego, and a singular appetite: V is for vanity, and that’s good enough for him. Barack Obama got a prize, I should get one, too!
This is not a problem unique to Trump or to Trump-era Republicans. We have, perversely, entered into a period of politics defined by what I call “Pareto punishment”: I don’t care if this development makes me or the people I care about any better off in real terms—as long as it hurts or humiliates the other side. Republicans want to get rid of the ACA not because they have better ideas—there are better ideas out there, but damned if you’ll hear Mike Johnson say two words about them—but because it was Obama’s signature accomplishment in office, for which reason they desire to vandalize it. Democratic talk about “inequality” is almost never focused on improving the lives of the poor but instead focused on how to take things away from hated classes of people. DOGE was almost entirely an exercise in inflicting anxiety and humiliation on political enemies and cultural rivals, as is Trump’s war on higher education.
Some political disputes are impossible to resolve because they involve fundamental principles—and, in some cases, fundamentally American principles: The fight over abortion, for example, pits one libertarian argument (for women’s individual bodily autonomy) against another libertarian argument (for the bodily autonomy of the unborn), at the root of which is a disagreement over a question of fact (whether there is a second individual with rights to consider). Some disputes are difficult but not impossible to resolve because they involve good-faith disagreements over preferences and priorities: Americans who are more risk averse tend to prefer a larger and more expensive welfare state and are willing to trade some quality and innovation in medical care in exchange for more certainty about prices and access to care, whereas Americans who are less risk averse are more open to approaches based on market operations, competition, and consumer choice. There is not really a correct or incorrect level of risk aversion, objectively speaking: We have different preferences based on our own situations, our own experiences, and our own temperaments. And that is precisely the kind of situation in which it is possible to come up with solutions based on, or at least adjacent to, that Pareto concept: When something is very important to the other side and not very important to you, that is the place to give in—and when something is very important to you but not very important to the other side, that is an opportunity for getting your own way.
But when political failure—or political treachery—is defined as cooperating with the other side or by giving the other side anything of importance to its partisans, then there is no room for compromise or consensus-building. At this political moment, Republicans are particularly perverse: If a Republican leader manages to win some Democratic support for a Republican proposal, this is taken by the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world as an indictment rather than as evidence of basic political skill on the simpleton’s theory that if the Democrats are for it, then it must be bad. Greene may be trying to rehabilitate her reputation lately, but that remains her fundamental orientation.
I have a sense, admittedly based on nothing more than subjective evaluation, that the Trump movement already is over, and that what we are seeing today is only its death twitches before rigor mortis starts setting in. A movement based on entirely negative deliverables—Épater la bourgeoisie!—is naturally going to be a short-lived thing. If my sense is correct, then this is a ripe moment—if anybody has the wit to make something of it. Doing that starts with looking across the table and starting the conversation: “Okay, then—what do you want?”
