Hobbes's mess was a tragedy of the commons, Leviathan was a coordinating authority intended to bring about a plus-sum outcome: life that is not solitary, poor, etc. Voltaire - who was good enough at math to break the lottery - said that if God did not exist, man would create Him. To do what? Morality is a form of coordination. God is Leviathan with respect to morality for those who believe in a moral God. I find that way of talking about human behavior useful. Maybe you don't. I call it game theory. Maybe you don't. It is what it is.

So the United States elected Donald Trump as President in 2016. How did that happen? Here's one theory. White, Christian, cis-het, males have dominated American life since the seventeenth century. That leaves a lot of categories of people with the fuzzy end of the lollipop. Over the centuries, various groups have eaten away at the privileges enjoyed by that group. In recent years, the number of assaults on the privileges of the dominant group has grown (in metaphoric terms) exponentially.

I would argue that the assault on privilege is a tragedy of the commons. So many groups have demanded so many things - almost all of them good things - like fish to eat - just as the social networking fishing gear has become more powerful - that the anti-privilege fishing grounds have been overfished, and, the pay-off has gone negative for all the fishermen. That's not a prescriptive observation, but those who do prescribe actions may want to integrate it into their thinking about what to do next. Is that "instrumentalism" or "game theory" and, more important, why would anyone care?