A lot of words have been strewn about in order to describe, diagnose, and cure sports team politics in the United States. If you haven’t read or heard these words, let me summarize: sports fans root for their favorite team no matter what. This leads to contradictory, inconsistent viewpoints and opinions. All you want is for “your team” to win. For example, I am a fan of the Los Angeles Lakers, and I hate the Boston Celtics. When point guard Rajon Rondo played for the Celtics, I thought he was an annoying, dishonest player. Once he played for the Lakers, I thought he was a crafty, intelligent player.
In U.S. politics, there are two main teams, the Democrats and the Republicans. A great many people identify strongly with one team at the complete exclusion of the other team. They root for their political team in a similar way to a sports fan rooting for their sports team. They ignore their own team’s faults, or recategorize them as strengths, and they focus on the other team’s flaws. They root for their team to win more than they care about their team doing a good job or society actually improving.
Now, this phenomenon has been explained by a lot of people in the so-called “center.” They claim that, “Oh, both Republicans and Democrats engage in sports team politics [which is true], and I, the centrist, rise above that, developing a better view.” That’s certainly a popular point of view, and I’d prefer that to the sports team method. It’s more honest, but it often leads to the centrist falsely believing that they don’t have their own biases, which they of course do. But I want to make clear that this is not my point of view. I am critical of both sports team politics and the centrists from the point of view of the left. To the left of the so-called “left” team. I’m a Lefty [it’s in my name].
Anyway, there is one element of sports team politics that I find particularly interesting. It is a very, very strange style of rhetoric. I’ll explain by example. There is a history teacher named Mr. Beat who has a YouTube channel. He mostly discusses American history. One of his videos featured him watching and responding to PragerU videos for seven hours. PragerU is a conservative channel, very much on the Republican team. Mr. Beat watched a PragerU video about Richard Nixon. The video essentially said that, while Watergate was bad, Nixon did a bunch of good things, and the scandal overshadows his achievements.
One of the things that PragerU includes as a positive for Nixon’s legacy is his environmental policy. He built up the EPA, and he passed environmental regulations. Now, if you know anything about PragerU, you know that they despise environmentalism and environmental regulations. In fact, the very next video that Mr. Beat watched was about the so-called “War on Cars,” and how environmental regulations are bad. So, do you like environmental regulations or not?
It’s a peculiar thing because they’re essentially defending their team member from the point of view of the other team. Odd! “Hey liberals, you shouldn’t criticize Nixon as much because he made environmental regulations, which we hate. But we won’t criticize him for that!” What the fuck? I find this strategy to be particularly interesting because most sports team politics involves a simple uncritical view of your own side combined with a thoughtless hatred of the other side. But this example is different in that it is an explicit advocation of your team by the values of the other team.
Of course, the other funny thing about sports team politics is when fans venerate their old team members, completely ignoring the team’s shifting ideology over time. Abraham Lincoln is a fun example of that. And the Civil War in general. As former President Trump said, “If you go back to the Civil War, it was the Republicans that really did the thing.” He also talked about how “people never give us [the Republican Party] credit for this, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, right?”
That is so emblematic of the comparison to sports teams. Like I said, I’m a Lakers fan and I hate the Celtics. I wasn’t alive for the 1980s or 1960s versions of the rivalry. HOWEVER! I still praise the old Lakers and criticize the old Celtics. Cause that’s my team! I’m just gonna be biased towards my team because it’s fun. It’s not particularly serious. It’s funny when Republicans latch onto Lincoln while simultaneously praising his greatest enemies, the Confederacy. I wonder if they’d be more supportive of removing Confederate statues if we called them “Democrat Statues.”
Those are most of my thoughts on the matter, and of course it’s not just Republicans and conservatives; Democrats and liberals engage in sports team politics as well. This, perhaps, is even more damaging because it enforces this warped version of “the Left,” where the Democratic party is mostly a corporatist, imperialist party who are just a bit nicer to gay people. More to say on that later!
Lefty Forrester 