Jesus, Politics Really Is Sports
Now I know what it feels like to be a Cowboys fan.
There is no correct way to follow American politics, although I’m aware my personal method of “mostly on mute” is infuriating to the Vote Blue No Matter Who crowd. More recently, I have become a passive rubbernecker with a mix of disgust and perplexion. There is something strange about watching squabbling politicos/grifters—all of whom I have idly, if gratefully sampled, for years in various phases of my own internet addiction—with a newfound skepticism and screwball detachment. It is one thing to know that, say, Joe Biden fell off a bicycle. But it is another thing to find yourself suddenly forming extremely intense opinions about this, and then subsequently developing equally peppery opinions about whether Donald Trump would ever fall off a bicycle. Hordes of hothouse freaks would debate questions revolving around whether he is too obese to mount the seat properly, if it has been confirmed that he can physically move long distances, or if this is representative democracy at work since his BMI occupies the American statistical mean.
Is this normal? Probably. Although that is not quite the same as saying that this is healthy. But This Is A Newsletter! does not exist to provide medical advice in regards to your news or social media consumption, or even provide nifty listicles on how to cure yourself of irredeemable politics-brain.
While I am hardly an expert in human psychology, I am friends with several Dallas Cowboys fans, which is enough qualitative evidence to conclude that it is not good for a person’s emotional psyche to cheer for a bad sports team. There is little to recommend about the experience of perpetual heartbreak or the general self-imposed Stockholm syndrome that comes with placing unwarranted rabid hope in a team like the Cowboys. The time spent rooting for perspiring players whose names most people don’t care to remember isn’t so much wasted as it is strangely spent. It might feel better—or at least less upsetting—to have allocated those hours upon months toward, say, basket weaving, but then there is also the dilemma of where all those shoddy baskets would go. At least the enervating, useless clutter of mentally rearranging a busted or injury-riddled lineup for maximum effectiveness has the decency to linger in your head.
But the part of this that is truly a bummer is not the futile attempt to feng shui the janky deck chairs on a rapidly tilting cruise ship, which is standard irrational sports fan stuff. More than that, it is a fan’s moral duty insofar as it involves taking the situation they’ve been handed by the powerful and generally pretty craven people sitting atop that situation, and then trying to make the best of it with the nonexistent agency and leverage that fans have.
It is not ideal that everything about being alive in the United States at this moment is at least a little like this. But this opens the conversation of whether there really is anything that could puncture the toxic but broad impossibility of accountability for our sadistic and shameless ruling caste.
These past few months solidified what it means to live in a country that is transitioning from a sort of staged-managed ersatz democracy into a purely authoritarian nightmare. It began innocuously enough, with the Biden Administration establishing what they unironically call the “Ministry of Truth.” Republican politics these days is more or less centered around the steadfast belief that it is Literally Orwellian to be fired for saying the n-word on Juneteenth, so it seems politically realistic to expect them to acquiesce to a government agency that directly rips off 1984. Realistically, this needless bureaucratic appendage will end up presenting explanatory slideshows about how to spot Russian trolls or will create a certified government account that retweets unhinged right-wing rants with the caption, “not a good look.”
There was also a slew of under-the-radar decisions by the Supreme Court that are making America a thoroughly worse place to live—but in a boring and suffocating way, like smothering citizens in a lead blanket that smells like farts. The most noteworthy of their judiciary policymaking, of course, was the overturning of the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that has largely maintained a federal constitutional right to an abortion, which is the sort of bizarre unforced error undertaken only by justices with a cry-laughing emoji where their brains should be.
This decision is petty and exhausting, even in this particularly noxious environment of unreality and trolling. It makes fringy hardcore anti-choice stances into something much bigger, and does so entirely because deeply repellent people who feel affronted have mustered into a minoritarian coalition that wields disproportionate power in a nation where they despise a majority of the population and that majority despises them back. Predictably, Red states have begun prosecuting women who have miscarriages, placing legal bounties on women seeking legal abortions, banning contraceptives, or enacting a host of draconian measures, but there is really no telling what comes after this. While this is a problem for more decent and discerning people, the chucklefucks hooting in support of restricting reproductive rights are too braindead or willfully ignorant to realize they’re rationalizing themselves, and America, into a toxic garbage heap of white power and white grievance in service of plutocracy.
This is one of those occasions where it is useless to spend time reacting to blue-check lanyards sharting out smooth-brained takes, or relitigating the 2016 or 2020 elections, or rehashing squabbles about Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s legacy. Anything that anyone could possibly say during this nauseating period feels insufficient and grasping. In no way does the Democratic Party deserve to be exonerated from this absolute failure, but this is an unspeakably awful mass violation of women, worsened by the fact that the immediate political solution to this just feels completely foggy.
For the last 40 years, even as their opposition party engaged in bold frontal assaults on basic decency, Democrats made an ultra-abstracted assumption that Republicans would never overturn Roe v. Wade because they would suffer immense electoral backlash and would lose a crucial fundraising and mobilizing tool. But we are living in the post-overreach era. There isn’t anything the conservative movement has made explicit about its vision for society that can be considered too extreme for them to pursue. They control the Supreme Court, most federal courts, and most state governments. I don’t know if social progress will be rolled back in drips or in a deluge, but it cannot be assumed this won’t happen.
And now we are back to the really bleak part of caring about the team that doesn’t care, which is the hollowed-out complicity it forces upon those who persist in caring.
It would be a stretch to say the Democratic Party actively tanks, but they aren’t built to win, either. The fans of Team Blue could take Democrats up on its increasingly flagrant dare and stop caring. Instead, many of them adopt the perspective that conflates a certain well-credentialed administrative cynicism and technocratic savvy with actual foresight, and consign themselves to whatever plan is or isn’t in place—for as long as that plan is operative, or just legible. Neither is a great deal. It is not much fun to parse through and puzzle over and pine for a political party that seemingly exists to do nothing, especially as they continue to gaslight its fanbase into believing there is no hope beyond half-measures and preemptive capitulation. Pete Buttigieg, in response to the nationwide infant formula shortage, said on “Face the Nation” that, “This is a capitalist country. The government does not make baby formula, nor should it. Companies make formula.”
For something that everyone agrees is either dying hideously or is actively and deservedly already dead, the American Dream™ seems to be in robust and luridly purple health. Yet, the defend-Democrats hysteria has somehow exceeded the post-2020 primary peak. Pointing out that this administration, and preceding Democratic administrations, have been a willful failure is somehow doing the work for Republican smear merchants. Preserving basic civil rights was the ostensible point of all these decades of strategic hopelessness on the macroeconomic front, or it was at least a mechanism of crude discipline to muster votes. Now the Democrats are left with nothing outside of, Get a load of these other guys!
Then, after the dreary 10-day period that featured two national-profile mass shootings—one targeting a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo that was live-streamed and motivated by the “great replacement theory,” and one in Texas that saw 19 children slaughtered—I was morbidly curious about how cable news pundits would react. There was something terribly grim and pre-defeated about their unanimous conclusion: There’s nothing we can do! We don't have the votes! It was pure insanity. They plunged into tendentious spiels about Biden assuming the role of “Consoler-in-Chief” and “drawing from his well of pain to heal the nation.” Biden is this nation’s sin-bearer, born to take whopping L after L for America.
Media surrogates for the Blue Team have spent the last two years blundering toward the barely latent subtext that, given nothing was ever going to change for the Democratic Party’s exertions, fans would do well to relax and find a way to enjoy watching a team whose leaders remain determined neither to step aside or do anything to improve it—and who also really do not appreciate being yelled at about any of that. The jargon and justification are all too familiar, and there is nothing but this kind of conjecture to think about. The Very Serious People and the Twitter-brained commentariat squabbling over the failures of the Biden Administration are all essentially recriminating every failure of the Obama Administration.
We exist at the depraved whims of right-wing criminals, ghouls, vampires, and outright psychopaths. A lot of institutions, a lot of workplaces, and a lot of minor day-to-day interactions unfold under this general and queasy dynamic. This moment, for all its many other manifest and lurid failures, is an extremely opportune time to be an aggressively unpleasant putz whose sole avocation is to impose their individual unpleasantness onto everyone in their vicinity. This isn’t an ideal way to run a society, or really anything else, but “Representative” is the right word to describe the forces behind these unbearable trends.
In the absence of a team worth rooting for, fans are encouraged to find their own perfect bite of this particular shit sandwich, and are also tasked with seeking enjoyment in a more abstract sense. So with all this being said, I regret to inform you, dear reader, that I did not indulge in the bleary thrills of watching the supposedly riveting Congressional testimony about the January 6 coup attempt. I’m sure everyone glued to their news programming is itching for Donald Trump to finally be brought to justice, for America to reach its own Götterdämmerung—which, undoubtedly, will happen very soon. I will remain checked out of this whole ordeal until there’s a live CSPAN broadcast of the Cheeto-In-Chief’s public beheading.
Maybe I should worry if I’m shirking my duty as a citizen of democracy by ignoring this stunning moment unfolding before our very eyes. Maybe I should wonder how history will judge me, as I’ve elected to binge the third season of Barry instead of watching Blue Team weenies glom onto this singular issue to compensate for the Biden administration’s abject and multi-front failures. This should, if I were a Twitter dweeb, be something that keeps me up at night. Unfortunately, these hearings were airing on prime time and the news networks decided to go head-to-head with the Stanley Cup Finals.
In a pure entertainment sense, with entirely too few exceptions, the American political-media ecosphere only produces a few different types of politicos, nearly all of whom exist within a strikingly narrow range of aesthetics—which doesn’t exactly make for compelling television. This is why the federal government lording over this remarkably diverse country looks like a geriatric version of the “Brady Bunch,” in which virtually all the little faces on the board are shriveled-up blobs of soy. In an otherwise decently functioning universe, watching these fossilized dopes fumble their way through this stage-managed decline would be a little more than mundane. However, it is almost breathtaking when you contemplate how appallingly cruel and stupid every single thing in the culture is right now.
The only hope, here, is that no one actually has any idea what’s going to happen, but we have free will to change all of this because we don’t know the future. This acceptance, while it may be cope, is also cathartic. The future does seem predetermined and doomed, and as each accumulated crisis increasingly destabilizes our assumptions and preconceptions, it will all be harder for any force to control.