Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country by Steve Almond

Author:Steve Almond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American Government, Anthropology, Campaigns & Elections, Cultural & Social, Democracy, Essays, Executive Branch, Political Ideologies, Political Process, Political Science, Social Science, Social Theory, Sociology
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Published: 2018-04-02T03:00:00+00:00

I can remember waking up on the morning after the Reagan/Mondale election of 1984. I was a freshman in college, appropriately bereaved, and wandering down my dorm hall when I saw a large, bearish figure in shower sandals lumbering toward me. This was Sam Burkholdt, the hall’s resident hockey player. “We kicked your ass,” Sam boomed. “Your guy got three points! Three lousy points!”

Mondale actually received thirteen electoral votes. But as a fellow jock I wasn’t about to quibble. I understood the prerogatives of an ass whooping. I didn’t even blame Sam. He was an insecure kid born into wealth, a loudmouth and a bully who was responding to the election night coverage, which, with its giant scoreboard and color-coded map, looked more like a sports broadcast than anything else.

Americans have always, to some extent, chosen to regard politics as sport. What’s changed is that our media and political classes now function to intensify this bad story. Rather than interviewing experts who might illuminate policy, cable news outlets stage pundit cage matches. Candidate debates are no longer forums to showcase competing ideas. They are promoted and analyzed like prizefights. Who won? Were there any knockout blows?

When Mitch McConnell announced in 2009 that the GOP’s top priority would be to make Obama a one-term president, he was acceding to the reality that his voters now function as sports fans. When the enduring image of your national convention—and its unifying message—is an entire arena chanting “Lock her up!” are you staging a political event or a sports rally?

Obama entered office seeking to change Washington’s political culture, hoping he would win points for equanimity and respect. Obama lauded sports, but he never managed to get his head around the sports brain, nor the cycle of escalating recrimination and intransigence it initiated. He took a technocratic approach to policy, courted consensus, and avoided conflict. He hoped the presidency would place him above the fray.

Trump understood the fray was all. What he discovered over the course of the campaign was a media willing to render politics as sport, and an electorate willing to endorse his vision of democracy as a zero-sum game.

He won some cheers bashing the NFL. But if Trump had even a particle of common sense, he would have recognized that the league’s ascendance foretold his own. For years, fans had been training themselves to compartmentalize, to ignore the corruptions of the game so they could enjoy the spectacle. A football game is dense with strategy and marked by moments of transcendent grace. But it has no moral philosophy beyond an improvised whim to vanquish the opponent. This is the sports brain making sense of the modern world. It is now in the White House, making our national policy.

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