Reflections on How Our Games Are Played, On and Off the Field

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There’s a routine moment in any game of American football that, in this age of dysfunction and wrath, has started to seem rather extraordinary. I’m referring to what normally happens when a team loses possession of the ball. 

Men who just a minute or two earlier were “gallop[ing] terribly against each other’s bodies,” in poet James Wright’s words, cooperatively trot off the field, after a certain amount of celebratory whooping by some defenders, crossing paths with their offensive or defensive teammates who trot out to replace them. 

Hanging over all is the mutual recognition that the momentum will likely swing again and the feeling of winning or losing be transitory. There will be new opportunities, if not in this game then in the next one, or the next season. The realities of a fair sport put a damper on excessive gloating and grumbling. 

For such a violent sport, football depends on a remarkably delicate web of belief, tradition, habit, and trust. Football works because an overwhelming majority of the participants — players, coaches, and fans alike — demonstrate an allegiance to the rules of the game that transcends their desire, however fierce, to win.

What would happen to this culture of fair play, though, if a certain team — let’s call them, I don’t know, the “Elephants” — started flatly contradicting reality every time they fumbled the ball or their quarterback threw an interception? 

What if the Elephants and their fans convinced themselves that it was acceptable to cheat to maintain control of the ball when they played their arch-rivals, the Donkeys, because the Donkeys were not merely different but evil? 

What if, when the rules said with crystal clarity that it was time to give the ball up to the Donkeys, the Elephants’ coach got in the habit of urging fans to storm the field and attack the referees?       

I think you know where I’m going with this.

The Problem With ‘Just Win, Baby!’ in Electoral Politics

One of the two main “teams” in US politics has gone rogue in a way that no football franchise today would dream of doing. (If only we had a healthy political system and a crisis in the football world rather than vice versa!) 

While few Americans seem willing to kill or die for either major party, we may be heading for a political meltdown this November. That, of course, is when Democrats stand a good chance of winning enough votes to regain control of one or both houses of Congress, but Republicans at all levels, having acquired a dangerous appetite for self-deception and self-righteous lawlessness during the Trump era, will be tempted to refuse to give up the metaphorical ball.  

Many commentators have outlined the forms this refusal might take, along with things concerned citizens of all political orientations can do to help ensure that this year’s elections will run as smoothly as the midterms in 2018 and 2022. It is crucial both to alert the public to likely dangers, such as voter suppression by the Trump administration, and to remind voters that they still have some power in this country. But articles on defending democracy tend to define our problems, and potential solutions to them, too narrowly. 

Take a February 1 editorial in The New York Times called “Trump Could Interfere With the Midterm Elections. You Can Help Defend Them.” It was published a few days after Donald Trump sent Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to accompany FBI agents as they seized hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots from an elections office in Atlanta — after which Trump, in what would have been a major scandal under any other president, reportedly called the agents to “prais[e] and than[k]” them. 

In that context, and given how brazenly Trump has advertised his intentions to intervene in the midterms, despite his lack of constitutional authority to do so — because, naturally, the only kind of election that the “evil,” “sick” Democrats have a chance of winning is a rigged one — it makes perfect sense that the Times editorial board framed the reigning American champion of election misrule as the antagonist in their narrative.

When the Fans Join In

However, it’s worth taking a moment to recall that Trump didn’t elect himself. Swing voters in battleground states picked him in 2016 — not despite the fact that he had broken all the rules but because of it. 

In 2020, even in defeat, voters turned out for him in numbers that were shockingly high, given how many deaths his chaotic pandemic response was contributing to every day. 

He returned to office last year because millions of voters were either: a) willing to excuse his and his supporters’ republic-trashing behavior on January 6, 2021; or b) eager to embrace conspiracy theories that absolved their “team” of responsibility for trying to overthrow the 2020 election. 

Or, perhaps worst of all, they just didn’t care.

Trump is one part, albeit an indisputably elephantine one, of a much larger culture of paranoia, disinformation, apathy, corruption, illiberalism, and, indeed, nihilism — virtually the exact opposite of football’s fair-play culture.

Conspiracy thinking still seems to have a tight grip on the GOP, though. As of a few months ago, according to the nonpartisan initiative Bright Line Watch, only 38 percent of Republicans agreed that Joe Biden was the rightful winner in 2020. 

That isn’t just because Trump takes every chance he gets to whine about being “robbed” in that election. Trump is one part, albeit an indisputably elephantine one, of a much larger culture of paranoia, disinformation, apathy, corruption, illiberalism, and, indeed, nihilism — virtually the exact opposite of football’s fair-play culture. 

A Deeper Dysfunction

The Times editorial board is right about several things: Democracy-loving citizens should volunteer as poll-watchers, donate to groups dedicated to protecting everyone’s vote, and so on. But those kinds of short-term efforts will do little to transform the broken political culture of which Trump and Trumpism are only the most obvious manifestations. 

This will be true even if Democrats manage to regain possession of the “ball” in November — even if (wonder of wonders!) they manage to impeach Trump again and, this time, remove him from office.

Why? In part because, as countless observers have noted, Democrats bear plenty of responsibility for the sorry state of the US political order. 

I know that this will prompt many gun-hating, electric-car-driving, “In this house we believe…” Democrats to cry, “But we’re the rule-followers, not the rule-breakers!” Any reasonably unbiased observer would have to agree. 

The trouble, however, as Steven Hahn documents in Illiberal America: A History, lies in how the rules have been written. You can’t build a true democracy on a commitment to fairly apply unfair rules. 

Democratic elected officials have been all too willing to craft laws and implement policies that further privilege White, highly educated, wealthy liberal elites — all, of course, while loudly declaring themselves the party of multiculturalism and the working class. 

The frequent dissonance between Democrats’ words and actions has not been lost on ordinary people. Among many other constituencies, these include residents of Rust Belt states whose economies have been gutted by the offshoring of manufacturing jobs under Democratic as well as Republican administrations; Black people devastated by the mass incarceration policies that really took off, as Hahn notes, under Bill Clinton; and progressives who saw how hard the Democratic establishment, backed by a seemingly unlimited supply of corporate money, worked to keep Bernie Sanders from becoming the nominee in 2016, and again in 2020.

Hahn does locate most of the illiberal energy coursing through American politics today on the right, and he acknowledges that the cultural and economic factors that have brought us Trump and the current right-wing rampage have been complex. Nevertheless, I agree with him that, as left and center-left parties around the world “moved toward the middle and increasingly accepted the world that conservatism and neoliberalism [were] making, the road toward Trump and the far right had fewer obstacles.”

The intoxicating sense of vindication that Democrats would take from a landslide (We were right all along!) would make this kind of reordering seem unnecessary to them. “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” the victorious Democrats would likely ask themselves, ignoring and thereby perpetuating what has long been broken at the deepest and most systemic levels of the national political game. Another opportunity fumbled away.

A Democratic landslide in November would usher in a desperately needed return to regular order in Congress, but what about the deep reordering of priorities and values — the “revolution of values,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called it in 1967 — that the long-term health of the Republic requires? 

The intoxicating sense of vindication that Democrats would take from a landslide (We were right all along!) would make this kind of reordering seem unnecessary to them. “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?” the victorious Democrats would likely ask themselves, ignoring and thereby perpetuating what has long been broken at the deepest and most systemic levels of the national political game. Another opportunity fumbled away.

Like Football Fans, Political Fans Hate a Boring Game

So socioeconomic fairness is a huge and badly underappreciated issue for Democrats. As for the play side of things, one major problem with Democrats’ rule-following tendencies is that, to be blunt, they tend to make politics boring. 

Yes, boring is vastly better than psychotic, but let’s put it this way: If swing voters imagined Democratic politics as football, they would probably envision a typical game lasting five or six hours. Because play would constantly be interrupted by technocrats and bureaucrats wanting to make sure that every blade of grass was in its place. By cheerfolx in non-objectifying gray outfits made of recycled organic yak wool leading the crowd in half-hearted chants of “This is what democracy looks like!” and “The people united…” 

And by polite, dull, middle-aged academics like me getting on the JumboTron to mildly scold fans for their carbon footprints and their unhealthy fascination with violence, and to expound on football’s strong resemblance to settler colonialism. 

Voters in November may well choose normalcy over pandemonium, as they did in giving Biden the edge in 2020. But that shift could turn out to be as short-lived as the Biden interregnum, and the work of Democrats as open to right-wing sabotage as the work done by the Biden administration — if Democrats in Congress yield to the temptation to just keep playing the same “game” their party has helped rig, and to play it in the usual, joyless ways, instead of hustling to do whatever they can to reinvent the game altogether.

An Imperfect Analogy but a Useful Model    

Obviously, football is an imperfect analogue for politics. In an ideal world, both political “teams” would be sharing the “ball” back and forth whenever they could so they could score as many touchdowns as possible for “fans” on both sides — which makes no sense whatsoever in sports terms. 

But football does offer a valuable model for those of us who would like to promote a true revolution in American politics, not just a return to a status quo that was working for far too few of the people in the United States — people of all parties — long before Donald and Melania Trump came down that golden escalator in 2015. 

Related: The Beautiful Game in an Ugly Era: My View as a Soccer Referee and Journalist

Maybe we can draw some inspiration from football’s ingenious blend of sportsmanship and spontaneity, bone-jarring competition and matter-of-fact cooperation, safety and risk, fan loyalty and shared commitment to the greater good. 

Maybe, as we look for ways to break the chokehold that social media and the tech industry currently have on our society, we can borrow some of football’s strategies for getting people together IRL and giving them a genuinely fun alternative to staring at their phones. 

Maybe both Republicans and Democrats can relearn some simple truths that any Pop Warner kid knows: On this field we believe that winning means nothing without the possibility of losing; the rules don’t exist for their own sake; and, you may not like the other team, but there’s no way you can have a game without them. 

Bart H. Welling, Ph.D., is an associate professor of English at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. He is currently writing a book titled Resisting Energy: The Long Struggle Against Irresponsible Power, which traces the origins of our current energy and climate predicaments back to the early days of European colonization of the lands that became the United States.