Red Vs Blue
Politics as sport.
[Letter #009]
Good morning, son.
I’ve never actually been to Minnesota, as of this writing. I’d like to go someday, although I suppose the odds are increasingly against that coming about. I hear that the people are really nice, and the weather is far more favorable to my warm nature than it ever was for me back in Florida where I grew up. In the meantime though, I’ve chosen the Vikings to be my pro football team.
They didn’t do quite so hot this season. I had hope for a play-offs attempt, but they blew it. With the Super Bowl coming up though, I figured it would be a good time to talk about team spirit, although maybe not in the way you might initially presume.
See, when you choose a sports team, you’re proclaiming that this is the crew you would put your money on, literally or figuratively. You’re going to proclaim that they’re the best, number one, going all the way, even when they aren’t and won’t. You celebrate every victory as though it was a championship match, especially if it was. You quickly forget about losses because there’s always next week or, if necessary, next year. Next year is going to be the one, you’ll say. And, who knows? It might.
Another interesting quirk of team spirit that I learned growing up was that your team can do no wrong, but the rival team can do nothing right. If your team benefitted from a questionable referee call, “Well, it was clearly obvious and the other guys are just sore losers!” If your rival benefits from an identical questionable call, “Jeez, ref, are you blind?! These officials are on the take! Bribery! Cheats!” It’s the same when your team makes a great play. You cheer for the amazing skill, talent, planning, and execution. If the opponent makes a great play, it was luck, the field was wet, the wind was strong, or it was an act of the divine. Certainly, it wasn’t just great playing by the opponent, because they’re incapable of playing great! Quod erat demonstratum.
This sort of mental gymnastics is common among sports fans. It can reach a level of zealotry that would compete with religions. I can recall growing up, being taken to a little country church (three times a week), that the attendance level would be reliably the lowest of the year on Super Bowl Sunday. Hell, they didn’t even hold church at night on that day, which is pretty serious business for a country church in the Deep South. I want to think that only happened twice a year. The other was for Christmas Day when it fell on the weekend, since the congregation would often have family in from out of town and would rather spend time with them.
Why am I going on about sports and religion? Apart from the relationship that I described above, they also share some commonalities with another item on the list of impolite dinner conversations: politics.
The American system of politics has almost always had two sides. You had your Federalists and Anti-Federalists, your Whigs and Democratic-Republicans, with the rare exception of the third party addition, like the Bull Mooses and the Know Nothings. But, those never last long without supplanting one of the two main parties. They usually just splinter political power away from one of the big two, allowing the other to win. Spoiler effect, they call it.
One of the characteristics of having two sides in a political battle is that it will inevitably become framed as an “us versus them” situation. Our side must win at all costs in order to preserve the gains we’ve made in the past and to continue to make gains against the corruption and backward ideology of the other side. If they win, all of our progress will be destroyed and we’ll be set back by decades. Inevitably, every single election is the “most important election we’ve ever had” and it’s always a “battle for the soul of the nation.” I don’t fully understand that last one, but politicians love to say it. I doubt they really understand it either.
Another characteristic of having two, and only two, sides in a political battle means that it’s particularly easy for the rich and powerful to control each side. When dealing with a parliamentary system, they have to buy out as many parties as there are in power at any time. At least, those parties with enough power to matter. The American system has only two, and each shares roughly half of the power. This streamlines the process of corruption to a level of efficiency that made the US the empire that it is. USA! We’re number one!
It’s remarkable to me how political affiliation has become indistinguishable from sports team affiliation. Our side is the best. We’re going all the way this year. Our team can do no wrong. Their team is evil incarnate. I mean, they even have animal mascots for the political parties. They host rallies and watch parties. America collectively tunes into the various news networks on election night as if it were a championship sports match, drunkenly cheering and shouting at the light-up map on the television screen as though it were a scoreboard. Because, well, it really is.
Because, just like the final score of the biggest Big Game of the year, despite all of the parties and drinking, despite the rallies and logo merchandise, despite the fanfare and confetti…
The competitions are meaningless.
I mean, it’s obvious why sports are meaningless. It’s just a made up exercise in athletics and choreography, which is incidentally a lot of fun. Entertainment for its own sake. The score on the scoreboard is reset after every game. Next round is the same idea as the last. Play, win, celebrate, play again. Or play, lose, get better, play again.
But, how are elections meaningless? This is the future of the country after all. These are the leaders and lawmakers who will shape the course of our nation and, consequently, the rest of the world. These are the representatives who carry out the will of the people who elect them. If they didn’t deliver on their promises, they wouldn’t be re-elected.
Like most of the tales of our great empire, it’s far more mythology than reality. I’ll cover the god named Governance another day.
I’ll get to why it’s all meaningless here soon, but I want to address a couple of side issues first. In the US these days, it’s very fashionable to bemoan how our democracy is damaged or, gods-forbid, destroyed by any number of procedural issues. Citizens United often gets a lot of blame for allowing unlimited legal money to enter politicians’ campaign funds, thus immediately corrupting them. A good many citizens blame the “first past the post” and “winner take all” aspects of our election system, not to mention the enigma machine known as the Electoral College. Hell, the US invented the concept of gerrymandering to secure powerful positions for the elite. American citizens are rightfully quick to blame the rules of the game that favor one side over another. You can’t cry foul if the rules say it’s legal, right?
These complaints aren’t the cause of our democratic woes though, and they’re certainly not the reason why the empire is circling the drain right now. Why? Well, because democratic republics all over the world have solved some or all of these problems in different ways, and yet they still see the same corruption problems, the same nepotism, the same dynastic tendencies. They’re still controlled by the elite, the powerful, and the obscenely wealthy. Those with parliaments still have bought politicians. Those with campaign finance laws still deal with famous candidates winning out over Joe Everyman. Candidates with name recognition and media savvy are always at an advantage to win. So, for however much these conditions make corruption of democracy easier in the US, they aren’t the cause of the problems. We would face them even without the American-flavored quirks.
This is something that bothers me when I encounter folks who are fixated on the American failures of electoral fairness. Would fixing these issues make the process more equitable for all citizens? Yeah, it probably would. But, it wouldn’t eliminate the core issues. People complain about “money in politics,” but you can never, ever remove Money from Governance. Those two creatures are family, and they’re not going to betray the family. They’ll always be together, whether legally or otherwise. No, the people here want something that just isn’t possible: an ideal democracy.
But, that’s just not possible on this side of heaven. What we have now is how democracy actually works. Citizens are taught the myth that the elected representatives are those who have the time, expertise, and knowledge to handle the composition, litigation, and passing of required laws on behalf of busy citizens who can’t otherwise do it themselves. Setting aside the observation that I’ve rarely seen politicians who are knowledgeable in any subject beyond self-preservation, let alone those who can pass laws with any regularity, the myth sets the expectation that politicians will walk the balance between voting exactly as the majority of their constituents would vote (which would amount to a direct democracy) and voting entirely based on their own wisdom and expertise, even if that’s completely against the ostensible preferences of the constituency (which would be an idealized aristocracy). Nothing on that spectrum will happen, of course.
When power is centralized into a government that is given the monopoly on violence to enforce its own power, and that government seeks to exert its control over the population by requiring money circulation via taxation, then politicians in a representative democracy will be encouraged to sell their vote in exchange for personal power in the form of money. Said simply, if money exists, those with money will buy the rules to keep their power and make more money.
Even simpler: hierarchies preserve themselves.
This is why Bernie Sanders never stood a chance. It’s a shame too, as your mother and I were big fans of his presidential runs and really believed things might get better. Back then, we didn’t know as much about the political machine, and we really felt like a few of these insurgent candidates around that time that were coming into congress, and running for the White House, would shake things up and make a big difference.
What we didn’t know yet, and would soon learn the hard way, is that these systems have internal pressures that are truly overwhelming to such agents of change. If the insurgent candidates are demanding too much, too quickly, then it’s possible to simply squash them. Legality is irrelevant, as whatever the system needs will always be technically legal. The establishment politicians can stonewall a newcomer to prevent them from doing anything of value, and this will discourage voters from re-electing the newcomer in the next cycle. That’s a problem that fixes itself in enough time.
I should probably add that even if we did somehow manage to get John Q. Public and Joe Everyman elected into office, they wouldn’t change things. They would be affected by the same internal pressures. Even if we could get them the same funding as the elites, the same media training, and all of the best propaganda to get word out to the people, the result would be the same. They could either assimilate into the machine and do as the other cogs do, or they could be rejected like a body rejects a foreign organ.
There’s an inertia to political systems. They are self-correcting, and they don’t like to yield power to any changes. That isn’t to say they’re alive, per se, but systems do absolutely behave as though they were. In practice, it’s just each individual member of the system working to protect their own interests and power, much like the cells that make up a body. Systems theory teaches that this produces an effect greater than the sum of its parts, which is what the word gestalt means, if you want to sound fancy.
Insurgent candidates can be effective in limited capacities, usually providing relief around the margins. It’s just that massive, sweeping changes they might attempt that go against the trending inertia of the system aren’t going to be permitted. But, they also play their role in preventing catastrophic damage (read: big changes) from the active agents of the “other team.”
It’s sort of like the Overton Window, the concept of what is and isn’t an acceptable idea for discussion. There’s a range of options available to a system to direct its inertia. Any acting force that pushes outside of that range is ignored, if possible, or punished back into compliance, if necessary.
This is why I say that modern elections are largely meaningless. The system will only move within a narrow range of directions. Incremental changes are all that will ever happen within a power structure such as a national government. Red team or Blue team? It doesn’t matter, really. They have their distinct idiosyncrasies, of course, but the direction of the country isn’t changed dramatically by which team sits in power. Those teams are owned outright, and they play the game for our entertainment, which is a method of control. Panem et circenses.
There are those who would argue with me, I know. They would cite FDR as a game-changer for the US or maybe the French Revolution in the late 18th century as examples of how systems can radically and suddenly change on fundamental levels. They’d be mistaken though.
FDR did push some drastic shifts into law, but unions were collectivizing and fighting for workers’ rights for decades prior to his election. They had been pressing for leftist ideas for so long that, once FDR became a possibility, it was a foregone conclusion that he’d get their vote. This is why it took until the mid-1970s for things to switch back to the other direction. It took that long for the business elites to reorganize, setting up the conditions to crush the unions and spread the propaganda to get workers to actually celebrate those actions.
The same with the French Revolution, really. The Ancien Régime had driven France to such levels of poverty and destitution, and had inspired so many revolutionaries to speak out, write pamphlets, and demonstrate, that by the time the guillotine blade fell, such “drastic” changes were expected by the people. The only folks shocked by the shift were the clueless aristocrats who had long-since believed their own preaching about divine rights.
Hierarchical power structures don’t know allegiances or customs. They only know momentum. This is one reason that the Paris Commune didn’t really go very far. The people just weren’t ready for that level of a shift in direction at that speed. Considering that Napoleon came along immediately afterward as dictator, it seems the people were really only interested in maintaining a republic in name only. Les Miserables does have some really outstanding songs though.
It’s like a massive ship at sea. If you want to change its course, you have to be willing to wait awhile as it turns about slowly. It simply won’t change directions immediately. Actually, being forced to do so would destroy the ship. It’s the same way with a power structure. It takes decades or longer to build up the networks, syndicates, and propaganda necessary to swing the ship of state into a new direction. The only outcome to forcing such a system to change directions quickly would be the destruction of the system.
Incidentally, that’s actually why I’m not really organizing to shift the direction of the state today. It’s not just because I don’t approve of there actually being a state (and thus, I would normally advocate for its abolition rather than its reform), but that I don’t think it would have much effect at this stage. To continue the ship metaphor, we’re rapidly approaching a Titanic-level iceberg with the end of dense, abundant energy and climate change destruction. What we’re about to witness will be like nothing that humanity has ever seen before, which is a tremendously bold statement.
We’re going to see the full-on destruction of global hegemony. The closest analogs that we have are the collapses of the Bronze Age Mediterranean empires, the Roman and Aztec empires, the colonial empires, and then the USSR. This one will be world-wide though, and while it’ll probably take a couple of centuries to fully fragment away, the now-hegemonic power structure is already rapidly cracking. At this point, there’s simply no time to organize and change the heading of the ship. This sucker’s going down and there’s no rescuing our present way of life.
So, do I really care whether Republicans pass another bill to strip away freedoms or Democrats weasel out of another campaign promise to improve things? I mean, in the short term, yeah, those things suck, but they aren’t surprising. They’re just symptoms of the current state of things. It’s like when a hurricane rolls through. Your house might flood, and that’s a really terrible thing to happen, but it’s not surprising. And, there’s really nothing you could have done to stop it. You just prepare as best you can and clean up the mess afterward.
As things get worse for everyone, the politicians will attempt to keep control over the angry citizenry by promising to improve their condition and to punish the “villains.” The Red team will say the villains are the “outsiders,” which usually means some non-citizen group of people without any actual power. The Blue team will say the villains are the “insiders,” which usually means nameless billionaires who don’t pay enough taxes. They need a scapegoat, you see. There’s nothing to be gained by declaring the truth of the matter.
This year, the Republicans will run a presidential candidate who’s a raging, racist, psychopathic imbecile. That is to say, they’ll run a fascist. The Democrats will run a candidate who is milquetoast, boring, institutional, and weak. And, that is to say, they’ll run someone conducive to fascism in general. Regardless of who wins, we will move deeper into our police-state authoritarianism. People who scream about what this side is capable of or that side will do if they win are just fans shouting from the stands. Even if some individuals make correct analyses or intelligent points, it’s all just noise anymore.
These are just the expected results of where the process is right now. There’s nothing that anyone can really do about it. Voting is mostly irrelevant. What I plan to do going forward is to prepare as best I possibly can to weather the coming storm and clean up whatever mess remains. Whatever will be, will be, and we can only make the best of what we have available.
Of course, I’ll probably vote this next time around anyway. Much in the same way that I might go to the last baseball game of the local minor league team, if that were to happen. It’s just a fun thing that doesn’t really matter, and I may not ever get to do it again. Red team versus Blue team. Place your bets, folks.
I love you very much, son. I’m sure that you’ll still be dealing with the fallout from whatever is happening this year and in the years to come, but I hope that you’ve found a safe place to be at this point in your life. Maybe if I’m still around, we’ll have taken a trip to Winsconsin or Minnesota. I don’t know if the Vikings are still playing when you read this, but it sure would be fun to take in a game with you in person. Anyway, be very safe, son. Skol!
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
