Entry 369: Stick to Sports!

I read a lot of sporting news online, and then on occasion sometimes I make the mistake of reading the comments.  I know enough to stay away from the comments on the "big" sites (if you want to feel even worse about the state of humanity than you already do, read the comments after an ESPN story, especially one about race in sports), but even the comments on some of the smaller, "smarter" sports sites are getting to be tough to stomach.  Sportswriters, by and large, seem to be a mostly liberal bunch, and from time to time, since they are human, they might inject a small amount of their own personal politics into a story -- or they might keep politics totally out of their stories, but tweet about political things.  Whenever this happens there is a vocal backlash from both poles of the political spectrum.  Fellow liberals complain because they want sports to be a sanctuary from the constant barrage of political media, and conservatives complain because the typical sportswriter is espousing views contrary to theirs.  From both sides the refrain is the same: Stick to sports!

In different times, I might agree with this notion, but we don't live in different times, we live in these times.  And the following is a comment I put on a blog about this topic:

The problem with the “no politics,” “stick to sports” position is that when you have a president, as we do, who doesn’t cohere to objective reality, just being factually accurate becomes a political position. 

Trump constantly says things that are flat-out untrue — not exaggerations, not spin, not typical-politician wishy-washiness — but straight-up, factual falsehoods. And if you point this out (or use it as the intro for a silly story) then suddenly you’re “getting political,” even though you’ve done something (corrected falsehoods) that shouldn’t be controversial or political at all. 

As long as Trump continues to say things like he had the biggest electoral victory since Reagan, *everything* is going to seem political, because simply acknowledging reality is equivalent to opposing Trump, and a lot of people still wish to live in reality.

I thought that was particularly well put, as did the author of the article who said, "This is well-reasoned, insightful and eloquent.  Even with an allowance of 3500 words, I could not have said it better myself."

It is weird that one of our two major political parties is effectively willing to concede truth to the other party, but so it goes.  Republicans had a choice between reality, and Trump and they overwhelmingly chose the latter.  It's working out for them quite well in the short-term; the long-term is still an open question.  I'm a glass-half-full guy by nature, so I definitely see the path by which this Trump lovefest could backfire on Reps in the future.  But I'm also not naive.  One thing I've come to realize is that a lot of people don't want to live in reality.  It's much nicer to create you own reality that conforms to your political views, instead of vice versa.  And now with the "niche-ification" of news and social media echo chambers, it's quite easy to do as well.

Then there are others who aren't anti-reality per se, they just don't think reality is something to get too hung up on.  Living a lie is just the price of admission sometimes.  This includes most "mainstream" Republicans -- the ones who were against Trump before they were for him (over the course of a few weeks).  I don't think Paul Ryan, for example, actually believes millions of people illegally voted for Hillary Clinton.  It's just that the truth isn't that big a deal to him.  He has different priorities, and if he has to pretend that 2 + 2 = 5 to pursue those priorities, then so be it.  In Ryan's view, it's better to have a lying president who will cut taxes for the rich than a truthful one who won't.  (Jonathan Chait has a good article about Ryan's priorities.)

Finally, there are the people who don't (or can't) pay attention and just vote for the candidate from their "tribe."  I think this covers most people actually.  On a podcast I can't remember, a man whose name I can't remember (great sourcing, I know) studied exactly what were the criteria people used when voting, and it was shockingly simplistic.  Almost all of politics is identity politics.  People identify with a group, and then they vote for the candidate who best represents that group.  And once this candidate wins over the group, it doesn't really matter what they do or say after that.  If Trump has any political acumen at all (other than just getting really, really lucky), it's that he understood this much better than everybody else.

Anyway... I gotta go, but before I do, I wanted to post something.  Remember how I said that reading Trump's remarks was comedy gold?  Here's a perfect example:

Until next time...

Good soup!