Politics as Sport
The game is the game.
University of Bath political scientists Peter Allen and David S. Moon have just published a peer-reviewed article on a topic of longstanding interest here at OTB: “‘Huge fan of the drama’: Politics as an object of fandom.” The abstract:
On June 12th 2019, in the middle of the UK Conservative party’s leadership contest, journalist Marie le Conte tweeted ‘so this is my first proper leadership contest as an actual Westminster person and honestly it’s such a hoot…huge fan of the drama’. This tweet is exemplary of a wider phenomenon. Politics is the activity through which power and resources are allocated across society – who gets what, when and how. Politics, and what it does to all of our lives, is consequential. Yet, despite this, many of those who pay the most attention to politics do so from the position of a fan, engaging with it in the way that others engage with entertainment forms like sport and television shows. Previous studies have paid attention to the fandoms and anti-fandoms that develop around individual politicians and movements – in other words, they maintain a focus on the behaviours and actions of these fans of politics. By contrast, in this paper we explore the construction of politics itself as an object of fandom, asking what happens to politics when it is treated in this way. The activity of politics can be socially constructed by humans to serve some purpose. Thus, who does the constructing and how they do this, affects what it becomes. Our claim is that constructing politics as an object of fandom (i.e. constructing it as ‘the drama’) affects politics itself.
This finding is not the least bit shocking, especially in the Trump era.
Some excerpts from the paper itself follow, interspersed with commentary.
This enthusiasm, however, is not solely the preserve of an otherwise disengaged public suddenly roused to interest by headline events; it is just as true, if not moreso, of this paper’s particular focus – members of the ‘intensely politically involved’ (Allen, 2019; Allen and Moon, 2020), an elite group comprised of individuals working in and around politics, including prominent political journalists and pundits who, as part of the cottage industry surrounding politics, are employed to report on and frame it for public consumption.
Indeed, I would argue that fandom is precisely what draws these people to the craft. Those interested in policy, rather than politics, will tend to go into academia or the think tank world rather than media or the party apparatus.
Allen and Moon make this distinction early:
The target is not the impact of television, celebrity media and so on, on politics’ presentation. Rather, it is the treating of politics as if it were a form of entertainment in itself, handled and consumed in a manner no different to sports or sitcoms.
Steven and I have been making references to politics as sport as long as we’ve been blogging, if not longer. I actually think we follow sitcoms and other scripted entertainment very much differently, but am open to persuasion.
Here’s their argument on that score:
Widely studied, fandom is not a coherent object in itself; as Duffett (2013: 3) notes, for example, sports fandoms – often tribal and competitive – and media fandoms such as television series, books or board games, have been treated as very different objects of study. Nevertheless, in practical terms, fandoms commonly involve communities of enthusiasts or supporters intentionally formed around and engaging with specific media or cultural properties that become a shared ‘object of affection’ (Reinhard and Miller, 2020; cf. Andrews, 2020; 2021) – or ‘fan-object’ (Hinck, 2019: 9) – amongst them.
Obvious examples of such fan-objects include football teams, music groups, actors, film franchises and computer game series. But fandom can attach itself to any source material, not only those drawn from the spheres of popular and high culture. Specifically, what makes one a fan of a particular object/property is its ‘regular, emotionally involved consumption’ (Cornel Sandvoss, quoted in Dean and Andrews, 2021: 323) and the shared emotional relationship towards the consumed object that both drives and is elicited by such consumption. The shared element is important; attaching oneself to a fandom brings with it an identity as a member of an imagined community of fellow fans. The emotional element is key as one’s identification with a fandom becomes part of the identity of the individual – what Duffet (2013: 24) calls ‘personal fandom’, a term expressing individuals’ fannish activities and experiences.
Fans read books, buy merchandise and talk about these things with other fans. In doing so they develop familiarity with specialised, product-specific knowledge: pro-wrestling fans, for example, recognise and can name a vast array of wrestling manoeuvers – from ‘Irish Whips’ and ‘atomic drops’ to ‘tornado DDTs’ and ‘Boston crabs’ – and their signature utilisation by different performers, allowing them to interpret, from the application of particular moves in particular sequences, the likely predetermined outcome of matches (see Dell, 2006: 22). This knowledge extends beyond the purported object of fandom – for example, the fantastical stories contained between the covers of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series – to include ‘backstage’/industry-specific knowledge of production processes, and business news related to adaptations or forthcoming (eventually, we are assured) publications. To have not only this insider knowledge but the skill to interpret it also relies upon an ability to think like the writers, producers, executives and performers behind the production of a particular object, a mental process that essentially means adopting the established premises such actors operate within (the ‘rules of the game’) for the purpose of being able to discuss and offer predictions about their actions. A fandom is thus a shared linguistic community (Goggin and Emmanouloudis, 2019: 138) – this specialised knowledge, shared understandings and attendant language forming the basis of the cultural capital that allows fans to communicate, and thus be afforded access into discussions within the fan community that bond together the fandom’s members.
While I still believe that most people, myself included, experience sports fandom differently than these other activities, they do seem to be referring only to specialized sub-examples. I wouldn’t dispute that fans of, say, Star Trek or Game of Thrones, are more immersed in the experience than, say, those of Seinfeld or South Park.
Still, as much as I enjoyed The Wire or Breaking Bad, the Star Trek and Marvel movies, or Robert B. Parker and Tom Clancy novels, becoming emotionally engaged with the characters, the knowledge that the outcomes were scripted and that the characters weren’t real bounds my experience in a way that’s just not true of the Dallas Cowboys or the Crimson Tide. At least so long as the teams are competitive for a championship run, I live and die with them game by game—even play by play—in a way that just doesn’t happen with movies, television shows, or books. And that certainly seems to me how most hard-core fans experience the games.
Regardless, I’ll just ignore their wider conception of fandom from here on out, taking it as a tangential argument.
Participants in politics fandom take on the characteristics of an epistemic community (Haas, 1992). First, they treat politics as akin to a sport, game or form of entertainment, with commentary offered on political events in much the same way that one would expect on a football match or television series. Second, they adopt a knowing stance in these discussions, with participants rarely explicitly expressing their own fealty to a set of ideologically-grounded political views. Instead, their views are purported to come from the position of an expert observer or from a hypothesised neutral political position. Third, these discussions often take on a tone of irony or ‘snark’, the assumption being that valid interlocutors in the debate will ‘get’ the message being conveyed while those who aren’t in the know will not. Overall, this is something like the inside baseball-ization of political discussion. The Oxford Dictionary of American Political Slang defines inside baseball as ‘about knowing the inside, about having the low-down, the scoop. It’s about knowing the details so constituents and Congresspeople don’t have to. It’s…shoptalk’ (Barrett, 2006: 4). Barrett goes on, ‘[N]ow sometimes used in any industry to describe the minutiae and inner workings of interest only to its wonks and geeks, inside baseball, above all, is about what happens behind the façade’ (2006: 4).
Conversations amongst political pundits have ‘a distinct flavour: an interest in process over substance, a preference for certain kinds of knowledge (primarily statistics) and a mode of engagement that is at pains to assert its political objectivity’ (Allen, 2019: 75). Scholars of political communication refer to this discursive style as ‘strategic game framing’, with a focus on tactics and strategy, winners and losers (aka ‘horse-race coverage’ (Aalberg et al., 2011)), as opposed to ‘issue framing’ approaches that focus on the detail of political problems, proposed policy responses, and the consequent outcomes of different solutions (Young et al. 2019: 84). The result is commentary focused on interpreting the ‘message’ politicians seek to tactically convey by their messaging – for whom? To what end? – rather than any substantive ideological content of their statements.
Politics fans are continually learning the ‘rules of the game’. They then apply their understanding of these rules to interpret these political signals as an ‘insider’ would. As already noted above, this requires an ability to actively think like the writers, producers and actors of their particular fan-object – or, in this case, the politicos, wonks and lobby hacks who package and transmit politics. The implication is that, as fans of politics, the reception of any political information takes place inside this particular, narrow framework of ‘rules’ with an interpretive focus aimed at uncovering the strategic intention of essentially performative acts.
This seems indisputable. Most voters simply have no need to understand these things. Just as casual sports fans don’t spend the entire offseason obsessing over the minutia of recruiting, free agency, the draft, and the like, most voters pay next to little attention to the news until right up until the election. I would guess that the overwhelming number of Americans have no idea that the government was on the brink of a shutdown, much less who Matt Gaetz is.
Allen and Moon argue that the phenomenon is growing:
The move away from news production focused on specific times or editions (e.g. evening news slots and first and second editions) has intensified since the late 1990s and the advent of 24-h cable news. In recent times, the perpetual news machine has operated out of, and through, Twitter. Mills et al. have noted that among British journalists Twitter is ‘widely used for a range of professional purposes including monitoring news, gauging opinion, identifying and fostering contacts and sources, publishing live reports and commentary, and promoting content’ (2021: 3). Social media is also where the breadth of individuals identified above – from political editors to political scientists working in academia – come together. Although it is likely their in-person social networks would have overlapped in the past, social media permits this to take place without the constraint of needing to be in the same physical space (Mills et al., 2021) and, on Twitter, interested members of the public can also bear witness to their interactions in real time.
This development has run alongside a ‘deep and continuing crisis’ for ‘UK local, regional and national news media’ (Williams et al., 2015: 681) wherein the economic model that historically sustained traditional media – one based on print sales and advertising revenue – has come under strain as Internet access has become widespread. This has, broadly speaking, led to the domination of the media sector by a smaller number of bigger players and, in turn, ‘[D]igital technology has recalibrated and become integrated with existing media institutions, practices and power structures’ (Mills et al., 2021: 1). The nature of the ‘media economy’ (Meyer, 2002: 35) means that the imperative to sell entertaining content in order to produce profit will survive any shifts in how that content is initially funded. For example, although it is difficult to establish the precise causal pathways, it appears to be the case that a lot of the contemporary discourse regarding politics and political events at the elite level is driven by social media. Previously, political participation involved physical involvement with groups such as trade unions, churches and political parties – institutions whose membership have declined, taking with them the social identifications and securities that came with them (Bauman, 2013). The development of networked technologies has been central to providing spaces for new collective communities to form across geographical distances – as it has been for other fandoms – and platforms to reiterate, daily, the discursive practices that sustain the community and the boundaries of its membership (Hinck, 2019: 13). In the context of a changing media economy, social media’s rise as a key form of news dissemination can thus be seen as a method by, and forum in which, political coverage can be served to more curated audiences in this more easily-consumed fan-object form.
The same has surely happened in the US, and likely on a bigger scale. The UK electoral system, after all, is much more constrained, with radically shorter election cycles and a more unified system of governance. In the US, we have essentially had a permanent campaign going on since roughly 1990, with one election running into the next. To extend the sports analogy, we no longer have offseasons.
The authors conclude:
In her book Haven’t You Heard? Gossip, Power and How Politics Really Works, author Marie le Conte features a quotation from Miranda Green, a former political advisor, who states that ‘When people portray politics for the rest of the population, they leave out the most important thing, which is that it’s unbelievably enjoyable and everyone’s having a really great time. Why else would we do it?’ (Le Conte, 2019). Green here distils the essence of politics fandom – a phenomenon we have identified here, specifically focused within the intensely politically involved. These fans are close to power and gain enjoyment (‘a really great time’) from interacting with politics as an entertainment form. This is not in itself an issue; however, it becomes one because of who these people are. A ‘club’ (that you’re not in), rooted in traditional class inequalities, which simultaneously generates new inequalities around knowledge fuelled by the shifting but enduring economics and incentives of the news media, acceptability of actions and emotions, of credibility and the realms of ‘sensibleness’ that demarcate what politics can do in the world. In this sense, politics fandom serves as the epistemology of the political class, framing their communication of politics to the wider public with the resultant democratic implications we have discussed.
Like fans of television drama, the intensely involved are able to treat politics as not necessarily ‘real’ but still worthy of deep emotional investment. They follow it, discuss it, and speculate about it. But the way they do so makes politics itself into a particular version of itself: one focused on process and aesthetic over materiality and outcome, something undertaken by elites and an object to be revered. To some extent, we could see this as akin to a workplace culture; as just another workplace culture, even. But to do so would belie the importance of the ‘workplace’ in question and, to some extent, would further belie the importance – and the consequences – of politics itself. The extent to which the characterisation of the activity of politics that we have sketched here serves to alienate the wider public is difficult to establish with any empirical certainty but the opposing claim – that it has improved this situation – does not seem to hold any water whatsoever.
I see no way out of this cycle because the excitement of the game is precisely what draws political junkies. But treating politics as a game makes it a game. While the elite political press in the US overwhelmingly find Trump awful, they nonetheless find him tremendously exciting. Indeed, the very things that make him awful make him entertaining.
While there’s next to zero chance that Joe Biden declines to run for another term, replaces Kamala Harris on the ticket, or has some secret plan to get elected and then resign his post to hand her the presidency, all of those possibilities are excellent if wildly predictable fodder for punditry. Indeed, one way in which political journalism is more like that for serial scripted entertainment than sports is the existence of a large number of hoary tropes that get dusted off cycle after cycle. Speculation about an Electoral College tie throwing the election to the House, faithless electors changing the outcome of the election, the death of the winner before the Electoral votes are counted, and many other oldies but goodies are definitely coming to a column near you.
But it’s also why I find explanations like Christian Nationalism for electoral behavior so unsatisfying. While they doubtless explain why some people choose their political party, most people’s behavior is predictable. At the end of the day, most people who are going to bother to vote have a favorite team. While most of them are less rabid than we dedicated fans, they’ll nonetheless cheer when their team makes it to the playoffs.
I don’t understand this comment — it sounds like you are treating these as competing explanations, when to my ear they sound like exactly the same explanation.
@DrDaveT: I don’t want to rehash yesterday’s thread here. French and company aren’t trying to explain partisan loyalty but rather something Trump-specific.
I find it ‘interesting’ that most conservatives who ‘normally’ would find any number of reasons based on ethics and morals to dismiss out-of-hand a truly malevolent and ‘deplorable’ person like Donald Trump … now whole heartedly support him based on (1) the Team he’s on and (2) he’s willing to break all norms and rules to ‘win’ the election.
Democrats need to stop bringing salad forks to a Republican gun fight.
Sports are a form of entertainment which is a form of play.
Play is evolved behavior exhibited by many species – cats, apes, whales, dogs etc. The distinguishing common characteristic of play is lack of real world consequences.
Treating politics as sport means treating it as play – mere amusement, no real world consequences. There are people who do this, which I see as bad to do, because politics does have real world consequences.
Christian Nationalism is not sport and not play. It has real world effects such as the rising level of violence frightening people like electoral workers and minorities and people like Paul Pelosi, hammered into a fractured skull.
Trump is a serious problem and it is assholish behavior to treat Trump as entertainment.
You can make politics fun for participants though, with snappy production values like Fox News, Trump rallies etc. Lots of things can be fun, sugarcoats the seriousness to be more attractive.
Watching the Dallas Cowboys or The Song of Fire and Ice is mostly pure fun, I reject the idea that has much resemblance to politics which I see as deadly serious. That’s just trivializing politics.
Imagine you’re having a dinner with both Republicans and Democrats present, and you’re advised to avoid talking about politics.
Now, imagine instead of political differences, it’s fans of opposing sports teams, and you’ve been told to talk about anything but sports.
Which do you think would be an easier task?
That’s the difference.
Anyone who’s had the experience of trying to avoid talking about politics (we’ve all been there) knows it can be challenging because so many things relate to politics in some way. Hell, even sports does! Talk about the NFL in 2016, and you might find yourself discussing Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling during the national anthem. Talk about women’s sports and you might find yourself in an argument over trans rights. Of course it’s possible to steer clear of topics like this, but it requires care, and anyone who’s been told to avoid politics knows that “uh oh” sensation when you see a conversation headed in a certain direction.
In contrast, avoiding talking about sports is easy (even if it’s disappointing to hardcore sports fanatics) because sports to a large degree is cordoned off from other things people are into.
You can compare the tribalistic feelings and behavior that govern sports fandom to politics, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that politics is just a lot more fucking important.
So Christian Nationalism was not a factor in efforts to overturn the 2020 election such as the January 6 insurrection. Gotcha.
How does Christian Nationalism affect how people choose their party without affecting their electoral behavior? But I see there is more to electoral behavior than just picking a party – invading the Capitol for example or intimidating Ruby Freeman or tampering with election machines.
You maybe don’t think the constant urging to violence by both Trump and the Christian Nationalists is electorally significant?
That’s an interesting paper that I think goes beyond the surface-level sports analogies.
And with the increase in partisanship and catastrophizing, I think the sports analogy is starting to fail, at least in terms of scale. It’s hard to know when people are actually treating it as a game.
On an analytical level, one thing I do is look at how invested people actually are by comparing words with actions. And what I find is that most political hobbyists say a lot and do little.
It’s the same thing here. Just look at the posts that get 100+ comments vs. those that only get a handful. The pattern of which posts get more engagement from the commentariat have been pretty clear for a long time.
And yes, Trump is extremely good for the press, especially the liberal press. Look at the MSNBC viewership, especially the opinion shows, during Trump’s term compared to now, for example. Assuming it’s a Trump-Biden contest, the media will do very well next year.
I think that primarily matters for candidate selection – ie. the primaries. The so-called Christian Nationalists are small in terms of overall population but punch above their weight thanks to the primary system and the rise of small donor candidates due to campaign finance reform. I think our politics would be a lot more normal if our primary system weren’t so completely broken in all the ways we’ve endlessly discussed here.
@al Ameda:
Try putting the shoe on the other foot.
I’ve asked here several times over the years what it would take for the more liberal members of the commentariat to vote for a Republican, and the general consensus was that most would never do that, even with a Trump-like leftist analog. I think one person said they would vote for a sack of potatoes with a D next to it before ever voting for any Republican.
Maybe someday, our bad primary system will allow a candidate as bad as Trump to get nominated on the D side, and then we can see what Democrats do when faced with that choice. I feel pretty confident in predicting that most would continue to vote for the D brand because that’s how people are wired and – as Stephen as noted here multiple times – that is the expected pattern.
@Andy:
“I’ve asked here several times over the years what it would take for the more liberal members of the commentariat to vote for a Republican, and the general consensus was that most would never do that, even with a Trump-like leftist analog.”
And yet some of us repeatedly note that they have done so in the past, and the conversation ends there. I am not saying this is the case with you, but it feels like some people are trying to score points by asking the question, and when they get an answer they don’t like, pretend it doesn’t exist.
@charontwo:
If you have a Ouija board, Andres Escobar would like to have a word with you about how deadly serious sports fandom can be for some people.
@Andy:
You need to state your question more clearly. Do you mean what would it take today, given the current situation in Congress and the 50 state houses, or do you mean at some hypothetical future time when the context might be different?
Today, I can’t conceive of anything that could get me to vote for a Republican, because Republican majorities enact crazy hateful laws and appoint corrupt ideologue judges who will defend those laws. This is apparently independent of the personal beliefs of any particular Republican; they act this way because it’s how to get elected, or because they support the crazy hateful, or for some other unknown reason, but it’s predictable as clockwork.
If at some point in the future that stops happening — if enough Republicans start to vote as individuals who don’t support the crazy hateful shit — then I will be free to consider who to vote for at the individual level, rather than as pure defense. Until then, there is no amount of harm that any whacko Democrat*, or a Democratic majority, can do that in any way compares with what an R majority is doing today and planning to do more of tomorrow.
*I’m trying to imagine what you could mean by “a Trump-like leftist analog”, and failing. Could you cite a historical example of the kind of person you mean? Preferably one from post-WW2?
@Andy:
I understand your point.
It took us well over a century, perhaps since Andrew(s) Jackson and Johnson, to get to a person/president as personally malevolent and deplorable as Trump. Trump is a very dangerous unicorn. Historically, what other president supported an insurrection at The Capitol, one designed to halt the Constitutionally prescribed certification of a presidential election for the expressed purpose of stealing the election to stay in power? No need to Google this, the answer is none.
The current Republican Party is the logical home to political nihilists like Trump, Bannon, Flynn, Gaetz, Boebert, Taylor-Green, Biggs, Gosar, Rogers, et al. Could this happen in the Democratic Party? There is always a possibility, but that does not tell us anything about probability.
@DrDaveT:
Do black swans actually exist? I don’t know, but I do not think I would learn much from encountering one.
@Moosebreath:
That is a pretty unlikely hypothetical, I am not seeing the relevance of something that unlikely.
The GOP is too committed to corruption, fascism and theocracy to become redeemable in the foreseeable future. When you vote for any Republican, no matter how attractive, you are supporting such a party, unacceptable.
@Andy:
A belief that the Republican in question plans to actually try to solve the problems facing society, rather than at best doing nothing, or at worse actively making the problems bigger because there’s money to be made.
I would also need to believe said Republican isn’t going to collaborate with religious terrorists that want to kill me for being a queer pagan.
@Andy: “Maybe someday, our bad primary system will allow a candidate as bad as Trump to get nominated on the D side, and then we can see what Democrats do when faced with that choice. I feel pretty confident in predicting that most would continue to vote for the D brand because that’s how people are wired and – as Stephen as noted here multiple times – that is the expected pattern.”
Except that it does not.
@Andy:
January 6 destroyed that analogy.
Because the sack of potatoes will not end representative democracy. Duh.
If the choice would be between a never-Trumper like Liz Cheney and, let’s say, Joe Sims (the national co-chairman of the CPUSA), people here would hold their nose and vote for Cheney.
@drj:
I keep being surprised by the widespread unwillingness to recognize Donald Trump and the current GOP for what they are.
If someone shows you who they are, believe them.
@drj:
Some are dedicated to whitewashing Republicans’ drift towards extremism, the inevitable result of the last 60 years of Republican choices.
Trump is not a random anamoly of a “bad primary system.” Trump is the direct result of a half-century of Republicans embracing increasingly bad people and increasingly bad policy.
“A Trump-like leftist analog” can only be the stuff of nonexistent bothsides hypotheticals because contra to rightwing propaganda, mainstream Democrats actually are not fire-breathing radicals. Democrats cannot currently produce a Trump because the Democrats haven’t spent the last five decades rolling out the welcome mat for racists, homophobes, religious extremists, and cutthroat capitalists who place selfish individualism above the general welfare.
Republicans were warned they were drifting towards fascism. They did not listen. Now some want to pretend it’s all just a big mistake due to tribalism and bad primaries. Nice try, but I don’t think so.
Note: this can change. The parties will probably realign someday. The bigots will flock back to the Democrats, gays and women will turn Republican, and our coalitions will scramble. It has happened before, will likely do so again.
But it is not likely to happen again in our lifetimes. We are not suddenly going to wake up one day and find Democrats united behind a hatemongering, Putin-puppet criminal who launched a terror attack on congress. Of course, we’d no longer vote Democratic if that happened. Because that would mean the Democratic Party itself has fundamentally changed.
So what would it take for contemporary Democrats to start voting Republican? Simple. The parties would have to change, irrevocably and dramatically. Pretty obvious.
So whatever this thread was originally about, it seems to have veered off into a discussion of partisanship and polarization. Not really the same as whether politics resembles a game or a sport or whatever.
– Barry “Mr. Republican” Goldwater (whose hands are also not clean when it comes to passing around blame for the Republican Party’s hard right turn)
We been knew. All of this was predicatable and inevitable, and Republicans were warned by insiders and outsiders.
It’s the primaries? It’s because politics is like team sports?
It’s the Republican Party’s policies and platform. This is not just a process issue. When you make greed, selfishness, hatred of blacks, homophobic smearmongering, militarized policing, gun nuttery, and unification-of-church-and-state litmus test policies in your party, Trump and fascism are the result.
@Andy:
If a Democrat candidate threatened our democracy as Trump has done, I’d not only vote R, I’d make a contribution. I’m a patriotic American before anything else.
@Andy: I live in Texas which is essentially a one party state. I often vote Republican when their positions are close to mine. This is primarily in the primaries which by Texas law registers me as a Republican for one year. Examples: no school vouchers, against clearly corrupt candidates, voted for a Republican AG against Ken Paxton. I tend to avoid local Democrats primarily because they are so weak, politically and intellectually.
It really depends on what the major issues are.
@Scott:
I managed to live in Houston for 15 years without ever voting for any Republican.
I did need to resort to third party for Texas Railroad Commission and State Supreme Court because the Democrats never fielded candidates for those.
If it was something like Judges with no non-Republican on the ballot, I just did not vote.
@Andy:
A return to sanity and politics that I can get behind. I started voting GOP but after 9/11 they lost their fucking minds… Later on I found out that the core issues/problems with the GOP go back past the 80s and the deal with the devils aka Christian nutcases/racists..
@Andy:
I would vote for a pedophile before a Republican, as Republican policies fuck more children than any pedophile could. Lesser of two evils, utilitarianism at its best.
Also, the closest example we have to a Trump-of-the-left is corrupt Democrats. Bob Menendez was re-elected after the hung jury in his first corruption indictment-trial adventure.
And, if Menendez would be replaced with a Republican, then I would support him hanging on this time, because garden variety policies are more important than one man and his basic crimes.
If the crimes were trying to overthrow the government, the benefit would have to be big. If it was a left wing dictatorship that was going to decarbonize our economy and help the rest of the world decarbonize… I could get behind that. But we are talking about something that might not be an extinction level event for humans, but is going to make many densely populated parts of the world uninhabitable for humans.
@Andy:
Without getting into whether this is true or not, this seems to me a version of, “I vote for the man, not the party.” Which is something lazy voters with no idea how things work say. We say parties are weak, and in many ways they are. But they’re still the way the government works. If you elect Mitt Romney, you get an administration staffed with Republicans. An administration that would work with the Republican caucuses in the House and Senate. No matter how well intentioned Romney might be, he couldn’t get very far ahead of his Party.
I’ve argued before that yes, Biden’s too old. But if Biden goes away he leaves Harris to pick up the reins of a competent administration trying to do the right things. If Trump were to be elected, then go away, he’d leave another clown act in the West Wing.
It ain’t just Trump. You can’t vote for a Republican for prez in isolation. If you vote for a Republican for prez, you vote for the whole Republican Party.
@Gustopher: The thing about voting for a sack of potatoes is that it will be more consistent than Republicans will be. You know exactly what a sack of potatoes will do; can you say the same thing about a sack of Republicans? No. You can’t.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
So exactly who is this sack of potatoes, what are they running for, and where the heck do I sign up to vote for them?
Inquiring Luddites want to know.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Had Republicans elected a sack of potatoes in 2016, we’d all be better off today.
Well, not surprising my comments got pushback here.
I’d just like to point out a few things:
1. Systemically, the Democratic party is almost as vulnerable to a takeover as the GoP was. The party has been moving toward more democratic primaries and reducing the influence of party leadership and elites. After 2016, the rules on superdelegates were changed to reduce their influence to essentially only deciding ties. So, the fact of the matter is that the party leadership cannot control who can compete and win. The historical and institutional barriers to this happening are much diminished and almost gone. Additionally, the defenestration of party finances in favor of dark money and small donors has also weakened the party’s authority and influence. So all your assumptions about how something similar could never happen to Democrats entirely rest on assumptions made about future primary voters.
And, unlike the Presidency, which requires 50+1 delegates for nomination, most other offices only require a plurality of support which makes is possible for more fringe candidates to win.
2. Someone mentioned realignments. Yes, they happen, and one is happening right now. No one really knows how this will all shake out. Both parties are significantly different than they were 30 or even 10 years ago, and things are still shifting. That also means shifts in the bases of the party and primary voters. The assumption that the people who vote in Democratic primaries will always be aligned with the values of the commentariat here are just assumption.
3. Relatedly, this can happen in a short period of time. Romney was nominated for the GoP in 2012, and four years later, it was Trump. Romney, who is one of a very small number of people to vote against their party’s leader (Trump) in an impeachment. It’s hard to imagine two Republican politicians more different than these two, and yet they are only separated by one Presidential election cycle.
3. We had a mini example on the Democratic side in 2020. Sanders likely could have won the nomination if not for two things – Biden’s strength among black Democrats, which saved his candidacy in South Carolina. Second was the other moderate Democrat aspirants stepping aside to make room for Biden to allow consolidation of support. Now, Sanders is nothing like Trump. But he’s at the fringe of the Democratic party (to say nothing of America generally) and isn’t even a Democrat. A Democratic party under the leadership of someone aligned with the DSA is a much different animal than one led by Joe Biden.
To be clear, I’m not predicting that this will happen. I don’t see any Trump-like candidates on the horizon. But as point #3 shows, these candidates can emerge with little warning, and the democratic nature of our primary system means that anyone can claim the party label and compete. And, increasingly, states are opening up primary systems such that voters don’t need to be aligned with a party to vote in the primary.
@Andy: I love how the closest you can get to a Trump on the left is a man who wants universal health care, to tax the rich at a decent historically fair rate, to decrease the costs of higher education, to expand the gi bill and pell grants, to fund head start, etc etc. So you example of the “crazy trump like lefty” is a guy whose policies would help the working poor in the USA AKA the vast majority of Americans and you clearly think that’s a horrible terrible crazy far left idea on par with marxism or some shit…
Do you not remember Romney flipping so hard to appease the GOP base that people were sending him flip flops? Romney was nominated because he was saying the same things that Trump would later take to 11. Hell you can see the GOP worshiping of the president when Bush Jr was president and congregations were literally praying to cardboard cut outs of Bush. Remember Sr getting kicked out because he approved a small increase in tax rates because he decided to be an adult? This is nothing new and I can go further back to the southern strategy or Jesse helms?? The hands commercial? Willie Horton? Daisy?
Trump didn’t show up and suddenly change the GOP. THe GOP has always had this simmering under neath their veneer of civility. The reason so much of the base loves Trump is because he allows them to no longer have to pretend to not be pieces of shit in public.
@Andy: Also what is a DSA? I’ve never seen that before and have no idea what it’s supposed to be short hand for. I’m not stuck in whatever bubble you exist in so I don’t know the short hand.
As stated prior multiple times should such a thing happen then the commentators would adjust their vote accordingly. I don’t have a team thing going on here outside of team America.
It’s almost as if one party is infested with selfish grifting pieces of shit and the other party isn’t… but yeah you do have a bit of a point that the adults in the room AKA the Democratic party members made sacrifices for the greater good. Yes you cannot rely on that in the future but you can’t really rely on much in the future besides death and rich people getting more tax cuts/hand outs..
@Matt:
I specifically was not comparing Trump to Sanders – only pointing out that someone who is not even a Democrat could win the nomination and lead the Democratic party. This is evidence of the systemic issues I described, which you can’t really deny.
Maybe you should read Bernie’s website, and then click over and check out the DSA for yourself.
@Andy:
I agree with this general statement, but I’m curious how you would describe the realignment we’re currently in, and how it would compare or contrast with how I’d describe it.
@Kylopod:
I don’t have time to give this the depth it deserves, but the quick simple answer is that I think we’re seeing part of the working class shift to the GoP – especially the white working class (those without a college degree), and there are hints that the non-white working class might be starting to shift that way too. Conversely, Democrats are gaining the educated and the wealthy, especially in the suburbs.
@Andy:
In the end, it still comes down to ‘what if the goatee Fairy were to slap goatees on all Dems, and turn them all evil?’
“Both parties are significantly different than they were 30 or even 10 years ago, and things are still shifting.”
And note the directions.
@Andy: I went to bernie’s website before commenting.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/
and
https://berniesanders.com/
There was no DSA anything listed on the front page or in his policies. You have to go to a very specific link on the second website to get to the DSA part. You hid this intentionally because you’re trying to “score points” by making it seem like I couldn’t be bothered to do research. This is part of my issue with you.
Not everyone who supports the Democratic party are hardcore communist left winger american haters and I don’t know the short hand your right wing bubble uses to enforce that concept. When some of my right wing service member friends were talking about voting sanders over Clinton not a single one mentioned any DSA or similar. Those people ended up voting Trump because in the end they are just so wedded to the GOP via their family/friends they cannot break from the cult. I’m still friends with them because while MAGA/GOP is as much a part of their identity as being white and male I don’t care. We just avoid talking politics and enjoy the activities we’re engaged in.
@Andy:
The working poor and uneducated AKA the base for the GOP since what the 60s or so?
One of the things that surprised me when I lived in south Texas near the border was how people who were born to illegal immigrants would rant about illegal immigrants. It’s like bro the only reason you’re here is because your parents broke the law too. They will hand wave it away all day long with absolutely inane defenses. At the end of the day the reason was basically “fuck you I got mine” which is classic GOP. The only reason the GOP hasn’t picked up vastly more of these latinos/hispanic voters is because the GOP embraces the racists. Soon as the GOP kicks out the racists you’d see a massive flow of minorities to the GOP. Because at the end of the day people are selfish assholes to various degrees. After all it’s much easier to believe that if you keep grinding away some day you’ll be rich and all those tax cuts will be yours.. Never mind that the system is essentially designed to keep those people in their place poor and desperate but hey that’s probably also the demonRATs fault too!!!
Do you really think the Democratic leadership would let Sanders do the equivalent as what Trump has done to the GOP? That’s just outright delusional thinking with no basis in historical fact or reality in general. IF Sanders was able to do the impossible and managed to win the nomination you wouldn’t see the Democratic party suddenly turn into whatever socialist hellhole you’re imagining. Sanders might be able to get a few center/center right concepts put on the to do list but anything that is really socialist or far left would get shot down instantly. God forbid we have universal health care or any number of “socialist” programs that other first world countries have..
THe money we waste on our “market solutions’ is just proof of how rich and great we are U S A U S A….