On flanks, punts and presses: How our obsession with sports proves we’re more than capable of being a more engaged citizenry

Jim Cavan, HW Columnist

You don’t need a professional pollster or seasoned political analyst to tell you that Americans are, by and large, woefully inept when it comes to politics or political engagement. Not only are we habitually uninformed; we don’t even bother to vote a lot of the time. Our national elections take place on Tuesdays, and time off from work is neither mandated nor entirely encouraged. The result is an electorate which turns out in much smaller numbers than in just about every other industrialized country – and less than in many developing countries – around the world.

There are, of course, a number of possible explanations for this. The first and most obvious is the fact that our country has yet to make Election Day a National Holiday, as it has been in many European countries, who often choose to hold their elections on Sundays. Certainly there aren’t many employers who would shun or otherwise punish you for leaving early or showing up late in order to do your civic duty. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that, when your two times to vote are either before or after the workday, doing so can become a nightmarish hassle of long waits in line.

There’s also the argument that a general civic malaise – wrought over decades of corruption and across the political spectrum – has increasingly contributed to a vague sense of “what does it matter, they’re all the same anyway.” Likewise, our relative standard of living – fast-careening though it may seem – has happened steadily, and under presidents and politicians from “both sides of the aisle”. Still, life goes on.

Still, it seems that every election cycle, activists and grass roots organizers pitch and yaw about the millions of new voters — the youth bloc, minorities, etc. — lying in wait like a mass of locusts, ready to forever alter the political landscape. And while the 2008 election served as a noticeable outlier in terms of turnout, the 2010 midterms brought the temporary fervor wrought by the leftward political pendulum swing squarely down to earth, with election numbers reverting back close to those seen during the 1998 and 2002 levels.

In the immediate aftermath of the ’04 election, pundits wet themselves over the supposed “red state – blue state” divide, the convenient notion that America was evenly split along cultural-geographic rifts – values, in a word. Yet while this might have applied at some level to the less than 50 per cent who actually showed up to vote, when it comes to large minority of voters who don’t, the most common justification for such apathy typically involves the belief that there really wasn’t much of a difference between the two parties to begin with.

Ralph Nader said it best: “The only real difference between Democrats and Republicans is the velocity at which their knees hit the ground for Corporate America.” Harsh? You could say that. Accurate? More than you’d probably think. The idea here is that a major reason why the electorate avoids the polls is that they feel neither party is really looking out for them – that the two parties are, for lack of a better term, two corporately-shaped sides of the same coin.

But Nader doesn’t believe that our collective political impotence necessarily equates to a culture of stupidity – apathy sure, but not stupidity. Just look, he says, at how seriously and vigorously we discuss, argue about, and pay attention to, sports. Ever listen to sports radio? Try it some time – as long as you can stand it anyway. You’ll hear callers from Provo to Providence regurgitate endless reams of facts, statistics, and scores, argue the wisdom of blitz packages and offensive passing schemes, spout off about trade rumors and salary cap issues – all with a breadth of knowledge and memorized minutiae that could just as easily serve to fill the grease boards at MIT, had it once been diverted towards the relevant ends. “No,” suggests Nader, “the American mind is quite intact, and doing well. It’s just too often focused on the wrong spheres.”

The difference is, of course, that sports are far more exciting and immediately engaging, while politics usually aren’t — at least not at first glance. Sure, occasionally you get the universally hilarious or amusing PR blunder, inter-party smackdown, or campaign trail screw-up — Cheney spraying his buddy with birdshot from thirty feet, Bush walking into a door, Zell Miller challenging Chris Matthews to a duel on air from a national political convention, Ed Muskie crying at a campaign rally — that makes it into the greater pop-culture discourse. But these are exceptions, and they in no way relate to the everyday mundane squalor of politics writ large.

But if Nader is right, and our capacity to converse, argue, debate, and exchange reams of information and data can be mobilized for something as outwardly trivial — but so often mythic and culturally transcendent — as sports, then maybe we just need to find a way to make politics more exciting, or at the very least more engaging to the 21^st century consumer of information.

C-SPAN was a start. Televised politics in the form of cable news was yet another step. And while we can argue all day whether cable news deserves the power and visibility that it has, at the very least it has provided a readily-accessible, dynamic window into how our system of government works – or doesn’t work, as the case may be. Indeed, there’s certainly an inherent degree of risk in relegating politics to television to the degree in which we have, to the extent that it arguably only feeds into the dumbing-down of society. However, the resulting transparency also arguably forces some measure of accountability, in the sense that there’s far less “off the record” than there was, say, 30 years ago.

To the seasoned political junkie, there already exists a thrill-heavy language conducive to the kind of fervent observation and heated debate that makes up the diversionary diet of many an American sports nut: we speak of inter-party factions “flanking” one another; the President playing “hard ball” with his would-be detractors; majorities in both houses “sitting on the ball” or “punting” on the issue. Furthermore, anyone who has been involved in any intimate way with a national campaign understands the kind of adrenaline that is required for mere sustenance– also no different than with your favorite team’s season-long grind.

But C-SPAN was never meant to “entertain” so much as “inform”. In this way it’s different than ESPN, or Fox News and MSNBC on the cable news front: the finer details and procedural minutia of politics appeal to a comparatively narrow cross section of Americans. Even though it involves seemingly “real world” issues, it’s still somehow the case that the political sphere – something largely in our control – is the one most easily ignored. It’s certainly more “direct” and relevant to our lives, our jobs, and our interactions with others than in sports or entertainment writ large, where – beyond matters of revenue – the narrative is a product of forces far more distant and powerful. Indeed, whereas elected officials operate within institutions which function to allocate resources in a variety of manners and through myriad avenues, mere sports franchise owners are limited only by their own decisions and actions. And while those decisions and actions can certainly be influenced by what “the market” is demanding, there’s no direct correlation between a fan buying a $100 ticket and the owner signing that fan’s favorite free agent player.

If Americans are going to start caring about politics the way Nader believes — and I think rightly — they care about sports, the scope and nature of political media, be it based in print, on television or on the web, is going to have to evolve in such a way that it meets the 21^st century mind, rather than reaches down for it.  Blogs represent the most obvious coup: for as lacking in fact as they can often be, their freelance styles and topics have doubtless changed the nature of reporting in the more traditional media of print and television – to the point that bloggers which five years ago were considered “fringe” are now hosting their own cable shows.  Indeed, blogs have helped change not only the way citizens inform themselves, but how information more broadly is transmitted across culture.

Then there’s cable news itself. While many would argue that the likes of Fox and MSNBC have only served to render the greater political discourse more polarized and counter-productive, I would in fact argue that they’ve managed to bring into the fray myriad viewers who may have otherwise had their faculties directed towards far more inconsequential media. Political pundits and commentators – particularly the kind that dominate much of cable news – may be loud, ill-informed, sometimes obnoxious and often confrontational to the point of being counter-productive; but they’re also the only entity capable of reshaping political dialogue in such a way as to effectively balance the entertaining and the educational, in the process making it appealing to a cross section of voters who may have otherwise opted to tune out completely.

The real question is: where is the American political mind going? Can it be further engaged towards the ultimate goal, which is, in short, greater participation in the electoral system? The argument here isn’t – and nor should it be – that political coverage should mimic that of sports. Rather, we should simply appreciate that what sports provide are windows into what truly engages the 21^st century heart, mind, and yes, brain.

At their core, both sports and politics tout a similar gene: competition. And while one – sports – entertains our competitive genes in arenas which, at the end of the day, don’t really mean anything, politics really do mean something. We want our home town team to win, just like we want our political party to win. And while it’s rather obvious we wish for victories in those two spheres for largely different reasons – genuine philosophical beliefs about how the world works on the one hand, and more emotional-nostalgic or intuitive reasons on the other – both appeal to a gut-level, almost genetic desire to succeed, advance, evolve, and thrive; in short, to win.

Whether we as citizens can manage to turn the tide of apathy and begin re-heeding the call of civic duty will ultimately depend on whether politics itself can redefine itself in 21^st century terms. I use sports as an example simply because both politics and sports, at their deepest levels, tout a plethora of information capable of fueling endless debate and, it is hoped, greater levels of understanding. And while there must necessarily be some cross-over between the two – there are, after all, plenty of sports fans who are also decidedly informed about politics – bringing into the political fray those already more than educated in the realm of sports will not simply serve to raise our country’s percentage of voters to levels more in line with industrialized countries; it will help lend a greater sense of legitimacy and connectedness to that great original coliseum known as politics.

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