11/16/23

Rooting for one political side or the other in America today increasingly resembles rooting for a sports team.

They’re not the same thing.

On the surface they do appear similar: the cheering crowds, the yard signs and bumper stickers, the media coverage, the fan clothing, the arguments over coffee or lunch, the heroes and the villains.

And sometimes players in both sports and politics go beyond their respective rules. In athletics, referees and umpires enforce the rules and penalize the violators. In politics, that’s the job of enforcement agencies and ultimately the courts—or the voters.

It’s easy to get caught up in the highly competitive nature of both sports and politics. There’s a reason they call the competition of a political campaign a “horse race.” Fans of the players in both kinds of events focus laser-like on who will be ahead when the race comes to an end.

America’s two main political parties used to be broad-based, with liberals, moderates, and conservatives populating both. So on most issues the eventual form of an important new law, for example, contained elements supported by participants from both parties. That arrangement usually made for legislation based on a certain level of bipartisanship.

Not anymore. Today’s political parties skew toward their extremes. The number of true moderates in each party is startlingly small. So today’s politics, like today’s sports, is pretty much winner take all. Otto von Bismarck’s phrase “politics is the art of the possible” seems woefully outdated.

Americans who, like me, take an intense interest in both sports and politics need to step back and recognize the enormous differences between the two.

Unless you’re an owner or a player, winning in sports is an end in itself. As a fan, whether your team wins or loses, you absorb how that affects the season’s race, and you go on to the next game. Winning is all-important.

In politics, winning is more than a trophy at season’s end. Winning determines how, and by whom, we’re going to be governed: whom do we entrust to lead the city, county, school district, state, or nation for the next few years. That’s entirely different, and way more important, than which individual or team holds the championship trophy of a sport until next season.       

Politics and elections deserve more than the enthusiastic support I give to the Greene County Rams, or the Iowa Hawkeyes, or the St. Louis Cardinals. That’s because the leaders we elect will make and execute the decisions, rules, and laws that govern the people I care about.

Are they smart? Are they honest? Do they have compassion for the less fortunate? Can they evaluate the relative importance of a bunch of issues? Can they work their way through a situation where there’s no obvious good answer? Can they weigh the importance of a project against its cost?

Or do they simply parrot their party’s predetermined response?

Beanbag is a game. And as the saying goes, politics ain’t beanbag. ♦