People should not apply a sports-like culture to politics
The big game is coming up. Barely a week and both teams will take the stage as millions of fans rabidly watch and wait, hoping for an assured victory. I’m of course referring to the Feb. 3 Iowa Caucuses on Monday. Mark your calendars accordingly. Perhaps, you thought I meant the Super Bowl, which takes place a mere day earlier.
Reader, I can’t fault your confusion. After all, these two events have more in common than just their proximity on my February calendar. Millions of Americans will watch these two events unfold in real time on TV and through Facebook and Twitter feeds. I can’t say the stakes are the same, but anticipation clouds both events, nevertheless.
Over the next week, ESPN commentators will form anxious roundtables as they discuss each team’s Super Bowl prospects. Much the same, political pundits will crowd around their own tables to pontificate on this season’s crop of Democratic and Republican hopefuls.
For a state known for corn and, well, more corn, Iowa’s take on the primary election — the caucuses — holds outsized importance. As the first contest of the primary season, these caucuses strongly indicate how presidential candidates will perform in subsequent states. So those stakes I mentioned earlier? They’re high.
In anticipation, each candidate’s horde of fervent enthusiasts takes to the streets — and by the streets I mean Twitter — to trash talk the competition. Meanwhile, on Instagram, users can find their friends sporting (pun intended)merch from their favorite candidate.
There’s perhaps no item as ubiquitous as the fire engine red “Make America Great Again” hat donned by President Donald Trump supporters. However, Democrats can still throw on a Sen. Bernie Sanders T-shirt or sip their morning coffee in one of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “billionaire tears” mugs.
The factions have names, too: some self-professed and other labels used more widely by opponents. There are “Bernie Bros” for the Democratic Socialists and “Yang Gang” if Andrew Yang’s freedom dividend suits your fancy.
But nothing encapsulates politics’ evolution into an American pastime to rival the likes of the NFL as much as the color-coding that dominates our conceptions of liberalism and conservatism. On the first day of kindergarten, kids learn the three primary colors: red, yellow and blue. I have to imagine that on their first day of work at CNN or Fox News, new employees find out red and blue are the only colors they needed.
These cultural connotations are so great that in June, the Los Angeles Times published an article titled “The 2020 Democratic debates: A pop of red, a naked neck and a sea of navy blue.” But this phenomenon is hardly limited to the 2020 election cycle. Even in the political off-season, color-coded partisanship remains supreme.
Color-coding dominates sports arenas across the world as fans visually project their allegiance. This Sunday the scarlet and gold of the San Francisco 49ers will compete with the, hilariously, red and gold of the Kansas City Chiefs. This sports-like culture of modern politics seems inevitable in our partisan world, yet it wasn’t always the case.
In actuality, the red and blue political color scheme that CNN and Fox News graphic designers go wild for was not cemented until the 2000 presidential election. Before then, TV networks switched colors periodically and deviated from this red-blue hegemony. ABC even used yellow to represent Republicans in the 1976 election.
The sports culture of American politics presents several dilemmas, but the infancy of this red-blue color scheme offers hope. Politics isn’t sports because it isn’t a game. Real lives are attached to the policies each candidate supports. Often, in the process of building a fandom around a candidate and their talking points, we divorce them from the reality their policies represent.
This sports-like culture sows division. Within a single party, it creates competing factions that become increasingly virulent and not always as a result of legitimate concerns toward policy or qualifications.
This culture furthers the divide between red and blue, daring us to try and cross that ever-growing line. No matter who wins the 2020 election, this partisanship is toxic. Whichever candidate takes the White House will need to work with a continuously divided Congress to pass legislation they proposed during the election.
As of Nov. 15, the House of Representatives passed nearly 400 bills, 80% of which found themselves collecting dust as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell prioritized partisan grandstanding. This legislative graveyard has been building up for decades. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, Congress passed between 700 and 800 bills every two years. In the past several years, Congress passed 300-500 bills every two years. In 2019, Congress passed just 70.
Partisan sports culture halts the wheels our democracy is constructed upon, and no one wins. But if the world hasn’t always been in red and blue, then I think there’s hope for a cooperative future.
Ellen Murray is a senior writing about being a millennial. Her column, “‘90s Kid Unleashed,” runs every other Monday