It’s the season of plenty for sports fans – which others view as exhausting excess: Before we’ve recuperated from the NCAA basketball hoopla and golf’s Masters tournament, we’re launched into the Major League Baseball season even as the NHL and the NBA are just beginning playoffs.
Permit me, then, to say a word in support of the great, unappreciated contest known as tug-of-war. What a sport!
Think about it. Tug-of-war is glorious in its simplicity and the clarity of its outcome: Two teams pull in opposite directions on a rope, and one team wins when the other collapses. You don’t have to worry about the infield fly rule or lousy officiating or cheating; there’s no meddling front office, no corrupt taxpayer subsidization of stadiums.
If only American democracy was so neat. If all sides in a political contest respected the will of voters, and if votes translated into government action, well, then we could call our democracy as healthy as a good old-fashioned tug-of-war at a spring picnic. But that’s not the case just now, is it? (1:03 segment)
If our democracy was working, we would have sensible, life-saving gun restrictions in place, every woman would have the right to choose an abortion, and expressions of gender and sexuality outside the cisgender majority would be respected. If only.
Consider this: A poll last year found that 71 percent of American adults want stricter gun laws: 85 percent want background checks for any weapon purchase, and 59 percent want to ban semiautomatic rifles, like the AR-15. If the majority really ruled in America, maybe we wouldn’t have had 119 mass shootings so far this year, and counting.
And in a working democracy, male-dominated legislatures and courts wouldn’t be telling American women whether they could access an abortion – which more than six in 10 Americans say should be legal in most or all cases.
That same number, by the way – six in 10 – tell pollsters that they oppose the crackdowns on drag shows that we’ve seen over the last couple of years – the latest manifestation of anti-gay bias that most Americans deplore.
In a more rational time, politicians would recognize that ignoring the wishes of most citizens is both politically unwise and morally indefensible. But our political system has devolved to the point that there’s little penalty for anti-democratic behavior and plenty of reward for catering to extreme views. (1:18 segment)
Some of the blame belongs to the nation’s founders, who were so determined to protect the rights of political minorities that they created anti-majoritarian institutions – like the electoral college, and the U.S. Senate, both of which give extra clout to low-population states. Half of the 330 million Americans live in just nine states, including New York, meaning they have 18 U.S. senators, while the smaller half of the nation has the other 82 senators. Those smaller states are whiter and more conservative than the nation as a whole – which why over the first two decades of this century, Republicans held the White House for 12 years even though the Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote only once in six elections. If every vote counted equally, it would have been Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, appointing three Supreme Court justices.
Yet even with those institutional barriers to democracy, the United States functioned pretty well for two centuries, with the notable exception of the Civil War. Then, over the course of a couple of decades, a series of events applied shocks to the system.
In 1987, the Federal Communications Commission abolished the Fairness Doctrine, giving rise to the era of right-wing talk radio – which, in turn, was crucial to the election of a Republican Congress in 1994, where Newt Gingrich of Georgia became Speaker of the House. Gingrich regularized viciousness in political combat, setting the country on a path toward an era of bitterly partisan and ruthless politics.
Fox News Channel took to the airwaves in 1995, its intentional bias aiming to draw a profitable conservative audience. With the digital revolution, that anti-fairness content choice was steroid-infused, powered by big players that meet their profit goals by grabbing attention, standards be damned.
Then, when (by one vote) the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case nullified campaign finance reform, it freed corporations and interest groups to spend unlimited money on electioneering. That Big Money fuels right-wing political machines that are pushing state-by-state restrictions on abortion and other initiatives that are dividing the nation into warring cultural camps. It is Big Money that helped pave the way for Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Big Money enables politicians to ignore a national consensus, such as that favoring gun control and abortion rights. Big Money backs the big digital sites’ lax approach to content moderation.
All this – that is, what we’ve seen over the past generation of American politics – could be depressing to someone who cares about democracy. But if you’ve ever watched or participated in a tug-of-war, you’ll know this: You can’t tell who’s going to win by the first tug. It can take a long time, and teamwork is key. There’s actually strategy in tug-of-war: The win tends to go not to the team that yanks hard sporadically, but to the group that has everybody pulling together steadily, without hesitation or rest, until the other side is left sprawling on the ground.
That’s how to win at tug-of-war. And politics too, you know. It’s a long game. So sports fans, and all of you who have despaired for America in recent years, consider the model of the great sport tug-of-war: Grab on for a long, steady pull, with all the strength we can muster.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.