Usually when I go off on this topic I get all testy about the ignorance of and indifference to sports among conservative intellectuals (liberals are as bad or worse), but I’ll forgo that this time, except to quote one of our greatest intellectuals, Jacques Barzun: “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and the realities of the game…”

The key phrases there are “had better” (a stern admonition) and “rules and realities.” Baseball, in particular, and sports, more generally, are all about: the rule of law, tradition, competition, community, and individual excellence, and those are the solid bases of conservatism.

If you did a survey of the political philosophies of 75,000 randomly selected Americans you’d expect the usualÑif somewhat mystifyingÑresults: “Only about one-in-five Americans currently call themselves liberal (21%), while 38% say they are conservative and 36% describe themselves as moderate.” So said the folks at Pew Research, and this was after the November election.

Do that same poll among the fans at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa on Sunday and the results would likely be more like 15% liberal, 30% moderate, and 50% conservative. And a bunch of those liberals would probably be gun owners.

Obviously those numbers are just speculation on my part, but I guarantee that Steelers fans are more conservative than all Pennsylvanians and ditto Cardinals devotees and the rest of Arizona. Which is not to say that these folks cast their ballots in November more for McCain than Obama. That’s the problem.

When politicians and the media use the terms “conservative” and “liberal,” they are almost always referring to politicsÑand this is especially true for both conservative and liberal journalists. Ask your typical conservative intellectual what constitutes conservative culture and maybe he or she will talk about three things: politics, the arts, and religionÑthis last reluctantly, since in the conservative context it tends to mean a body of believers with whom the intellectuals are uncomfortable. As a result, most Americans don’t really relate to most conservative intellectuals. These are not people, they sense, with whom you could play golf, go hunting, cheer at a NASCAR race, attend an Opening Day game, or watch a heavyweight fight. Intellectuals, they believe, do not tear up when the National Anthem is played and the jets fly in low over the stadium.

Athletes themselves may or may not be instinctively conservative, but they work and play in a milieu that is. The rule-based character of what they do is part of it. So is the money. Golfer Tiger Woods, baseball player Mike Sweeney, and driver Jimmie Johnson are all conservative in nearly every way that matters: Woods, a man of great reserve, frankly admits he moved to Florida in order to avoid California taxes; Sweeney, a devout Catholic, gets some of his homerun power from saying the Rosary; Johnson, the reigning Sprint Cup champ, writes checks to GOP candidates. If in the last election these guys didn’t vote Republican (and they may have), it’s due in part to the fact that the GOP and its intellectual supporters pay little attention to sport.

In the Yale Daily News, reporter Bharat Ayyar (“Athletes on the Right?”) considers whether or not jocks themselves are more conservative, and reports that “of the 35 randomly selected . . . varsity athletes interviewed for this article, only 11 identified themselves as politically conservative.” Only? This is Yale! That nearly a third of athletes are on the right is damned impressive. Ayyar writes that “experts say ideals of individual responsibility and machismo, as well as religious roots, are just as integral to being an athlete as donning helmets and wearing kneepads,” and I think there’s truth in that.

The experts Ayyar quotes are anthropologists:

One, Yale professor William Kelly who is teaching “Sport, Society and Culture” this semester, says the focus on the individual athlete as a performer encourages a politically conservative mindset. Each athlete is responsible for his own effort, talent and accomplishment, Kelly explains.

And Orin Stark of Duke:

“It’s not surprising in a way that sports would tend to generate conservatism. Sports, at least in their commonest 21st century American form, celebrate values of competition and individual achievement, numbers and number-crunching, and spoils-to-the winners that mesh with the 21st century capitalist status quo.”

This is a problem. To read thisÑeven forgetting the socialist spinÑyou might imagine that sport is as dull as anthropology, but it isn’t. If it were, there wouldn’t be 105,000 screaming people packed into Ohio Stadium whenever the Buckeyes play football at home, nor would a TV audience approaching (and maybe even exceeding) 100 million tune in when FOX airs the Super Bowl. (Note: All of the top-10 primetime telecasts since 2000 have been NFL football games.)

And everything you can say about sport may be said as well about the much of rest of “pop culture,” although not with quite the same confidence in a common, conservative cause. Many of the most popular movies and TV programs are culturally conservative. Where would Hollywood be without its superhero blockbusters or TV without it police procedurals? Much intellectual ink is spilled over political films that offend conservative sensibilities, despite the fact that few of those movies attract many viewers. “Stop Loss” earned about $10 million; “Rendition” even less, whereas “The Dark Knight” grossed half-a-billion bucks.

But where are the opinion-magazine cover stories about the conservatism of Batman? Why have Andrew Adamson’s “Narnia” movies largely been ignored by conservative journals? (Thank heavens for the new blog, Big Hollywood.)

Why? For the same reason that conservatives aren’t writing about shooting, the martial arts, golf, NASCAR, the World Series, or the Super Bowl. Too bad, because these are the things our conservative comrades are doing and watching.

I’d been asked to launch a conservative book club, since Bookspan (the corporate entity behind the book clubs, then a joint venture of Time-Warner and Bertelsmann) was frustrated by the success of the Conservative Book Club, which is owned by Eagle Publishing (owners as well of the most venerable of conservative publishers, Regnery), and obviously not a part of the Bookspan family. American Compass actually premiered in January of 2004, and we were a welcome adjunct to the conservative imprints that were introduced (just before and after) by some of America’s major publishers: Crown Forum at Random House, Sentinel at Viking-Penguin, Nelson Current at Thomas Nelson, and Threshold at Simon & Schuster.

Suddenly the publishing establishment was paying serious attention to the conservative-libertarian point of view, accepting that there is a literary marketplace implied in conservative successes in other mediaÑin talk radio and cable TV; of Rush Limbaugh and FOX News Channel.

In August of 2004, American Compass hosted two panel discussions by a dozen authors (including David Frum, Michael Barone, Hugh Hewitt, and Sen. Zell Miller) about the state of conservative publishing and the affect of conservative books on the political process. C-SPAN aired the event from our offices in the Time-Life Building, which was a few blocks north of where the Republican National Convention had just begun. The New York Times reported on the event. At the end of the afternoon, a colleague came up to me and said: “You did it. You’ve destroyed the Conservative Book Club.”

Apparently not.

Towards the end of 2007, when Bookspan was . . . restructuring, I was fired, and American Compass was shuttered and then sold to . . . Eagle Publishing. (I should mention that it was never our intention to put the Conservative Book Club out of business, and we maintained a spirited, friendly competition during our co-existence.) And as I write (December, 2008) the fate of the several conservative imprints is uncertain: Mary Matalin’s Threshold seems to be gaining momentum after a slow start, but the founding editors of both Forum and Sentinel have moved on and have not been replaced, Nelson has eliminated most of its separate imprints, and several prominent conservative editors have left other houses where they’d had some success. This is not to say the companies in question will not continue to publish their successful conservative authors or even that the remaining imprints themselves won’t survive and thrive, but I can’t shake the feeling that a great many liberals up and down Publisher’s Row are breathing a collective sigh of relief that the industry’s conservative experiment is mostly over. (Such sighs are probably preferable to conservative hyperventilating, but that’s another story.)

This uncertainty is amplified by the . . . restructuring that has begun in earnest at just about every publishing company, and we’re clearly going through the kind of economic contraction during which vacancies are made and then left unfilled.

But now is exactly the wrong time for publishers to be diminishing their commitments to conservative books, if that’s what’s happening. It’s an axiom (and, I think, truth not mere shibboleth) that in the world of opinion journalism you always do better in opposition. Over the last decade, The Nation magazine, arguably the bible of the Left, has seen its circulation soar, and National Review and The Weekly Standard may reasonably expect to grow in the new, liberal climate represented by the ascendancy of Barack Obama and the Democrats. Of course, it’s long been my impression that conservatism is by definition the philosophy of outsiders, and that even when Ronald Reagan was in the White House or, after 2001, when both the Presidency and the Congress were briefly in Republican hands, conservative books thrived if and when conservative readers were riled up in hostility towards the “liberal agenda.” Indeed, most conservative books are written in attack mode. (Ann Coulter’s success derives from her assault on the new orthodoxy, liberalism, in the same way that a generation earlier Lenny Bruce was famous for satirizing the “conservative” establishment.)

We may soon see a conservative awakening of sorts, and many bestselling political books will almost certainly be from the “Right.” Introspection is a path to profit.

We may evenÑalthough this depends upon eventsÑcome to see an expansion of conservatism (or libertarianism or Americanism or whatever you want to call it), although that will require books that do more than simply preach to the choir; that do more than just attack..

I’d been asked to launch a conservative book club, since Bookspan (the corporate entity behind the book clubs, then a joint venture of Time-Warner and Bertelsmann) was frustrated by the success of the Conservative Book Club, which is owned by Eagle Publishing (owners as well of the most venerable of conservative publisher Regnery), and obviously not a part of the Bookspan family. American Compass actually premiered in January of 2004, and we were a welcome adjunct to the conservative imprints that were introduced (just before and after) by some of America’s major publishers: Crown Forum at Random House, Sentinel at Viking-Penguin, Nelson Current at Thomas Nelson, and Threshold at Simon & Schuster.

Suddenly the publishing establishment was paying serious attention to the conservative-libertarian point of view, accepting that there is a literary marketplace implied in conservative successes in other mediaÑin talk radio and cable TV; of Rush Limbaugh and FOX News Channel.

In August of 2004, American Compass hosted two panel discussions by a dozen authors (including David Frum, Michael Barone, Hugh Hewitt, and Sen. Zell Miller) about the state of conservative publishing and the affect of conservative books on the political process. C-SPAN aired the event from our offices in the Time-Life Building, which was a few blocks north of where the Republican National Convention had just begun. The New York Times reported on the event. At the end of the afternoon, a colleague came up to me and said: “You did it. You’ve destroyed the Conservative Book Club.”

Apparently not.

Towards the end of 2007, when Bookspan was . . . restructuring, I was fired, and American Compass was shuttered and then sold to . . . Eagle Publishing. (I should mention that it was never our intention to put the Conservative Book Club out of business, and we maintained a spirited, friendly competition during our co-existence.) And as I write (December, 2008) the fate of the several conservative imprints is uncertain: Mary Matalin’s Threshold seems to be gaining momentum after a slow start, but the founding editors of both Forum and Sentinel have moved on and have not been replaced, Nelson has eliminated most of its separate imprints, and several prominent conservative editors have left other houses where they’d had some success. This is not to say the companies in question will not continue to publish their successful conservative authors or even that the remaining imprints themselves won’t survive and thrive, but I can’t shake the feeling that a great many liberals up and down Publisher’s Row are breathing a collective sigh of relief that the industry’s conservative experiment is mostly over. (Such sighs are probably preferable to conservative hyperventilating, but that’s another story.)

This uncertainty is amplified by the . . . restructuring that has begun in earnest at just about every publishing company, and we’re clearly going through the kind of economic contraction during which vacancies are made and then left unfilled.

But now is exactly the wrong time for publishers to be diminishing their commitments to conservative books, if that’s what’s happening. It’s an axiom (and, I think, truth not mere shibboleth) that in the world of opinion journalism you always do better in opposition. Over the last decade, The Nation magazine, arguably the bible of the Left, has seen its circulation soar, and National Review and The Weekly Standard may reasonably expect to grow in the new, liberal climate represented by the ascendancy of Barack Obama and the Democrats. Of course, it’s long been my impression that conservatism is by definition the philosophy of outsiders, and that even when Ronald Reagan was in the White House or, after 2001, when both the Presidency and the Congress were briefly in Republican hands, conservative books thrived if and when conservative readers were riled up in hostility towards the “liberal agenda.” Indeed, most conservative books are written in attack mode. (Ann Coulter’s success derives from her assault on the new orthodoxy, liberalism, in the same way that a generation earlier Lenny Bruce was famous for satirizing the “conservative” establishment.)

We may soon see a conservative awakening of sorts, and many bestselling political books will almost certainly be from the “Right.” Introspection is a path to profit.

We may evenÑalthough this depends upon eventsÑcome to see an expansion of conservatism (or libertarianism or Americanism or whatever you want to call it), although that will require books that do more than simply preach to the choir; that do more than just attack..