Super Bowl Sunday: Something Conservative Wonks Should Watch–and Celebrate

Indulge me. With the Super Bowl coming up this weekend, I want to write about sports, which I consider a key to building a larger conservative coalition in America.

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.