I’m going to spend more time on this blog in 2015.

I’m going to do this with great skepticism and trepidation. I’m 45 and tenured — the quintessential “mid-career professional.” I’m probably not alone among those in my profession wondering to themselves “how do I continue to add value to my profession, my students, my institution, my friends and family, my community and the world.”

After the requisite week of “new years resolution,” I’ve answered this question for myself by committing to redoubling my efforts to build a public voice through this blog and other media. There are numerous other things I could do than try to hastily put out premature ideas to meet some abstract quota. My approach to blogging has been to be pithy and quick. To save the “slow thinking” for book chapters and journal articles. Doing this, I’ve met with marginal response from the “world out there.” Often times I’ve thought that my blogging did more harm than good, believing that it does nothing more than present me and my “ideas in progress” to the world as a “thin intellectual.”

Over time, my post frequency dwindled as my professional and personal duties increased. But if I’m honest, I stopped posting regularly because I felt as if I had less and less to say to fewer and fewer who would listen. This might be the existential crisis of most academics who fear their less that their labor will fall on hostile ears and more that they will fall on no ears at all.

I know it is just another in a teeming ecosystem of voices and it may land imperceptibly on indifferent ears, but I’m willing to try it again with more fervor. I come back to Camus’ call to make meaning of humanity’s absurdity. If we are all like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill only to have it fall back down over an over again, then I’ll put my tendonits-plagued shoulder to the task in the hope that it makes a marginal difference.

There’s a long road to the 2016 election, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out. Much is being said about changing state demographics and psychographics and how it will affect the electoral map. Chris Ladd sounded the alarm in his post-2014 analysis, noting the electorally rich Blue Wall and the electorally sparse Red Fortress. Many argue that leadership can cause blue states to turn over, but the swing state math means putting a diverse set of states into play. This would mean states like Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico from the West; Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ohio from the Midwest; Virginia; and Florida.

The ideological rhetorics in #hashtaggable quips have solidified over the years to create meanings for ideological clusters. Perhaps the thorniest issue for both parties will be the size and scope of the government. Pew has been developing political typologies for about 25 years and the latest highlights political fragmentation:

The GOP is faced with two factions that want different things. The Steadfast Conservatives and Business Conservatives differ on social issues and immigration. There isn’t a core, but 2 cores that are distinct. The populist aspect of the Steadfast Conservatives can make Business Conservatives uneasy when there’s talk of going after crony capitalism and use of rhetoric like Codevilla’s “country class” versus “ruling class” dichotomy. Republicans could court Young Outsiders, but would need to moderate on social issues. The Faith & Family Left are religious and have concerns about the country’s morality, but are proponents of the social safety net, as are the Hard-Pressed Skeptics. Democrat core typologies also create factions of Solid Liberals, Next Generation Left, and the Faith & Family Left.

I think we’re guaranteed to see the Obama Administration systematically lobbing issues at the right to create tensions between Steadfast and Business Conservatives. I would surmise that part of the strategy is to get Republicans to despise their own opposing faction and set up a particularly brutal primary season with the tagline of Who Is Most Conservative? Already, the Twittersphere and punditsphere are calling into question Chris Christie or Jeb Bush’s qualifications as true conservatives. In the power struggle, it’s not as if either side will defect from the GOP (both came out or Romney in 2012 & Republican Congressional candidates in 2014). The danger is turning off the other political typologies. While Republicans made inroads with the 2014 election with respect to all of the typologies, it was without a center ring battle of what the party represents and its platform:

The Democrats might have a few more degrees of freedom with respect to strategizing in the next 20 months. They can never be a “small” or “anti” government party, but they could articulate being a “smart” government party knowing full well that they will never convince their detractors. This would allow inroads in swing states into the Next Generation Left, the Hard-Pressed Skeptics, and the Young Outsiders. Of course, a shift could occur and these political typologies might morph or dissolve with new ones forming.

It will be interesting how things shape up in 2015.

In this week’s NYT Sunday Review, Arthur C. Brooks, the President of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) cites Pew polls figures showing that Americans are bothered by the commercialization and consumerism of the Christmas season. Brooks explains it away saying, “The frustration and emptiness so many people feel at this time of the year is not an objection to the abundance … [but rather] a healthy hunger for nonattachment.” Like any self-respecting enlightened capitalist, he makes a superficial nod toward Eastern philosophy and tells us to “collect experiences, not things” (easy when you have nice things like groceries). Good advice, but it’s lost in the mix when he forgives all capitalist excesses because they allow for poverty amelioration: “This season, don’t rail against the crowds of shoppers on Fifth Avenue or become some sort of anti-gift misanthrope. Celebrate the bounty that has pulled millions out of poverty…” The whole op-ed is fairly nonsensical but the sort of the thing you’d expect from the President of AEI. You might hope that the NYT would choose a better lead story for their Sunday Review on the week that saw the release of the Congressional report on the use of torture, the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting, and a massive Justice for All March in D.C.

I do wonder what it means that a nation of such avid consumers is so horribly troubled by consumption during the Christmas season. Jean Baudrillard once argued that Disneyland exists so that Americans can identify it as fake, allowing us to avoid facing the overwhelming unreality of life in America as a whole. Do our critiques of consumerism around Christmas serve the same function? Perhaps we condemn consumerism within the sacred space of December as a way of making consumerism during the eleven profane months more acceptable. The only thing that makes Zen master Brooks different is that he revels in our “abundance” (that’s enlightened capitalist code for buying shiny crapola) all year. He’s all too happy to spread the profane.

I tend the other way. It doesn’t bother me that Christmas cranks consumerism up to 11. It would be fine if we went on a sweater-buying frenzy for a month out of the year if we didn’t drive gas-guzzling cars and live in giant houses and get trapped in a work-spend cycle the rest of the year. What concerns me is that we keep Christmas consumerism in our hearts all the year round. In other words, many of our concerns about Christmas consumerism are misplaced, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be worried about consumption in general. Now, back to my Christmas shopping …

I may be off base here, but President Obama’s executive order to defer action on deportation to roughly 5 million undocumented immigrants is a political masterstroke (whether or not it’s good governance or constitutional is a separate issue).

It’s brilliant because it gives millions of US citizen children with undocumented parents a strong reason to register and vote in 2016. Further it gives the US citizen relatives of undocumented parents a reason to register. It gives resident aliens connected to undocumented parents a reason to apply for citizenship and finally, it gives undocumented people the impetus to knock on doors and make phone calls for Democratic candidates in 2016.

It does this because it’s a temporary reprise from the threat of deportation. The political success of this strategy hinges on the inability of Republicans to act on immigration reform. If Congress can’t pass immigration reform legislation, then the status of 5 million undocumented immigrants hinges on the continuation of an executive branch policy that defers action on their status. This would be a strong motivator for a Democratic presidential candidate to pledge to continue the president’s deferred action policy.

If the strategy relies on Republicans inaction then so far, so good. Mitch McConell wasn’t wrong when he said the president’s action would make immigration reform more difficult to pass in Congress. Case in point, a Quinnipiac University poll that shows Republican support for a “path to citizenship” has fallen precipitously since Obama’s executive action last week.

This Republican disapproval is exactly what the administration needed for this action to work politically. It’s a clever form of political ju-jitzu from President Obama — use the opposition party’s abject hatred for you to drive down Republican support for Congressional action thereby making it impossible for the Republican majority to pass a bill and therefore locking the Democrats in as the “Immigration party.” With a favorable electoral map in 2016, this can only boost the chances of Latinos turning out to vote for Democrats. While it might create counter mobilization on the other sidde, nothing is a powerful a motivator as “go vote, or tia and tio will get deported.

It’s taken me a while to gather my thoughts on last Tuesday’s mid-terms. It was a profound defeat for the Democrats, not simply because of the loss in the Senate and the gains in the House (the largest Republican margin since 1929), but because of decisive victories in state legislatures and governorships.

From an objective policy perspective, the Democrats don’t deserve this type of treatment. It took a costly, ill-advised war in Iraq and the biggest financial meltdown in a century for voters to sour on the Republican party. By contrast, the list of Democratic party sins seem tiny in comparison (a health care plan that has produced mixed results, a mixed economic picture and an unsteady yet uneventful foreign policy). Stepping back, it’s hard to understand why voters are so angry that a vast majority want the Republicans back in charge.

What I keep circling back to is branding. The biggest failing of the current Democratic president is his inability to help his party build a strong, consistent message about what the Democrats believe in. Ronald Reagan was singularly effective at building the Republican party brand as small government/strong defense. It was such an effective packaging that Bill Clinton sought to borrow elements of it to repackage the Democrats as the party of “smart government.”

President Obama has been much less effective in helping cultivate a party brand by turning his legislative accomplishments into a digestable package. To the extent he was successful in his re-election efforts, he was able to reinforce the Clinton-era brand for the party as the party of “smart government.” He even seemed to be pinning back the Republicans in the wake of the government shutdown fight. That is until the Obamacare website fiasco created an opening for Republicans to paint the administration as incompetent.

The subsequent dip in the polls and the bad Senate map led the party to run en-masse away from the president and his record. In it stead, the party fielded or defended a set of candidates with muddled, inconsistent messages for voters. The strategy was to allow individual candidates to run as themselves rather than under their party brand. This approach might have won 20 years ago when parties weren’t “perfectly sorted” by ideology, but the impact of a candidate-centered approach is to further confuse your brand and make it more difficult for turnout operations to work because their party fervor isn’t backed by the candidate.

No matter how sophisticated the big-data infused micro-targeting techniques, party politics is still about motivating people. Even if you can get the “true believers” to knock on doors, they have to have something meaningful to say. More likely, bushels of dark money can be used to pay people to knock on doors. But what they say has to resonate. As Rasmus Klein Nielsen points out in Ground Wars, a useful book about the 2008 campaign, face-to-face communication has become increasingly prevalent in the microtargeting era. Increasingly, people are delivering political messages in elections. This corresponds with the growing body of political science literature that identifies this type of personal contact as most effective in political campaigns. Nielsen notes how much commitment is required of a get out the vote effort:

Contacting approximately 100 million people across the nation, as the numerous campaign assemblages that faced off at various levels during the 2008 elections did, takes about 33 million hours of work.

What gets 33 million hours of work done? Money? Absolutely. But the money doesn’t buy the commitment or the message. This mid-term election, when a Republican volunteer knocked on a door, they could deliver the 1-2 punch of their brand strength (small government, pro business) and the failure of the Democrats to live up to their brand (not-so-smart government). When a Democratic volunteer knocked on the door, they had nothing impactful they could say to their voters.

This isn’t because the Democrats don’t have a list of accomplishments. It’s because they still lack a language to articulate what they have accomplished. Politics are still at their base about ideas. Republicans have ideas about the role of government that are clearly understandable to the public. They skillfully downplayed the social conservative aspects of their party’s beliefs to capture middle-ground voters who are more concerned about job-growth. Democrats have ideas too. But President Obama’s skill as a public speaker hasn’t translated into a skill as a communicator. What has resulted is a party that provides tepid at best and non-existent at worst defense of an activist government. The era of candidate-centered politics is over. Democrats have little time to figure out who they are or they might be in the political wilderness for a generation.

Six years ago, my wife and I moved to Fargo, North Dakota for my job at Concordia College across the Red River in Moorhead, Minnesota. Growing up in Bergen County, New Jersey, my view of the country looked a lot like the famous 1976 New Yorker cover, “View of the World from 9th Avenue.”

As a kid, a friend’s father tried to convince us that North Dakota didn’t exist (a take on the Bielefeld Conspiracy gag) and it seemed somewhat plausible. Even as I prepared to move, most of my understanding of Minnesota was informed by The Mighty Ducks and, like most people, what little I knew about North Dakota came from the Coen Brothers’ movie, Fargo. In other words, I was profoundly ignorant about the people, the culture, and the geography of our new home.

Six years later, in early June of this year, my wife and I packed up and moved back east to Saratoga Springs, NY for my new position at Skidmore College. In that time, I have had the pleasure of teaching many remarkable students and working alongside some wonderful colleagues. We have made lifelong friendships with people who are smart, progressive, and cosmopolitan, and who violate nearly all of the stereotypes of Midwesterners (except for calling soda “pop” — that’s actually real).

I’ve learned an incredible amount during these years and have come away with some perspective that I don’t think I would’ve had if I’d never left the East Coast. Here are four important things I’ve learned from living in the Midwest:

1. There is no Midwest. Ohio is different from Michigan, which is different from Minnesota. But Grand Rapids, MN in the Iron Range is also different from Minneapolis. Indeed, some of the identity of being an Iron Ranger is constructed in opposition to the culture of people from “The Cities.” While most Minnesotans and North Dakotans I know identify as Midwestern, evidence shows the percentages identifying as Midwestern are lower than for people living in Indiana. In my experience, North Dakotans especially are more likely to specify that they’re from the “Upper Midwest.”

But when it comes to understanding “the culture of the Midwest,” the divides of urban and rural, major city and small city are far more profound than the differences between Midwest and East Coast. The cultural difference between Chicago and NYC is smaller than the cultural distance from Minot, ND and St. Paul, MN. The caveat I would offer is that many urban dwellers in the Midwest are only a generation or two removed from a farm and tend to have greater familiarity with rural life than I have encountered in the East.

An important lesson to an ignorant East Coaster like myself is that “The Midwest” is far from monolithic.

2. If the American Dream is alive anywhere, it’s in the Midwest. With a little help from a 577 page surprise bestseller by a French economist with a name we’re stilling learning to pronounce correctly, we’re in the midst of a national conversation about inequality. It is now well-established that income and wealth inequalities are as great as they have been since the Gilded Age and that the extent of inequality is far greater in the U.S. than in Europe. Likewise (or perhaps consequently), the United States has much lower social mobility than Europe or Canada. Many social scientists and political figures alike fear that the toxic combination of high inequality and low social mobility seriously jeopardizes the dual promises of meritocracy and middle class prosperity that make up the American Dream.

But social scientists have also shown the United States is not uniformly unequal. As the Equality of Opportunity Project has shown, the states of the western Midwest (WI, MN, ND, SD, NE, IA, MT) are among the most equal and socially mobile in the country (see figure).

Though I grew up with it, when I go back to New York or New Jersey now, I’m stunned by both the concentrated poverty and the extreme wealth. Fargo, a city of almost 200,000, has a booming economy and one of the largest Microsoft campuses and still can’t support a Banana Republic. Meanwhile, nine of the forty-five Gucci stores in America are within 20 miles of each other in the New York area. Of course, major Midwestern cities, like Minneapolis, have greater wealth and poverty, but they simply cannot compare to the intergenerational durability of wealth and permanence of poverty in either the Northeast or, especially, the South. If the American Dream of hard work and upward mobility is alive anywhere today, it’s in the Midwest (actually, it’s in Denmark or Norway where social mobility is much greater).

3. The Midwest has a deserved chip on its shoulder. The nation’s centers of power are on the coasts. The economy and the press are in New York. The government and military are in D.C. The culture industry is in L.A. And over half the nation’s population lives within 50 miles of a coast (39% live in coastal counties representing less than 10% of the country’s land (http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html)). As a result, the Midwest (especially the Upper Midwest) is too often neglected. A snowflake falls in Midtown Manhattan and CNN flies into crisis mode. It takes serious devastation (or an absolutely massive oil boom) for the Coastal press to take notice of little ol’ North Dakota.

One of the more cringe-inducing experiences in Fargo is seeing a visiting band or comedian take the stage and make a hackneyed joke along the lines of “Wow. I’m in Fargo. It sure is cold!” And here’s the thing: the crowd eats it up! Because it’s a form of recognition. All that talk about the “real America” from the likes of Sarah Palin? Those are desperate cries that “hey, we count, too!” Especially in places like Fargo, what I’d call “place entrepreneurs” engage in active PR campaigns to show that life isn’t as bad as you think way out here (e.g., the #ilovefargo hashtag on Twitter started by a local urban promoter).

There’s a defensiveness in the region that stems from a real neglect and a feeling of disempowerment. On the other hand, it’s worth noting that feeling of disempowerment is somewhat counteracted by the highly disproportional representation that these largely low population areas have in Congress (Obamacare’s “public option,” for example, was taken out of the bill by seven Senators representing 3.6% of the U.S. population).

4. It is a Christian country in the Upper Midwest. An acquaintance, a mother of two small children, told me a story about her move from Connecticut to Fargo. She enrolled her kids in a non-religiously-affiliated day care in Fargo and when she picked them up during the middle of the day, she found that they were saying a prayer before snack time. None of the parents seemed to have a problem with it. She pointed out that in CT, the parents would have flipped out. Now, it’s not because everybody in North Dakota is a pious Christian, but because Christianity is so assumed as a part of everyday life that having a quick prayer shouldn’t bother anybody. The level of diversity in CT makes that unthinkable. As one of the chaplains at Concordia College once told me, “this is Christendom.” It does not operate at the level of aggressive evangelism (in fact, most people I knew are progressive Lutherans). Rather, Christian is taken to be the default category.

The two facts that define New York and New Jersey where I grew up are incredible diversity and extreme inequality. I grew up with a lot of secular Jews and, during the December holiday season, the schools took great pains to have as many menorahs as Santas. Like the rest of the country, all parts of the Midwest are becoming more racially and religiously diverse. So, Christendom is in decline even the Upper Midwest, but there is not the public secularity of the East or the West coasts.

—
To many Midwesterners, these points may be blindingly obvious, but they are things I couldn’t see as an East Coaster. From my conversations with other coastal folk, I’m not alone. So, thank you to my Midwestern friends who put up with a loudmouthed New Jerseyan and taught me more about my country. To my East Coast friends and family, let’s try to reject that New Yorker cover vision of America.

Apologies to ThickCulture readers for all the sports talk recently. I’ll get more sociological again soon. I promise. I wrote the following as an email to my pal and historian of American sports, Dan Hawkins, but thought I’d post it here to get a wider response.

I’ve been following the latest NBA free agent rumors and pretty much every other sentence on ESPN is “clearing cap space.” I certainly remember a lot of talk about “cap space” going back to 2008 when teams started drooling over LeBron’s availability in 2010. But I don’t recall much talk about it before then. If memory serves, in the 1990s, people tended to talk about “blockbuster trades” more.

I have several hypotheses to help explain this observation:

1) I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m just more tuned into NBA post-2008, but I kind of doubt it. I feel less tuned in to the NBA than I was 1990-2002.

2) It’s a media effect. Maybe cap space was always a big issue, but because ESPN and its ilk have created a bigger “newshole” for sports coverage, they can cover acquisitions issues more closely. It seems like Bill Simmons and others responded to/created market demand for this sort of trade and signing speculation.

3) It’s a product of the superstar era. The modern game relies on superstars to a greater extent and so free agent signings have become more important means by which teams improve. Thus, “freeing cap space” to sign free agent has become a more common tactic.

4) NBA rules have changed. Here, I’m way out of my depth. Have there been changes to the regulations surrounding acquisitions that have made free agent signings more desirable?

Thoughts?

I have an curiosity about Tinder (strictly academic — I’m happily married), a dating app that lets you find singles (or “singles”) in your immediate vicinity and allows you to quickly zero in on the one you find most attractive.

An article in BetaBeat details how the site works:

You pick a gender (male, female or both), then decide how far or close you want them to be (10 to 100 miles away) and how old (18 to 50+.) It’s like ordering pizza. You can also write a tagline to describe yourself and add a few more photos for people who want to learn more about you(r looks) before making their choice.

Swipe right if you approve of someone’s appearance. Swipe left if you’re not into them. If you reject someone, the poor schmuck won’t be able to contact you. But if you both swipe right, you’ll be able to chat up a storm until you make plans for drinks at a mutually agreeable location.

What fascinates me about Tinder is that it’s a simple, elegant app that does one thing, facilitate hooking up. Across the world, organizations and city governments are engaging in “hackathons” designed to build apps to help solve civic problems. The White house just concluded their National Day of Civic Hacking where programmers/coders in 103 cities set to work on solving civic problems. The coders created an impressive set of apps and sites designed to address pressing local and regional issues. However, none of these projects, as important as they are will have the social impact of a “hookup app.”

I’m afraid our efforts to change political dynamics using social media is still reckoning with a question posted in a tweet by Jeff Jarvis:

Do we need a Tinder for democracy?

— Prof. Jeff H Jarvis (@ProfJeffJarvis) June 25, 2014

If you listen to traditional media channels, you may be surprised to learn that soccer is actually a pretty big deal in the United States. Take for instance, Stephen Dubner’s usually engaging and informative Freakonomics radio, who trotted out a tired canard about how unpopular soccer is in the United States. The story starts with the ludicrous notion that the World Cup is unpopular because it isn’t American football.

It’s no secret that soccer continues to lag behind other U.S. sports in viewership and enthusiasm. For instance, 111.5 million Americans sat down to watch Super Bowl XLVIII in 2014. Meanwhile, only 24.3 million watched the 2010 World Cup Final.

I believe this is known as a “straw man” argument. Soccer is not as popular as American football? Nothing is as popular as American football! The 24.3. million people tuned in to the final of the 2010 FIFA World Cup (a 41 percent increase over the 2006 cup, by the Way) is comparable to Game 7 of the 2013 NBA finals which captured 26 million viewers and more than the final game of the 2013 World Series which captured 19.2 million viewers. By contrast, it is much great than the 8.2 million that watched the last game of the 2013 NHL Stanley Cup Finals. By Dubner’s ludicrous standard, no sport is popular in the United States because it isn’t American football.

Later on, Dubner cites a Harris poll noting that only three percent of Americans cite soccer as their favorite sport compared to 30 percent who cite Pro Football and 11 percent who cite College Football. More straw man. That same poll reports that only 4 percent cite hockey as their favorite sport and 7 percent cite basketball. Not to mention that this was an online poll conducted in English.. but we’ll get to that.

This is why a more interesting conversation about soccer in the United States has shifted from “soccer isn’t popular” to “soccer is only popular every four years.” Political Scientist Andrei Markovitz talks of the Olypianization of soccer, whereby Americans tune in to the big event (World Cup) every four years and ignore the sport in the interim (kinda like American politics.. sorry couldn’t resist). But even that isn’t true… the landscape is shifting rapidly, only it’s a little hard to tell because soccer is so fragmented.

First, soccer is a global game so it’s played all over the world. Second, the way soccer works is that there are really two leagues, one based on clubs and one based on country. The biggest event for countries is this month’s World Cup, but national teams play in tournaments between World Cups. There are regional tournaments aside from qualification for the World Cup itself. In the Central American, Caribbean and North American region — CONCACAF, there’s a tournament called the Gold Cup. In South American it’s called Copa Libertadores America, in Africa it’s the African Cup of Nations, and so on… In the US, these tournaments do pretty well. The CONCACAF gold cup does respectable, if not spectacular, ratings on TV in the United States. In 2013, 4.9 million people watched the final between the US and Panama. The 2012 Euro Cup averaged over 1 million viewers on ESPN, double that of 2008.

The other type of competition in world soccer is league competitions. Here, soccer is gaining ground as well. If you compare the TV ratings of any one soccer league to traditional US sports, they don’t fare well. In the 2012 regular season, the NBA average a rating of 3.3 (roughly between 3-4 million US households). That’s a pretty strong compared to the ratings of our domestic soccer league (Major League Soccer – MLS’s). MLS’s meager ratings of between 100,000 and 300,000 households seems small. But the soccer space in the US is divided between a number of leagues. So to be fair, you add MLS’ 200,000 viewers to the 500,000 to 700,000 that watch the English Premiere League on Saturday mornings and the 800,000 to 1,000,000 that watch the Mexican League (LIGA MX) and soccer on a regular basis begins to approach the NBA in magnitude.

So why the view that the sport is irrelevant, even among people who should know better? The perception that soccer is “small time” in the US sports landscape is driven by two key factors. One, its popularity is fragmented as I’ve already discussed, so there’s not one league to focus on, bur rather a multitude of “foreign” leagues to discuss. But I think the other explanation is more pernicious, its perception comes for society’s sustained marginalization of “foreigners,” particularly Mexican immigrants in the United States. It is a means of drawing boundaries of “Americanness” around sports. Unwittingly, it is a way of identifying based on identity groups that suggest race and ethnic categorization, but do not explicitly state it.

Most telling in the Freakonomics radio piece is this throwaway line where Dubner’s doubts the prospect of soccer becoming as popular as American football.. as if that were the standard:

let’s be honest, it probably won’t. Many of the people who are most fanatical about the sport in the US have some kind of tie to Europe or South America or Africa.

This is intended to suggest that only those with close ties to “foreigners” appreciate the game.. a fallacy that need it’s own unpacking. But let’s take this at face value. Does he realize how many people he is talking about? There are roughly 50 million Latinos in the United States, many of whom “have strong ties” to soccer loving countries, primarily Mexico. I’m sure a smart guy like Dubner knows that Mexico is actually in North America so the exclusion of Mexico must be because it doesn’t fit the narrative they are trying to tell about the unpopularity of the sport.

Here’s the problem: Soccer is enjoyed by people who inhabit the United States, but because many of those people may be first or second generation immigrants, and in many cases many not speak English or have English as a primary language, it’s not culturally relevant to include in debates about the popularity of sport. Close to 5 million people in the US watched the Liga MX (Mexican soccer league) final between Leon and Pachuca, a number that compares favorably with the ratings for MLB playoff games, but it’s irrelevant because either it was watched in Spanish or watched by Spanish-speakers, I’m not sure which.

Sports media constantly refer to a “big four” American sports (Football, Basketball, Baseball and Hockey). Soccer when mentioned is still talked about as a foreign entity. A few days ago ESPN commentator Michael Wilbon opined that US National Soccer Team coach Jurgen Klinsman to “get the hell out of America” because he suggested Kobe Bryant should not be given a contract extension based on past performance. The inference was that this foreigner shouldn’t be commenting on American games.

So if a person on US soil watches a game in Spanish, are they a foreigner? Are they tuning in to a sport broadcast in a foreign language and that’s what makes it foreign? This narrative of a “big four” underscores a troubling assumption. A sport is only truly “popular” in the United States if English-speaking, native born people follow it. When they do, then we can call it an “American sport.” I’d argue that there is a deep cultural marginalization going on when the preferred sport of the largest-minority ethnic group in the United States is viewed as marginal because it’s not viewed by “the wrong people.” To say people don’t follow soccer in the United States is a veiled way of saying that it’s not viewed by people that matter.

The sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva has a great term for what I think is going on: white habitus. This is the idea that the “separate residential and culture life” (103) of Whites creates a:

“racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters” (104)

A habitus that reinforces notions of what cultural norms and tastes are “American” and which are “foreign” is reinforced by this social and cultural isolation. To personally not like the game isn’t evidence of cultural bias, but arguing that the sport isn’t popular even when there is evidence to the contrary, suggests an ignorance derived from cultural isolation. Commentators on traditional media outlets (ESPN and FOX, for instance) as a space of cultural life reinforces the idea that to be American means to follow some sports and not others. Mike Wilbon is paid to “act a fool” for lack of a better term, but that doesn’t mean that he’s being culturally arrogant when he claims to know what constitutes an “American” sport. Things are changing however and I suspect that if four year’s time, when the 2018 World Cup kicks off in Russia, I won’t be compelled to write a post like this.

Danny Vinik at the New Repubic has an interesting piece that makes the claim that the Republican Party’s problem with Latinos rest less on immigration reform and more on social spending and persistent messaging that is perceived as hostile to Latinos. The problem is more with the party’s base than with the party leadership:

The Brookings/PRRI poll found that 50 percent of Republicans believe immigrants are a burden on the country, compared to just 44 percent who say they strengthen the nation. On the other hand, 73 percent of Democrats say that immigrants strengthen the country.

This statistic highlights a dilemma for the party, appeal to a big chunk of the party base that is hostile to immigrants while attracting those immigrants to begin with. In the past, this dilemma was resolved by parties through patronage. David Roediger’s brilliant book, the Wages of Whiteness, tells of the patronage system as a ladder of opportunity for Irish immigrants, one many found more preferable than partnering with blacks to agitate for better wages. Hence, they chose the “wages of Whiteness” over actual wages. Neither the Republicans or the Democrats have patronage to give. I’m skeptical that an “improvement of manners,” to quote Richard Rorty, would do much to change the political equation.