Among those who will be watching the game is National Review senior editor Charles C.W. Cooke. A native of England, Cooke has become an avid football fan (specifically, of the Jacksonville Jaguars) and has written about his growing understanding of America’s one true national sport. He has also written about some on the Right’s aversion to the N.F.L., particularly as some concoct convoluted conspiracy theories involving singer Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, the Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, while others denounce professional sports as a whole.
I spoke to Mr. Cooke about falling in love with football, what the sport means to Americans, why some on the Right are fine with being “toxic” to most Americans, and why he thinks the 49ers will win the Super Bowl. This interview has been edited for length and clarity and is part of an Opinion Q. and A. series exploring modern conservatism today, its influence in society and politics and how and why it differs (and doesn’t) from the conservative movement that most Americans thought they knew. (...)
Coaston: The politics around the N.F.L. specifically have gotten pretty weird online since the 2010s. Some people tried to get people to boycott the N.F.L. because of Black Lives Matter. Now we’re a few months into very intense online right-wing reactions to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce that ranges from people saying football distracts from Jesus to saying the 49ers have to win the Super Bowl to prevent World War III. But let’s start with the boycott aspect. Was that even possible in the United States? What were people thinking?
Cooke: I think that what you are seeing is right-wing puritanism or right-wing totalitarianism. And by totalitarianism, I don’t mean authoritarianism so much as the subordination of everything to politics, which has historically been a great tendency on the left. This idea that sports are a distraction from politics that has crept in on the right is quite East German. It suggests that politics is all that anyone should care about and insofar as they care about anything else be that sports or art, it should be contained within politics. And again, that’s a tendency that I historically saw among radical, slightly weird progressives who would see all art either revolutionary or non-revolutionary, maybe certain feminists as well. And it’s odd and alienating and destined to fail because most Americans are not politics-addicted weirdos, and they understand that politics exists to engender civil society, not to replace it.
The problem is that it just separates you from the middle of the country. And if your aim is to win elections, which these people seem to want to do, that’s just not the way to go about it. One of the great things about football is just that when you go to a game, everyone is the same. We’re all rooting for the same thing. And I have no idea what those people think about politics, and I don’t want to know because the point of being there is that we’re Jaguars fans. This weird tendency on the right, this hyper politicization that has crept in that doesn’t like anything that isn’t partisan politics — it’s just going to put people off.
Coaston: Do you think they want to win? And if they do, what is it: Elections? Prestige? Cultural acclaim?
Cooke: Well, that’s a great question and that’s more of a political question than a sports question. On the one hand, yes, I think a lot of those people want to win, and they’re just perhaps a bit odd. But then I also think that there are people who like the victim status that comes with losing. And also, this is one of the things the internet’s done is create a world in which you can be absolutely toxic to the vast majority of Americans, but have enough fans or subscribers or donors to make you quite rich. So there are certain people — and this is by no means limited to the right — there are certain people within American politics who really are a liability for their side, broadly construed, but who have made tons of money because they’ve managed to convince 10,000 people, a hundred thousand people, a million people to follow them.
Coaston: How do you think conspiracy theory culture, which is not new, but how do you think it ties into this idea that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are having a fake relationship to endorse Biden on the field? It just seems conspiratorial, but it’s the kind of conspiratorial that 15 years ago would be coming from just some guy on the street, and now it’s coming from people who are, like, someone who ran for president or people who are actual influencers with a fair amount of followers. What happened? Do conspiracies breed more conspiracies?
Cooke: So America’s always been absolutely chock-full of conspiracy theories. Going back to the founding, yes, the very traditional American pastime. This one baffles me because there is nothing that is more predictable than a female pop star dating a male football star. This isn’t odd.
Coaston: Something that’s funny is I just keep thinking, was Tony Romo dating Jessica Simpson a conspiracy theory? It’s interesting how this has happened before. The quarterback of the Broncos, Russell Wilson, is married to a popular R&B singer. This isn’t new, but this is new.
Cooke: Yeah, this is new. You said the conspiracies beget more conspiracies. And I do think you’re on to something there in that there has been now for quite a long time, a need to justify Donald Trump’s claims. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, but he said he won it. I suspect quite a lot of the people who like Donald Trump think deep down that he’s going to lose in 2024. And so some of them are looking for reasons as to why that might be. Now, it is true that there is media bias, and there is a great deal of progressive authority wielded outside of the electoral process. I would love to see conservatives enjoy the same influence in the media and academia and corporate America and so on as progressives do. But that doesn’t change the fact that Donald Trump lost the election and is just broadly disliked by Americans.
And I do see in some of these conspiracy theories as pre-emptive excuse making: “Well, he would’ve won the election if the Pentagon hadn’t recruited Taylor Swift as an asset.” And then, I mean, it’s so silly. “It made her famous.” She’s the most famous person in the world. (...)
Coaston: I’ve been thinking about how Erick Erickson argued that a lot of the noise around Kelce and Swift from MAGA influencers was basically an act to produce attention and clout. But what is that performance trying to tell us is? What are they trying to say?
Cooke: My test is always, if you said that in a bar, how would people respond? This is why I think some of the intersectional types don’t know how they sound. If they said that at a bar and they would be met with blank stare — just imagine pointing to the screen in the A.F.C. championship game when they cut to Taylor Swift and saying, oh, you see her, she’s a Pentagon psyop. Could you imagine the looks that you would get from someone?
But look, the incentives do line up for people to do it. There’s enough people out there who buy this stuff. I don’t know if they mean it or not, but the way I put it in my piece was, either way, they’re wrong. If they really think that this is happening, then they’re crazy. If they think that this is the sort of thing that people want to hear, then they’re wrong. And if they know full well that it’s crazy and wrong and counterproductive, and they’re doing it anyway because they understand that there are enough lost people out there who will shovel money their way for saying it, and they’re evil, however you look at it, this is bad.
by Jane Coston, NY Times | Read more:
