Waiter, Please Take This Politics Away, It's Got College Football In It

Collective Narcissism! Everywhere!

Welcome! The first two editions of Disorder Up are here and here, and some occasional thoughts on St. Patrick are here.

Still abroad as I write this, so I’m missing the NCAA basketball tournament. It’s a shame; March Madness is one of my favorite events in sports. Beyond their obvious virtue as spectacle, college athletics can teach us a lot about politics. This is especially true of the outsized role of collective narcissism in the politics of the New Disorder, for which there might be no better guide than college basketball’s unhinged cousin, college football.

A note for international readers: while professional American football generates the highest revenue of any sports league in the country (indeed, in the world) and has legions of zealous supporters, college football culture is the closest American equivalent to the visceral, primal fandom of the European soccer experience. Consider: the Las Vegas Raiders, opened their new stadium, with a normal capacity of 65,000, in 2020. An American university built a 66,000 person college football stadium in 1922. The largest pro football stadium - AT&T Stadium in Texas - has a normal capacity of 85,000 and can stretch to 107,000 if it needs to. College football has nine stadiums with greater normal capacity than that; several routinely hold 115,000 or more. 

College football fandom is also home to the most demented, disordered, and gleefully deranged behaviors in American sports. You do not need to have attended a university to be a foaming-at-the-mouth fan. Rooting interests can be inherited (as mine is) or adopted, but they are largely geographically determined - and, as in international politics, areas of overlapping interest are where you find the truly wild shit.

I suppose there’s an argument against the wisdom and virtue of millions of people staking their worldly happiness and very sanity on an eighteen-year-old making a superhuman athletic play rather than a simple mistake, but when it goes right, it goes really right. Entire regions of the country enter a state of grace when their team wins. There’s a defensible argument that Louisiana has a Democratic governor because LSU beat Alabama at the right time. 

As someone who has spent his life in professional politics, I have had mixed feelings about that, but at some point in this business you have to decide whether you’re either going to make your entire life about forcing human behavior through an ill-fitting conceptual mold of rationalism and perfect probity, or you’re going to steer into the skid of madness with a smile on your face, so: good work boys, Geaux Tigers.

Of course, it’s not all transcendent exuberance and re-elected Democratic governors. In fact, it’s mostly not that, although even when college football is going badly for your team, it can still be surprising and hilarious from a safe distance, like the workings of a state legislature or a riot at a clown school. But college football fandom has its ugly elements, some of which it shares with contemporary politics.

‘Collective narcissism’ is an updated term for ‘group narcissism’, and its definition is simple: a group that holds an exaggerated sense of its own merits, and believes that its superior status is not given sufficient recognition by other groups, is characterized by collective narcissism. 

College football culture is full of this sort of thing. Most major college football fan bases have supporters whose fandom expresses like that, and there are entire fanbases where this seems to be the prevailing ethos (yes, I mean Ohio State). It typically attends programs that have been historically successful or, at minimum, achieve periodic dominance. It is, aesthetically, aggrieved, aggressive, and joyless.

In this, it’s fundamentally different from mainstream fandom. It is one thing to glory in your team’s successes, mourn its defeats, look forward to triumphs to come in spite of all sense, reason, and available evidence (hook em - ed.). This is unreasonable, human, and mostly harmless. 

It is quite another thing for a college football fandom to be a prominent (even defining) feature of your life; for uninterrupted success to be your default expectation; and - centrally - for you to believe that every institution that touches college football (including but not limited to the administration of college athletics; the media; and the criminal justice system) is arrayed in a conspiracy against your team, the machinations of which are apparent in any outcome including when you get what you want. All victories are achieved not in the absence of that conspiracy but directly over it, to the howling, unbearable anguish of its members. That last is a load-bearing component of that kind of fandom. It’s also one of the most loathsome, like cheering for a bank to foreclose on someone because hell yeah fuck the haters.

Sound familiar? A few years ago a pollster observed to me that a critical segment of Donald Trump’s supporters were like superfans of a college football team. To borrow and expand that parallel: they don’t watch other teams, they don’t particularly know or care about what conference their team is in or how the playoff picture is developing (except inasmuch as their team must be in it); and they treat all other elements of college football itself with snarling contempt, when they think of them at all, except when those institutions glorify their team (and, by extension, themselves). In political terms: they don’t know or care about other candidates; they’re disdainful of the process of politics; and they’re openly hostile to every institution in American politics, including the Republican Party, except when it genuflects to Their Guy, who must always prevail against a conspiracy against him and whose primary appeal is his capacity to inflict pain on the people who have failed to sufficiently recognize the greatness of his people. Add in the aesthetic elements - the flags, the hat, all the various signifiers that elevate a fandom from an enthusiasm to an ersatz personality - and you’ve got the complete picture.

Fandom is not new to politics. People have always cheered for their candidate. Neither is collective narcissism; it’s the historical basis of most, perhaps all, ultranationalist and sectarian ideology. But the combination of the two, and their entry into the mainstream, is a new and unpredictable feature. Trump may be the best example of this effect, but he is hardly the only one. In the UK, Brexit and its champion party, UKIP, created an entirely new universe of voters whose only engagement in British politics was through their sense of grievance and the opportunity to express their contempt for its perceived perpetrators. We can recognize that many of those voters had every reason to feel hard done by, as decades of change hollowed out their communities and fundamentally shifted life expectations for the worse, and still note that vesting your entire political identity in a half-baked reaction to a deeply complex problem while choosing the ludicrous figure of Nigel Farage as your avatar is a disordered way to engage with democracy.

This is not exclusively a problem of the right, either, although it is more common on that side of the political spectrum. One of the most unfortunate features of left-of-center American politics in the last decade or so has been this kind of poisonous fandom seeping into the Democratic Party mainstream. We see shadows of it in various online communities dedicated to their chosen (almost always presidential) candidates, but the most visible example is probably a curdled segment of Bernie Sanders’s support-base. This is grimly ironic, because the substance of Sanders’ campaigns was one of the most pro-human policy platforms in modern American politics, and - to be both clear and fair - the data shows that that’s what drove the overwhelming majority his supporters to vote as they did in the primary elections, after which they voted for the Democratic nominee because, as one of them famously noted, it’s a team sport.

It is not that Sanders’ support-base was toxic (far from it); rather, I would submit that his campaign - supporters and staff - contained an unusually high number of people for whom the candidacy was a vehicle for pursuing grievance against politics generally and the Democratic Party specifically. The core of that contingent is a belief that they belong to a superior community of progressives or leftists, and that that community has long been victimized by the perfidy of the Democratic Party. This thought is not original to me; it’s one I’ve heard from more than one Sanders campaign staffer. 

Comparisons between Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn often miss the mark, but the two are fundamentally alike in a key respect: they’re both ready focal-points for this kind of collective narcissism, because they have had long careers on the (relative) fringes of their parties while characterized by unwavering commitment to beliefs that are out of the mainstream. What better vessel for someone whose political identity is based on being one of the virtuous oppressed?

I see the increased presence of collective narcissism in mainstream politics as the result of two combined factors. The first is the popularization of the internet, which both makes it easy to find and build collective identities, and also promotes narcissism of all sorts. The second is the New Disorder itself, which, at the risk of repeating myself, here refers to a series of institutions and individuals fundamentally, serially, and baroquely failing to meet the expectations of the majority of people whom they notionally serve. The common factor in collectively narcissistic groups on the left and right and both sides of the Atlantic is belief that they have been failed (and indeed victimized) by the larger political system. In this way these types of political communities are both the result of the New Disorder and agents of it, and the longer it continues, the more of them we can expect to see.

The critical - and perhaps hardest - step toward dealing with these communities is to get past their aesthetic, because it’s as abrasive as, well, a zealous college football fan’s. If you can get past these communities’ (often repellant, or at least irritating) communication style, you have the opportunity to understand where they came from. Communities of collective narcissism in politics don’t just appear out of nowhere. Somewhere, their expectations for life have been disappointed; somewhere, there is grievance. Ask, “who do they see as their community? Who is the ‘us’ that has been wronged, and by whom?”. The answers may fundamentally change how you talk to them, and even how you think about them. No political party can claim the mandate of heaven without at least understanding the grievances of its people. 

But that does not mean you need to agree with them, or even accommodate them. These communities, despite their (relatively) similar aesthetic, are not all created equal. For example, the leftist community of collective narcissism that found a home within Bernie Sanders’s base of support was created in part out of the larger Democratic Party sidelining, trivializing, and ridiculing leftist concerns over the party’s relationship to financial capital, and the effect it had on Democrats’ governing philosophy. You don’t have to like the messengers to accept that there might be some merit in that message, and to reflect on how to change accordingly.

Trump’s community of collective narcissists, on the other hand, is firmly grounded in the idea that white Americans, especially white men, are persecuted and victimized by people who aren’t white men, and are entitled to greater social, financial, and legal standing than they currently possess. You can acknowledge the decades of economic and demographic changes (sometimes related, mostly simply concurrent) that led to this, and even sympathize with the disorientation and trauma that resulted. But ultimately, a political ideology based on the idea that Some People Are Real People And Some Aren’t and only the holders of that ideology get to decide who is what, cannot be acknowledged or accommodated. It can only be opposed and defeated until it is destroyed. 

Which it can be! Because the toxic college football fandom metaphor holds up in one more critical way: the story these types of superfans sign on for is one about their team overcoming the conspiracy of their enemies as they sweep to a victory that will make the many haters and losers howl with impotent fury. The team is allowed to get knocked down a few times en route to the cathartic triumphs, but it cannot just lose again, and again, and again. That’s boring. And these people don’t watch boring football unless their team is winning.