Harry Cary was a "Cub fan" not a "Cub man"

Some are thinking about "politics" the wrong way. It's dangerous thinking.,

Photo by Blake Guidry on Unsplash

Franklin Roosevelt used a baseball image to frame his commitment to “the team.”  He said he was swinging for the fences.  That is, he imagined his political party as a “team” and himself a player. 

This metaphor is useful.  I want to relate it to Bart Giamatti‘s powerful description of engaged spectator participation in a sporting event.  Partisanship is comparable to team identity.  As Harry Carey said “you’re a Bud fan.”  But you are not as well, as he wanted us to believe. also a “Bud man.”  

The difference is significant.  Some commentators suggest that our present partisanship is because we have so identified with a partisan side that it’s defeat is a personal defeat (that is a personal rejection, a dismissal of one worth).  Being an engaged spectator, even one “on the bench” so to speak, is not to lose one’s personal identity in the way that Eric Hoffer described in the “True Believer.” 

In the real world when I say I’m a supporter of the Chicago Cubs I do not mean that you, supporting the Cincinnati Reds, are a non-person, an unworthy. 

The same when I say I’m a supporter of the Democratic Party.

Let us return to the idea of an engaged spectator.  In “Take Time for Paradise,” Giamatti described the experience of transcendence that comes from heightened moments of athletic (or artistic, if you are a Chicago Symphony Orchestra fan) performance of a team or “teammate.”  And such moments are embedded in a game or a season, of coming from behind, of winning, of a “walk off.” 

And we live to play again tomorrow.  That is the essence of our greatest political invention, the team sport we call democracy.  Politics is for “fans,” and not fanatics. 

And, of course, there are stakes involved.  More than trophies.  There are important policy choices.  Perhaps the future of human life as we know it, consider climate disruption, is at stake.  But your identify as a person, your value, your reality, your essence, is not being judged, is not being erased.