A master of the modern phenomenon of trolling, Ann Coulter knew what she wrote would get her name tweeted thousands of times and posted on Facebook hundreds of thousands more.
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See what I did there. I used an inflammatory title to get you to click on this article. Such is the state of modern news. At least, such is the state of modern news as practiced by the likes of Ann Coulter.
For those of you who are not right wing trolls or don’t follow soccer, I’ll catch you up, which is easy enough to do because this pseudostory boils down to the following: conservative pundit Ann Coulter recently penned a column in which she claimed that soccer is not only stupid, but un-American. End stop.
Coming in the middle of a highly entertaining World Cup, in which, against pretty hefty odds, the United States has advanced out of group play to the round of 16, the backlash has been predictable. And, so, I woke up this morning to find that Ann Coulter is trending. Trust me when I tell you there are better ways to wake up.
Of course, backlash is precisely what Ann was courting. A master of the modern phenomenon of trolling, she knew what she wrote would get her name tweeted thousands of times and posted on Facebook hundreds of thousands more. As long as everyone who jumps on social media to decry her spells her name right, it’s free publicity. There’s nothing quite like free publicity, good or bad.
This is what makes her smarter than you or me. She understands the game (not soccer, which she clearly doesn’t, but search engine optimization) and she plays it to the hilt. And we’re all caught up in it. She says or writes something inflammatory, we react, and then I get to comment on the reaction on The Good Men Project. Presto, news has been generated.
Now, Ann’s not the only writer who does this when the World Cup quadrennially rolls around. There’s a whole legion of sportswriters out there who, every four years, dust off the same article dismissing the World Cup, soccer, and any talk of how it’s America’s sport of the future.
My hometown paper’s Dan Shaughnessy has, as Deadspin amusingly pointed out, made a career out of this practice. Shaughnessy didn’t go so far as to claim that soccer’s increasing popularity in this country is a sign of America’s decline, but rest assured his sentiment emanates from the same crotchety belief that change threatens his personal and professional existence.
And, in Ann’s defense, she’s not completely wrong. Just mostly wrong, and just as Miracle Max informed us in The Princess Bride that there’s a difference between being all dead and being mostly dead, there’s a difference between being completely wrong and mostly wrong.
For one thing, soccer is foreign to the United States. It has not taken root here as naturally as it has in other countries, primarily because the world’s other great working class sport, namely basketball, has cornered the underpriviliged market in America. Whereas the children in Brazil’s favelas grow up playing soccer, the children in our cities grow up playing basketball.
Nevertheless, if Ann really thought about it at all, she would realize that the world’s professional soccer leagues, particularly those in Europe, are much closer to functioning as the pure free markets she extols than do America’s professional sports leagues, where revenue sharing and salary caps are the socialist norm.
Additionally, Ann isn’t completely wrong when she talks about soccer being the preferred sport of liberal moms. Political operatives have, for two decades now, referred to soccer moms as a voting block, and an important one, one worth courting. To the extent that these moms are somewhat affluent and most likely to live in a suburb, they probably do vote Democratic more than Republican. However, as a voting block, soccer moms are hardly monolithic.
What Ann is touching on, perhaps even unconsciously, is the demographic makeup of soccer moms and what that says about race in this country, a topic she could hardly be expected to allude to because her base doesn’t want to hear stories about structures of persistent racism in the United States.
Demographically speaking, soccer functions differently in this country than it does in the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, it is the poorer and working classes who love and play football. In the United States, soccer is a decidedly middle and upper-middle class sport. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to refer to it as a white sport. And as such, the sport’s growing popularity merely represents an extension of American housing patterns of the last 70 years or so, particularly in Northern states, which, to Ann’s credit, are more likely to be blue than red.
I have not seen any studies that demonstrate the link, nor do I myself have data on it, but, nevertheless, I do believe that soccer moms, to the extent that they can be said to comprise a demographic constituency, steered their children toward soccer and away from football and basketball for the same reasons that many white families chose to abandon cities in the second half of the 20th century.
It is giving Ann Coulter too much credit to say this was ultimately the point she was trying to make. Still, it sometimes behooves us to look past the obvious trolling to engage with the argument of those we disagree with, even vehemently. Doing so can reveal to us truths and ideas we would not otherwise have encountered, even if the likes of Ann Coulter are blind to their own arguments and we are uncomfortable with them because they implicate us too.
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Photo: AP/J. Scott Applewhite