Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick told a radio show on Thursday that:
“If the president loses Pennsylvania or North Carolina … or Florida, they'll lose it because [Democrats] stole it.”
For many years, when I was a high-school teacher, I spent my summers working at a rather posh summer sleepaway camp in upstate New York. I loved it there, but at the end of every summer we’d have something called “color war,” which I didn’t love so much. Color war involved splitting the camp (group-by-group) into two teams, designated by colors (and given cute themed nicknames) that would compete in various athletic and non-athletic events over five days culminating in a thing called “sing” where each team would … well, sing, typically a “march” or go-team-go song and an “alma mater” or we’re-sad-camp-is-over song. It was all quite intense, then it would end and everyone would come together, go home, and realize just how unimportant it was.
My job at camp was to run one of the non-athletic programs, but I was an athlete in my younger days so when color war rolled around I’d be pressed into service as a football referee, baseball umpire, &c. Officiating youth sports is a thankless job as a general matter, but as the summers went by I started to notice patterns of behavior, patterns that keep springing to mind in this particular election season.
The prevailing theme that emerged from this experience over a period of years was that the prevailing attitude, not only among the kids but the counselors who were assigned to coach these games, was that no one ever loses a game in color war; either you won, or you were somehow cheated out of winning, by [fill in one or more of] the officiating (i.e., me), the ‘splits’ (i.e., how the teams were divided), the scheduling, the equipment (e.g., one team had better goalie pads than the other), the field or weather conditions, or simply because the other team cheated or had some unfair advantage. Those were, it seemed, the only two options. No one ever left the field thinking they lost the game because they lost, because the other team beat them, because they made mistakes, or because they simply didn’t play well enough to win.
To put it another way, the first thing the kids and their counselors would think of in the aftermath of a loss in a color-war game, their first instinct, would be to look for some inequity, some unfairness, to explain the outcome. That they were simply beaten or outplayed would be the last thing anyone thought of. As an educator this always bothered me; it was just like in school, where the last thing any student or parent would think of if the student’s grade was lower than they expected, was that the student’s work wasn’t very good. But getting back to color war, I would always think of that famous quote by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, three-time NCAA national champion and six-time NBA champion, “You can’t win unless you learn how to lose.” It occurred to me that these kids didn’t know how to lose, and hadn’t learned how to lose, because no one was teaching them how to lose.
Learning how to lose is not the same as learning to lose. The New York Jets have learned to lose. That’s not what I’m talking about, and that’s not what Abdul-Jabbar was talking about. What he means is that you have to earn victory by learning from defeat, and the only way you can learn from defeat is to understand and accept your own responsibility for it. That’s what “learning how to lose” means; looking inward rather than outward for the reasons why you lost. If nothing’s ever your fault, you can never improve, correct mistakes, avoid them in the future, or achieve your goals.
Anyway, before I get off on an education-related rant here, the point is that I started observing the behavior described above way back in the late ‘90s when I first became a teacher; this is nothing new. And it’s crept into our politics, to the point where we have actual elected officials and candidates for office — right up to and including the fricking President of the United States — openly declaring that the only way they can lose is if the other side cheats, if the process is unfair, if the referees are biased against them, or because of some other inequity or injustice.
One more color war anecdote often comes to mind, one that I was reminded of recently when Grand Nagus Drumpf whined to Lesley Stahl that “you never ask Joe Biden tough questions.” As I’ve written before (and as the inimitable driftglass writes all the time), the great scourge of American politics over the last 30 years, and intensified over the last 10-15 or so, is Both Sides® and false equivalence.
One year I was reffing a football game and one particular player was behaving particularly badly, and after two or three warnings I had to eject him from the game. When the game was over his team’s college-aged counselor/coach came up to me and indignantly demanded to know why I hadn’t ejected any players from the other team. What had clearly not occurred to this person, and which I calmly explained to him in response, was that none of the other team’s players had been ejected because none of them had actually done anything to warrant an ejection.
This young man could not accept this Occam’s Razor explanation but also couldn’t point to any whatabout examples, so he just insisted again that the ejection was unfair because only his team had been penalized in that fashion. I specifically remember telling him, speaking as an experienced educator to an aspiring one, “You have a teaching opportunity here. You can either teach this kid that he was wrong, or that he was wronged. Much will depend on which one you choose.”
The more I think about color war, and experiences like this, the more I understand the political appeal of Donald Trump and modern Republican/conservative politics in general. I’ve been saying and writing for years that Republican politics are based on self-congratulation and resentment, and there’s a symmetry between that and the way our education system, including youth sports, has devolved away from objective learning toward subjective validation. “We can only lose if they cheat” and demanding “equal” treatment that’s really just Both Siderism are, I think, a product of this.
But what’s also a product of this is something else that the Grand Nagus offers his voters: total absolution of any need, reason or obligation to think, to learn, to understand, to take anything into consideration but one’s own comfort, convenience and advantage, at any given moment or in any given situation. In that world, all of life, and every interaction, is merely transactional; driven by shallow, superficial, narrow, unenlightened self-interest, nothing more. Feeling wronged is easy; being wrong is hard.
The Republican Party had an opportunity after 2008, and again after 2012, to either learn from their electoral losses or feel wronged by them; by Democrats, by “the Liberal Media,” &c. We all know which lesson they chose, and we all know the result. Heck, they made the same choice in 1993. And we all know what lesson(s) they will draw from their next massive electoral loss, whether that occurs next week or years from now.
Will Republicans ever learn how to lose? Given how much they’ve gained from losing in the last four years, locking in minority rule in the one un-elected branch of government so that elections don’t have consequences anymore (at least not for the fossil-fuel, chemical, pharmaceutical, insurance, financial, tobacco, firearms and defense industries, and whatever other polluters, profiteers and plunderers bought those judges), which they’ve been able to accomplish by “winning” control of the elected branches via the deliberately un-democratic institutions and mechanisms that our Constitution provides for, maybe they won’t have to. And that really is a shame.