Let’s see if I can write this fast and get my day going. I’m behind schedule but I think it might be more important for my mental health to get back to writing before breakfast even if that means not eating breakfast until 12:30. I just had an idea and if I wait, I’ll probably forget it. That’s already happened to the ideas I had yesterday on what to write today. I need to start writing them down again.
First a mental health update. I got back to bad sleep habits last night. Partly it was recording Gord’s Gold, that requires quiet and it’s easier to find that late. It would be easy to blame that but it’s not the whole truth. I did waste a lot of time. The upshot is that I didn’t get enough sleep, I didn’t bounce out of bed, and I fell asleep after playing the WFUV Question of the Day. That’s when I should have been writing. I never took my walk yesterday. I waited too long to get started and as I left the house it looked like rain. Only then did I look at my phone’s weather app and see that it was going to rain in 11 minutes. I walked to the local supermarket to get my eggs but balked at the price. I’ll make something needing only one egg for breakfast this morning. Again, I did have an excuse. As I was getting ready to leave the plumber came and I had to stay until he was finished. I liked him enough to make small talk including sharing stories of the agony of dropping a toilet tank cover on your foot. I’ve done that and assumed he did too. He had, many times. But just as with recording the show that was not the whole story. It took me too long to get moving after that.
Now on to today’s main topic, Trump supporters. I spent a lot of time in Facebook baseball groups last night. I love baseball, I love thinking about baseball, I love analyzing baseball, but these groups can cause a lot of angst. Why? They are filled with Trump supporters. There’s no other area of my life where I encounter so many. It makes sense as most of the people in the group are white men and there is no part of the selection process that would select against Trump support. Does that mean I spend my time on a baseball group arguing politics? Not at all. Trump’s name has never come up. I only know they are Trump supporters by looking at their profiles. Why am I looking for that? Because they talk and think like Trump supporters. I have mentioned before that people that hate baseball analytics, not just doubt it, not just don’t enjoy it, but have a visceral reaction against it, are overwhelmingly Trumpers. What I hear is the same contempt for intellectuals. The same antipathy towards changes in society. The same glorification of the past. And that’s the key. That’s what I want to discuss.
The link between white identity and supporting Trump is brought up often as it does drive so much of the support. What I’m going to suggest is that it’s not the root but a product of something more fundamental, that antipathy to changes in society and the glorification of the past. Racism did not create political divides as much in the past as it was the default attitude of most whites. There were differences on how far to create policy on racism but the racism itself was baked in. It was part of the most powerful force in society, what everybody knows. We don’t often question those things. New York didn’t have the de jure segregation of the south, but nobody thought anything of the Cotton Club being for whites only. The Cotton club was essentially a slavery theme club. Its very name evoked that. People paid to watch blacks entertain them while others acted in stereotypical servile roles.
The Civil Rights Movement changed things. It made people confront their racism. It could no longer sit in society’s and each individual’s firmware. We are encouraged to update our system. Many people did. Sure, they kept residual prejudices, but they considered them undesirable. Perhaps things changed by hypocrisy, people voicing opinions they didn’t have, but things change. The collective assumption of white superiority was no longer part of what everybody knows.
And that’s how we get back to baseball and my thesis. Many people even if they didn’t say so resented the change. Their picture of the world was set when they were between the ages of 12 and 22 and everything different from that was wrong. Blacks wanting to be treated equally created friction. The idea that whites can have attitudes that need changing frightening. The idea that being queer does not mean being bad disgusting. That same conservatism leads to antipathy towards changes in baseball in terms of strategies, and analysis. The idea that batting average isn’t as important as on base and slugging percentages at threat to the natural order. As data undermined what they believed they became hostile to the data. No mere statistics can challenge their gut feeling. Gut feelings are nothing but prejudices, ideas based not on reason. The scientific revolution was about realizing that though gut feelings can be right they needed to be tested against reality and rejected when the data showed they were wrong. Those with that conservative mindset view looking at data the same way there were some that wouldn’t look through early telescopes as the out of hand rejected anything that disagreed with what they already “knew.”
The resistance to changing their understanding of the world is what drives the racism, homophobia, and sexism, not the other way around. Of course, this isn’t true of everyone, but it’s true of many. And it’s that attitude that I encounter in the baseball groups. The old players were always better. Today’s players don’t know how to play the game. Despite the fact that they actually work much harder, I’ve heard people say how they are lazy not like the old timers. My all-time favorite bigoted baseball statement was, “Today’s players are too busy working on their tattoos to train.”
None of this is original to me. This was the premise of All in the Family. Archie’s bigotry was portrayed as his fear of change. The them song, Those Were the Days say it better than I can.
Wise Madness 