The Revolution Next Time

                In the 60’s, it was common to talk about revolution, that was before we turned 30 and became investment bankers and helicopter parents.  In the heat of the moment, revolution sounded like the bold and romantic alternative to a world of uptight hypocrisy and war.  It seemed properly defiant in a world where National Guard troops shot students, cities were in flames, and the war was in your living room every night.  So much of what was wrong could be reduced to one word, Nixon.  Now, the same animosity and revulsion is associated with Trump.  Just as in the 60’s, the idea that it might take a revolution to change the course of democracy is gaining popularity and credence.  I think it’s important to compare these moments of revolutionary rhetoric, because as naïve and inconsequential as the revolutionary calls in the 60’s turned out to be, what we face now is entirely different.

                Nixon was impeached in a world that was violent and corrupt, but it still had both a cultural and economic coherence that is missing in today’s political theater.  Although they were famously slow to react, it was Republicans who forced Nixon from office.  Viet Nam had strained American political solidarity, but it was still a force.  Even though it was coming to an end, the economic expansion following WWII meant that the culture wasn’t fragmented so much that a majority of folks thought they had nothing left to lose.  In Trump’s America, the forces that eventually held sway in Nixon’s impeachment have all been hollowed out and the center is too weak to hold.  The revolution this time will be the real deal and not a youthful fantasy of cultural liberation.

                Nixon and Lee Atwater launched the ‘southern strategy’ in ’68 that set the modern Republican party on the path to embracing minority rule.  Even though there are other elements of the coalition Atwater assembled, such as Evangelicals, abortion, and conservative ideology, the core of that coalition was and is racism.  It created a block of committed and active voters who, even though they have always been a minority of the population, have dominated the politics of the nation for the last 50 years.  They have become more violent and vitriolic while becoming less and less tethered to reality.  They have their own news and their own ‘alternative facts’ that make it impossible to engage them in civil discourse or democratic compromise.  Nixon and Atwater started undermining the institutions of American democracy, and the weight of Trump’s lawless and venial presidency has brought it to the point of collapse. 

                What Trump and the Republicans make obvious every day is that the ‘nation of laws’ that we have always thought we lived in no longer exists.  Trump’s impending impeachment is about to make that painfully clear.  There will be no statesmanship or patriotism that saves the day this time.  This time the battle will be fought and resolved on entirely different grounds.  In some ways that is both healthy and predictable.  American democracy has gone through several resets along the way.  We moved from a confederacy to a republic.  Civil rights and labor rights both reconstructed democracy to include more voices and level the playing field.  But the biggest reset was obviously the Civil War, when there was no way to reconcile the competing visions of what the country should be.  Without being unduly alarming about it, that’s where we are now.

                Clinton’s impeachment was a charade, but it was a political charade of no constitutional consequence.  Trump’s impeachment is going to make our whole system of government and its dependence on law and procedure into a charade.  I don’t think there is any way to avoid this.  We have been traveling down this path for 50 years; we can’t turn back now.  Finally electing not just a corrupt but a thoroughly incompetent president has broken the institutional framework of what we called a democracy.  There will be a lot of talk about how to restore those institutions.  It can’t be done.  More to the point, it shouldn’t be done.  We have tried to legally and institutionally construct a democracy based on diversity and we have failed.  We have to win this fight – never underestimate the depths of depravity to come – but when we win it, we have to start building something new, something different.  Jefferson thought a little revolution every now and then was a good thing.  After 230 years or so, a little revolution probably isn’t enough.

How Fantasy Baseball Ruined America

                Back in the day, when they were still referred to as Rotisserie Leagues, I was in a fantasy baseball league.  We were a loose collection of friends who also played poker, golf, softball and basketball together.  We met at someone’s house once a month and drank beer and tried to scam each other in outrageous trades.  We lied and blustered and had a great time.  Bill James had only recently started writing about ‘sabermetrics,’ an idea that would lead to “money ball” and analytics.  Today, fantasy leagues are everywhere, often an online collection of people who don’t know each other and have nothing in common but the destruction of civilization.  The innocent evolution of fantasy baseball is a small part of an obsession with an abstraction of experience that destroys what it is meant to describe.

                I’m not arguing that numbers are all evil.  If you’re down to the final out and you have to choose between a pinch hitter who has whiffed every time he’s faced this pitcher or someone who has lit him up every time he’s had a chance, those would be good numbers to have.  It is invaluable to know when our perceptions correspond to reality and when they don’t, but relying on statistics instead of experience and emotion can lead to an empty and soulless life.  Fantasy baseball and analytics have turned baseball into an empty game.  Fantasy owners care less about the game than they are the statistics the game generates.  Their ‘teams’ exist in a twilight zone of numbers that are never real or realized.  There is no joy or surprise in the game that analytics has created.  Several years ago when Cabrera became the first player since Yaz in ’67 to win the triple crown, the sabermetrics folks thought Mike Trout should have been the MVP.  This was based on a completely fabricated analytic called WAR, or wins above replacement.  There is no such thing as WAR, it is not part of the game.  It is an idealized bit of statistical fluff that has never swung a bat.  It was created by people who’s lives would be at risk trying to field a routine fly ball.  But in fantasy league world it has replaced the greatest single offense season in this century. 

                If it was just baseball, which is doing a good job of killing itself off, maybe it wouldn’t be a big deal.  But this statistical infection can be seen everywhere.  We evaluate children using invalid and improperly proctored tests to determine how ‘smart’ they are.  We use numbers instead of observations to diagnose patients.  We have replaced experience with a parallel statistical reality that is neither all that accurate or exciting.  We want to know who wins instead of enjoying the game.  Sure, it sucks to lose, but games are games and humans who play get something out of it that people who measure but never set foot on a field cannot understand.

                Democracy is a relational and not a statistical endeavor.  The people I interact with every day are not the composite of their income, IQ or credit score.  In the college I used to teach at, they would occasionally put together a statistical analysis of the ‘typical’ student, based on age, background, test scores and income.  That student never existed.  That analytic never once helped me engage the actual students that were in my classes.  They were all in some way an outlier, an anomaly in their own right.  Knowing them and teaching them meant I had to abandon whatever preconceptions I had and meet them where they were.  Democracies can and should do the math on who gets what, but they can never let the numbers replace the actual people.  We still have to go out there every day and make the connections and do the work it takes to understand each other.  A statistical parallel constructed by and for an elite class of managers is not the same thing.

                The team I drafted in my rotisserie league had seven eventual Hall of Famers on it, but it never shared a warm evening at the ballpark.  It never delighted or inspired a kid to play the game or practice for hours on the off chance they could play one day in the show.  It never did anything but pile up statistics.  It’s a poor substitute to watching a game with a friend or filling your grandsons up with all that crap your parents wouldn’t let you eat.  It can never recreate the magic I still remember the first time I trudged up the beer stained concourse at old Tiger Stadium and saw that amazing green field for the first time.