On sports, politics, and tribalism
Humans are biologically hardwired to join tribes—a trait that is healthier in some arenas than others
Some of my readers may know that I’m an ardent, lifelong Denver Broncos fan. And as many also are likely aware, one of the Broncos’ biggest nemeses has for years been the Kansas City Chiefs, who share the same division.1 Though the Broncos have had plenty of success during my lifetime, they’ve struggled mightily more recently while the Chiefs have become a new powerhouse team. Following KC’s win yesterday, they’ll have gone to the Super Bowl an astounding four times in just the last six years.
As a Broncos fan, it’s been particularly bad, especially as some of the Chiefs’ most prominent players have become something of a nonstop presence in daily American life, making it impossible to escape them even off the field. All this has admittedly engendered some contempt in me toward the Chiefs. It’s not a feeling I’m all that proud of, but it comes naturally to almost anyone who is a fan of any sports team. We pick a team, cheer them on with fellow fans, and vociferously root against their opponents. And when our team plays an opponent regularly, our animosity toward them often becomes greater than for most others.
But here’s the thing: no matter how much I detest—even envy—the Chiefs and their recent success, football is ultimately still just a game played for our entertainment. Aside from a handful of people who are closely connected to a given sport—players, coaches, management, agents—most of us have no actual stake in the outcomes of any game. Our lives are not significantly impacted one way or another. We get to turn off the TV after it ends and go back to our normal lives (assuming we’re not such diehard fans that seeing our team lose impacts our mental well-being).
This is why I’ve long been a firm believer in the idea that organized sports are a vital institution for humanity. It gives us an opportunity to channel our deeply tribal instincts into healthy competition without producing severe social consequences. We band together with our team or tribe, identify the “other,” and engage in friendly “combat” against them. Even if things get chippy during the heat of competition, the outcome has no material impact on most of our lives or our broader society at the end of the day. Fans and players alike are free to cheer hard and even get emotional, knowing life will still go on afterward.
It’s because I’ve become so keenly aware of these behaviors in myself and others when it comes to sports that I’ve also grown wary of seeing people exhibit them in other contexts, such as politics. And what makes this particularly dangerous is that politics deals with questions of power and who wields it, meaning the stakes are much higher than they are in something objectively trivial like sports.
It’s no secret that American society has become more polarized around liberal and conservative identities in recent years (something I’ve written about extensively). And as many of us have sorted ourselves into these two political tribes, we have begun to think of our fellow countrymen and women as “others” on the opposing team—and therefore see political outcomes like elections and new laws as zero-sum. We convince ourselves that, as in sports, there can only be one winner; when they win, we by definition lose. And as these perceived losses grow, we increasingly consider people on the other side not just opponents but existential threats to us and our way of life.
This new reality begins to influence our behavior in other unhealthy ways. We cheer more blindly and vigorously for our side, even when they might do something wrong, because going against our team would be heretical. We blindly attack the other side and have trouble acknowledging when they might be right about something, because who would ever want to be seen as associating with those awful people? Before long, we’re also attacking impartial arbiters and adjudicators as being biased against our team, leading us to eventually lose trust in them. And if we feel cheated or threatened by the other side for long enough, we may even look to rectify our situation through violence.
Needless to say, none of this is conducive to building or sustaining a healthy society. Though some baseline levels of partisanship can be good, wrapping our identities and personal well-being into political outcomes is a recipe for raw, uncut tribalism and endless fighting and unrest. There are many ideas for how to ameliorate this problem—far too many to get into here. But at minimum, anyone who still believes in the American experiment of a multiracial, liberal democracy committed to pluralism should work to catch ourselves when we start succumbing to these impulses and (gently) call out others when they’re doing the same. Politics is not—and should not be—sport, and it’s incumbent on all of us to make sure we do not treat it that way.
Yes, they’re my hometown team, and yes, I’ve been rooting against them 99 percent of the time since I was a kid. Guess I’ve always been a contrarian!