What does Ann Coulters recent completely unhinged (and unsubstantiated) diatribe against soccer say about the increasingly fractioned and isolated position of American Conservatives? For all the bluster about the liberal media covering up the truth and the carefully crafted conservatives arent represented in the media because of the Left and are persecuted... Just ignore those pesky commie radio and TV ratings showing how much we dominate the news/talk format, the one big story neither US conservative or liberal media want to talk about is the fact that conservative parties and scholars in Europe and Canada have continued to back away slowly from its American cousin over its often clownlike irrationality and its much more dangerous coddling of the Far Right to maintain the Big Tent illusion. While European mainstream conservatives have been carefully and surgically pushing out their fringe groups - hence the rise in Far Right and fascist elements in elections - to preserve international cooperation, the US has seen the Republican Party morph into an almost state communist echo chamber of bad ideas, superstition, and chronic scapegoating of the opposition without any sort of rational alternative. Unofficially, the Clinton and Obama regimes rightward shift have placed the Democratic Party and its supporters (progressive Democrats are leftovers and increasingly an endangered species, much like more libertarian and social Rockefeller Republicans, the last of the liberal GOP legacy dating to its founding, are now attacked as RINOs) squarely between European Liberal and Conservative power bases. The supposed conservative movement in the US increasingly sounds more like ultranationalist xenophobic movements like the BNP. In Britain, the intellectual birthplace of Anglo-American conservativism and torchbearers for the tradition of Edmund Burke imported into the US in the late 1800s, several prominent scholars have published essays recently, basically tossing in the towel over the constant onslaught of anti-rational contrarian rhetoric. Here, Coulter goes off on the worlds most watched and played sport. Rather than say something productive, she drops right into the histrionic fray, attacking soccer as somehow a liberal conspiracy and a gateway drug to European-style social democracy. Soccer, in Annganistan, is therefore not a real sport, its weak, its popularity is overrated... ... Never mind that soccer has been slowly and steadily growing in popularity since the early 1900s, the MLS is constantly expanding, and that, well, its the most watched sport in the world. In Annganistan, if Coulter doesnt like it or sees it as a supposed threat to the natural order, its a conservative issue and a liberal conspiracy. And this is a pattern repeated across US conservative media. Its designed to sell copy, generate ad revenue, to stir the pot... and not to accomplish a whole hell of a lot. Personally, I cant stand watching association football. Playing it is one thing and I enjoy a good live match, but I find watching it on TV boring and pretentious. And other people -American or otherwise - often say the same thing about my beloved baseball and gridiron football. And as an out there libertarian socialist, I can respect that individual right to not like something and to not want to watch a something I enjoy. Free association, sovereignty of the individual and all that. It comes from the American anarchist tradition of Josiah Warren and Lysander Spooner - both farther left and a whole lot less nationalist than that cooky, drone-loving Kenyan muslin commie usurper Townhall likes to write about... The one about as radical left as the Conservative Cameron government in the UK and the Conservative Harper government in Canada. I know. Crazy talk. Liberty is just a branding element to sell poorly researched books for Fox News hosts and guests, right? But unlike Coulter, I can engage my countrymen and the world with more solid critiques of major sports - Brazils wasteful spending and Big Government totalitarian tactics used to make the World Cup happen, corruption and cronyism in FIFA, etc. There are bigger fish to fry. And I can do it without embarrassing myself or resorting to childish attacks.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 15:09:15 +0000
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