A master of the modern phenomenon of trolling, Ann Coulter knew what she wrote would get her name tweeted thousands of times and posted on Facebook hundreds of thousands more.
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See what I did there. I used an inflammatory title to get you to click on this article. Such is the state of modern news. At least, such is the state of modern news as practiced by the likes of Ann Coulter.
For those of you who are not right wing trolls or don’t follow soccer, I’ll catch you up, which is easy enough to do because this pseudostory boils down to the following: conservative pundit Ann Coulter recently penned a column in which she claimed that soccer is not only stupid, but un-American. End stop.
Coming in the middle of a highly entertaining World Cup, in which, against pretty hefty odds, the United States has advanced out of group play to the round of 16, the backlash has been predictable. And, so, I woke up this morning to find that Ann Coulter is trending. Trust me when I tell you there are better ways to wake up.
Of course, backlash is precisely what Ann was courting. A master of the modern phenomenon of trolling, she knew what she wrote would get her name tweeted thousands of times and posted on Facebook hundreds of thousands more. As long as everyone who jumps on social media to decry her spells her name right, it’s free publicity. There’s nothing quite like free publicity, good or bad.
This is what makes her smarter than you or me. She understands the game (not soccer, which she clearly doesn’t, but search engine optimization) and she plays it to the hilt. And we’re all caught up in it. She says or writes something inflammatory, we react, and then I get to comment on the reaction on The Good Men Project. Presto, news has been generated.
Now, Ann’s not the only writer who does this when the World Cup quadrennially rolls around. There’s a whole legion of sportswriters out there who, every four years, dust off the same article dismissing the World Cup, soccer, and any talk of how it’s America’s sport of the future.
My hometown paper’s Dan Shaughnessy has, as Deadspin amusingly pointed out, made a career out of this practice. Shaughnessy didn’t go so far as to claim that soccer’s increasing popularity in this country is a sign of America’s decline, but rest assured his sentiment emanates from the same crotchety belief that change threatens his personal and professional existence.
And, in Ann’s defense, she’s not completely wrong. Just mostly wrong, and just as Miracle Max informed us in The Princess Bride that there’s a difference between being all dead and being mostly dead, there’s a difference between being completely wrong and mostly wrong.
For one thing, soccer is foreign to the United States. It has not taken root here as naturally as it has in other countries, primarily because the world’s other great working class sport, namely basketball, has cornered the underpriviliged market in America. Whereas the children in Brazil’s favelas grow up playing soccer, the children in our cities grow up playing basketball.
Nevertheless, if Ann really thought about it at all, she would realize that the world’s professional soccer leagues, particularly those in Europe, are much closer to functioning as the pure free markets she extols than do America’s professional sports leagues, where revenue sharing and salary caps are the socialist norm.
Additionally, Ann isn’t completely wrong when she talks about soccer being the preferred sport of liberal moms. Political operatives have, for two decades now, referred to soccer moms as a voting block, and an important one, one worth courting. To the extent that these moms are somewhat affluent and most likely to live in a suburb, they probably do vote Democratic more than Republican. However, as a voting block, soccer moms are hardly monolithic.
What Ann is touching on, perhaps even unconsciously, is the demographic makeup of soccer moms and what that says about race in this country, a topic she could hardly be expected to allude to because her base doesn’t want to hear stories about structures of persistent racism in the United States.
Demographically speaking, soccer functions differently in this country than it does in the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, it is the poorer and working classes who love and play football. In the United States, soccer is a decidedly middle and upper-middle class sport. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch to refer to it as a white sport. And as such, the sport’s growing popularity merely represents an extension of American housing patterns of the last 70 years or so, particularly in Northern states, which, to Ann’s credit, are more likely to be blue than red.
I have not seen any studies that demonstrate the link, nor do I myself have data on it, but, nevertheless, I do believe that soccer moms, to the extent that they can be said to comprise a demographic constituency, steered their children toward soccer and away from football and basketball for the same reasons that many white families chose to abandon cities in the second half of the 20th century.
It is giving Ann Coulter too much credit to say this was ultimately the point she was trying to make. Still, it sometimes behooves us to look past the obvious trolling to engage with the argument of those we disagree with, even vehemently. Doing so can reveal to us truths and ideas we would not otherwise have encountered, even if the likes of Ann Coulter are blind to their own arguments and we are uncomfortable with them because they implicate us too.
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Photo: AP/J. Scott Applewhite
I like this article.
The title was an obvious play on marketing, so I wasn’t insulted.
Not a bit.
It made me smile, and I smiled even more when I read the first line 🙂
The turn is super interesting – and if Ann didn’t imply these things consciously, she could’ve done it intuitively.
Lovely, thanks!
Llyane
One thing though, in regards to your view of soccer (football to the rest of the world) being the great multicultural all inclusive sport, check out HBO’s Real Sport piece on the racist chants against black players in the European soccer leagues. The ‘Monkey Chants’ and the throwing of bananas on the field whenever a black player takes a corner kick or free kick.
Yeah, you’re certainly right about good old Ann. The thing is I might actually agree with her point at the beginning, being somewhat conservative myself. Then she begins to talk and after 2-3 words, I find myself cringing at her cold, dismissive matter (especially regarding people). I never would have imagined that it’s possible to agree with a viewpoint , but be so in disagreement with the person speaking!
Trolls thrive on any kind of attention. There, she just got the last she will ever get from me. I won’t be reading articles in which she is mentioned, watching shows that she is on or engaging in any conversation in which she is even remotely associated with. Simple. Her name is starting to fade already.
Liam, your analysis is pretty dead on, but it is also a sign that the U.S. is being to join the rest of the world rather than being some isolated conservative island immune to the ideas and influences of the rest of the world. Ann is truly a media whore, but the point is that her days are numbered because the nature of the U.S. has changed and will continue to do so. Living in California, I see daily a confluence of cultures, Hispanic, Asian, Mideast, and European mixing to form a new America that is more in tune with… Read more »
that the world’s professional soccer leagues, particularly those in Europe, are much closer to functioning as the pure free markets she extols than do America’s professional sports leagues, where revenue sharing and salary caps are the socialist norm
hehe, that has certainly been noticed by the more astute.
In some areas it might be the middle and upper class whites that play, but I live in California where that is certainly not the case – the bulk of kids that play soccer here are POC and most are from lower to middle class backgrounds. Additionally, my dad grew up in Connecticut and played soccer in high school (late 50s- very early 60s) and most of the guys on his team were immigrants (from France and Italy) who were by no means affluent. I hear yah on Ann Coulter being a troll though. I don’t even think she believes… Read more »
equityis4all, I tend to agree with you. I think she stopped believing what she was shoveling a long time ago, but she continues to crank it out because she knows it will pay the bills.
Which is morally irresponsible. Perhaps we should be having a conversation about that as well.
Sounds similar to my experiences with who played soccer, growing up in Washington State. Where I’ve lived, there’s often a growing immigrant population, and where there’s a growing immigrant population, the soccer teams increasingly have more of a mix of immigrant children alongside the kind of whites that are described by the author. It makes me wonder where they live.
You’re brilliant. Truly.
You’ve nailed it on so many levels. Not only did you see it, you showed us how to look at it. That’s a gift, and I think you. Now, I’ll have to read Ann’s article, which I was avoiding for no particular reason. and I’ll re-read your article again with a mind to identifying all the nuances I have missed.
This is just the kind of geeky brainac exercise I enjoy. Thanks, again.
It’s 2:30 PM and your article was liked by 3 people – Apparently insulting people by telling them that someone who thrives on negative attention and on insulting everyone else is smarter than they are was not a “smart” move… One just needs to watch Coulter in a debate to know that she can’t debate. She yells, screams, cuts people off, and is unable to defend her points, because they are more often than not illogical, irrational, and non defendable.