No doubt, capitalism and consumerism-the desire for Major League Baseball to sell more team swag-were likely behind this (at least in part).īut I also suspect the shift in wearing your fandom on your sleeve reflects our increasing craving for tribal identity-a craving that, I hasten to say, is much safer when relegated to sports than to the world of politics. Now, compare that to what fans wear to a baseball game today. Almost none of them were wearing the team’s colors, t-shirts, or jerseys. What stunned me was how the fans were dressed. I happened to be showing my sons the video of my boyhood hero, Cal Ripken, Jr., breaking Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game streak. When it comes to the rise of tribalism, I stumbled upon additional evidence of it about a year ago. Bryan Yablonsky/Sportschrome/Getty Images
6, 1995 at Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland. of the Baltimore Orioles tips his batting helmet to the fans after breaking Lou Gherig's record of 2130 consecutive games played on Sept. It’s no surprise that we wind up in 2016 saying, ‘Why shouldn’t Tony Soprano be president?’” (It should be noted that The Sopranos debuted in 1999.)
In discussing his new book, The End of Reality, Jonathan Taplin-director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California-made just this point, telling me : “From The Wire to The Sopranos to Breaking Bad to Mad Men, these are incredibly dark anti-heroes… we watched that for 10 or 15 years. How much did my coming of age politically at this point in history impact my own temperament and distaste for partisan animosity? How much did the political culture of 1998 reinforce my belief that Dems were worse than Republicans? And how much did this period impact my (naive) assumption that the cranks constituted a fringe/small percentage of the American right?Ĭulture is upstream from politics, so it stands to reason that America’s changing entertainment culture that kicked off around the turn of the century might normalize certain behaviors previously considered deal-breakers by even the most loyal partisans. Coincidentally, it was also (according to Rattner’s data) a low point for partisan animosity (among Republicans)- and an era where the Republican Party still led in popularity among college-educated whites. I have always been something of a political junkie, but 1998 was the year I graduated college and got involved in electoral politics. Now, if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to engage in some introspective navel-gazing. In the mid-to-late 1990s, only about 10 percent of Republicans viewed Democrats this negatively, while closer to 25 percent of Democrats felt this way about Republicans. This increased animosity (like the other trends cited by Rattner) has only occurred over the last two decades.
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