quote:

Even if you’re not a sports fan, chances are you have heard about the controversy surrounding Gregg Williams, who recently coached the defense of the New Orleans Saints and several other professional football teams.

Williams supposedly offered cash bounties to his players for knocking opposing teams’ stars out of the game. Sportswriters are appropriately outraged, but if you follow the comment threads, you will find a lot of anonymous fans who insist that this is just hard-hitting football.

Most of Williams’s defenders, I suspect, are fans of teams he has coached. Meanwhile, fans of teams whose players might have been injured by Williams’s schemes are screaming for his head. In sports, we have come to expect such double standards. The trouble is, they have spilled over into every area of life, including politics.

Unless you have been vacationing in a Trappist monastery, you no doubt have followed, perhaps unwillingly, the contretemps surrounding Rush Limbaugh’s nasty comments about a Georgetown University law student who testified in favor of the Obama administration’s new contraceptive policy. The fascinating part of the controversy isn’t the universal condemnation of Limbaugh’s remarks, but the second-order debate over whether liberals are being hypocritical for coming down so hard on him while swiftly forgiving sometimes cruder comments from left- leaning pundits about conservative women.

Many observers are left uneasy by the double standard. On the other hand, Stanley Fish, writing in the New York Times, has argued instead that one can consistently be harsher on one’s opponents than on one’s allies for the same offense, because of the importance of the common goal being pursued. Seen this way, the seeming double standard becomes a mark of integrity...

There is a partisanship that involves rooting for my side, and there is a partisanship that involves insisting that my side can do no wrong, that all the bad guys are on the other side. In politics nowadays, all across the spectrum, we see fewer and fewer partisans of the first type, more and more of the second. The growing disparity threatens to transform democracy into just another spectator sport - and, as in other sports, potential followers might be driven away by the behavior of boorish fans...

Probably we should be unsurprised. Evolutionary psychologists insist that the dividing of the world into “us” and “them” is natural to us, a genetic holdover from our hunter-gatherer days, when we shared with our fellows and fought off attacks from strangers. We are psychologically comfortable, the theory runs, only when we know who is on our side and who isn’t, and can draw clean dividing lines between the two. So strong is this habit, researchers say, that we tend to discount suffering among members of the “out” group while highlighting it among members of the “in” group...

Let us at least be clear about our motive. We are not interested in the rules. We are not even interested in the game, except as a tool for victory. In democratic politics, we need our share of strong advocates, for whom winning is, in Vince Lombardi’s hoary exhortation, the only thing. But we need our referees even more. We require a critical mass of people - in particular, people of influence - for whom the rules are all but sacrosanct, and the game is more important than the outcome. We need people, in short, whose passion for the process itself is greater than their passion for the outcome. When that group vanishes, real democracy goes with it.