Soccer and Status Politics

June 27, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Ann Coulter nails it in her column on soccer.  Not the part about the rising interest in soccer signalling America’s  moral decay. That’s just her usual attempt to be provocative.  What Coulter gets right is that soccer is part of the cultural divide.  The question she raises is much bigger than whether soccer is an inferior sport to baseball or football. It’s “Whose country is this anyway?”

Though she doesn’t say so explicitly, Coulter frames soccer is a matter of status politics – the struggle for recognition, respect, and prestige among different groups. She sees the soccer demographic as is a coalition of White liberals and immigrants of the past generation or two. The anti-soccer side comprises what Sarah Palin called “the real America” – non-urban, White, Protestant, nativist, Republican.  That’s Coulter’s side, and she’s worried that in the long run, her side will lose.

We’ve seen this match-up before. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Prohibition provided a vehicle for “real Americans” to assert the virtue and predominance of their way of life over that of the immigrant, non-Protestant groups. The opposition to Obamacare (and just about any Obama policy) had pretty much the same roster.  (See an earlier post here.) In both cases, these groups felt a threat to their position of privilege.  The anti-Obama crowd is explicit about this sense of loss and threat. America is “our” country, “they” have taken it away, and we are going to take it back.  (See my “Repo Men” post from three years ago.)

Coulter is absolutely open about her nativism and Xenophobia – none of this “America is a nation of immigrants” nonsense. Or as she says, “I promise you: No American whose great-grandfather was born here is watching soccer.”  And one of the bullet points in her argument that soccer is a sign of moral decay is

• It's foreign.

Followed by

• Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it's European.

(The metric system is simpler and more logical. But it’s used in all those foreign countries, and it’s used universally in science – two reasons for conservatives like Coulter to give it the red card.)

Maybe liberals do like soccer because it’s European, or more accurately international.  But it’s equally true that conservatives fear things because they are foreign.  They demand that the rest of the world become American.  In 2006, John Tierney, a conservative/libertarian writing for the Times, said (here), “Instead of us copying the rest of the world, the rest of the world could learn from us. Maybe they love soccer because they haven’t been given better alternatives.” *

To see what else the soccer soccer coalition liked, I went to Google correlates and entered “world cup.” Unfortunately, data for the current World Cup are not in, so most of the queries are from 2010.  The map looks like what you would expect – the states where people Googled “World Cup” were the Northeast corridor and California. What’s more puzzling is that many of the highest correlates were for movies – Oscar nominees like “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker,” but also movies liberals like – “Vicki Cristina Barcelona,” “Inception,” and “Eat, Pray, Love.” All these had correlation coefficients with “World Cup” of 0.87 or higher. Here are the results for “World Cup” and “Oscars 2010.”

The other highly correlated cluster of terms had a different theme:

• hanukkah 2010 (0.8989)
• passover 2010 (0.8972)
• yom kippur 2010 (0.8950)
• chanukah 2010 (0.8874)

Here are the graphics:

This does not necessarily mean that people who Googled “passover 2010" also Googled “World Cup.” It means only that in states where people Googled “passover 2010" people also Googled “world cup.” In New York and California, for example, it might have been Jews looking for information about Passover and while Hispanics Googled “World Cup.”

Soccer, Jews, and moral decay.  This combination reminded me of something Coulter said in a 2007 interview with Donny Deutsch, who happens to be Jewish (the full transcript is here):

COULTER: Well, OK, take the Republican National Convention. People were happy. They're Christian. They're tolerant. They defend America, they — DEUTSCH: Christian — so we should be Christian? It would be better if we were all Christian? COULTER: Yes. DEUTSCH: We should all be Christian? COULTER: Yes. Would you like to come to church with me, Donny? . . . . . COULTER: No, we think — we just want Jews to be perfected, as they say. DEUTSCH: Wow, you didn't really say that, did you? . . . . . . DEUTSCH: Ann said she wanted to explain her last comment. So I'm going to give her a chance. So you don't think that was offensive? COULTER: No. I'm sorry. It is not intended to be. I don't think you should take it that way, but that is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews.

Coulter didn’t mention soccer at the time, but perhaps that is yet another sign of the how Jews are imperfect compared to Christians – they live in places where soccer is popular, places where small-town and suburban WASP conservatives are not so dominant. For Coulter, that’s not just imperfect, that’s moral decay.


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*In 2012, Marco Rubio, addressing the Republican convention, used nearly identical language – the same know-nothing arrogance – in speaking about Democratic proposals like Obamacare: “These are ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world instead of making the rest of the world more like America.”

We Still Don’t Call It Football, But . . .

June 26, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

How American is soccer now as a spectator sport? My totally unscientific indicator is the front page of New York tabloids.  And today, they both had the US-Germany World Cup match.

The inset in the Daily News picture is a letter written by coach Jurgen Klinsmann for workers to give to their employers:  World Cup as excused absence. 

(Someone ought to remind Coach Klinsmann that this is the US, not Europe. Employers here don’t even have to give workers a day off for childbirth.)

Eight years ago, the World Cup was not front page news, perhaps because team USA went 0-2 in the first round. In 2010, soccer made it to the front page of the Post, when the US was knocked out of the tournament by Ghana.

It’s still one of my favorite captions.  But if the US loses today, I doubt that we’ll see this kind of ironic humor.

And Then There Were Two

June 19, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Horace Silver died yesterday. He was 85.

Great musicians have an unmistakable sound. Horace’s chord voicings were distinctive. Even if you hear him comping behind a horn solo, you know it’s Horace.

Horace and his music rarely reached beyond the jazz audience. Some jazzers complained that Steely Dan stole the opening vamp from “Song for My Father” for their “Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.” But as someone else said, you can’t copyright one and five.  Norah Jones, who learned and played jazz as a teenager, used to sing “Peace” in her concerts. “This is a Horace Silver tune,” she says quickly after the first chord on one live recording, and I wonder, how many people in that audience knew who Horace is.  She sings and plays the song beautifully.  Outside of that, I know of no crossovers.

Horace is known less for his piano soloing, though that too is unmistakable, than for the groups he led. So many great players have stints with the Horace Silver quintet early in their careers – Hank Mobley, Joe Henderson, Donald Byrd, Art Farmer, et al.

But he will be most remembered for his writing.  I started thinking of his compositions that I know – know well enough to play and have them be recognizable. It started with “The Preacher,” which I first heard when I was thirteen or so on a four-trombone Kai Winding record. “Opus de Funk,” “Strollin',” “Nica’s Dream,” . . . .  and the hits just kept on coming. My Real Book app has eleven Horace tunes, and that leaves out quite a few.  His best known is probably “Song for My Father.” My own list of favorites includes, for idiosyncratic reasons, lesser known tunes like “Cool Eyes” and “The St. Vitus Dance.”

Dan Okrent tweets that with Horace’s death, of the musicians from the Great Day in Harlem photo, only two remain: Benny Golson and Sonny Rollins. 

(Horace is at the left, Golson at the top of the steps, Sonny Rolllins just to the right behind Marian McPartland and Mary Lou Williams.)

These were the musical heroes of my youth, and it’s strange to see them gradually disappear. Others in the photo are from a slightly earlier era – musicians whose names and sound were familiar, but I had no idea what they looked like.  One night, probably in 1994 when a documentary film had given the Art Kane photo some popularity, I was walking up Amsterdam Ave. and saw the great pianist Tommy Flanagan looking in the window of a neighborhood store. Inside was the photo. I stopped, and we talked briefly. Tommy would point to the faces of those who had already passed on.  “That’s Buck Clayton. There’s Red Allen.”

And now, that’s Horace Silver.

Take Up the Rich Man’s Burden

June 17, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Pity the wealthy. How their burden has increased. At least that’s what Mark Perry would have us believe. The income tax burden, he says in the title of this chart that he tweeted today, has become “more progressive.”

It certainly looks as though the rich man’s burden has increased.  Perry is careful not to say that “taxes” have become more progressive. That would mean that rates have increased more on the wealthy than on others. Instead he says that the “burden” has become more progressive. 

The burden might have become more progressive, but did tax rates on the wealthy increase? No.

Except for the period from 1990 to 1993, tax rates fell or were level.

Why then did the burden increase?  Since it’s unlikely that the wealthy were voluntarily kicking extra bucks into the IRS coffers, there’s only one explanation: the wealthy were getting an increasing share of income. This possibility seems not to have occurred to Perry.

It has occurred to Piketty and Saez, who have been providing us with information on the income shares of those at the top.  Here is a chart of the top 10%.

From 1985 to 2010, their share of income increased from roughly 34% to 47% – a 38% increase. Their tax burden rose by only 29%. 

And the 1%.

Their income share increased from 12% to 20% – a 67% increase. Their share of the tax burden increased by only 45%.

According to the bio at the American Enterprise Institute website, “Mark J. Perry is concurrently a scholar at AEI and a professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan's Flint campus.”

A scholar. Is this what passes for scholarly work at the AEI? I am not an economist or a finance expert. But even I know enough to see that the chart and its title are deliberately misleading. 

(And with apologies to Kipling)
.

Take up the rich man’s burden, and shower him with praise,
For at the AEI, this style of economics pays.