The Conservative Search For Conflict And Football's Body Count
How one conservative's desire for WWIII reveals the brutality of the ideology underpinning modern defenses of football
I, as a rational and compassionate human being, would really love it if World War III never comes to pass. One would think this would be an uncontroversial position. But Jesse Kelly, a conservative commentator on the prestigious Radio and Internet, is here to blow your mind with Monday’s Hot Take of the Day:
Allow me to go out on a limb and suggest that no, what the world needs right now is not another world war. That said, despite the obvious wrongness of Kelly’s take, I find the ideology it rests on fascinating and worth unpacking, because it’s the same ideology on which many of the defenses of football that have popped up in the response to the concussion crisis of the past decade have rested. And I find it important because I think it is far, far more dangerous than many, even those who agree with me about the vicious brutality of football, understand.
Even though it might result in a splitting headache, it’s worth dissecting what exactly World War III would do for America to understand why Kelly would want such a thing. Kelly claims that the nature of man is to seek out conflict, that debates around feminism and the rights of trans people are an attempt to seek out conflict where it doesn’t exist, and that the only way to solve this problem to his liking is for war to give men a purpose again.
This idea — not that we need World War III, but that men lack purpose-granting conflict in their lives — has been part of American conservatism for nearly two centuries. The origin of football, as I’ve written for the Guardian, was in large part driven by a fear of creeping femininity brought on by the end of the frontier, the industrial revolution, and the way they combined to create a more sedentary — and less conflict-driven — lifestyle for the American male. If life won’t mold men, the Muscular Christians said, we will, God damn it!
The connection between football and war has been made explicit by the game’s supporters since its origins. Henry Cabot Lodge wrote in 1896 that “The time given to athletic contests and the injuries incurred on the playing field are part of the price which the English-speaking race has paid for being world-conquerors,” making it clear that preparing young men for war was always meant to be part of the football project.
The real reason why I find football’s ideology so relevant to Kelly’s desire for a war to galvanize American masculinity, though, is that the game has already used war in a very real way to revive enthusiasm for the game in times of crisis in its past. Much like a head injury crisis is racking the game and driving down participation right now, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw enough grisly injuries — skull fractures rather than concussions, and a record high 36 deaths during the 1968 high school football season — to make the American public start to doubt the wisdom of having its boys ram their skulls into each other each fall. The game’s most ardent supporters used the Vietnam War as an opportunity to show just how much American needed football and the specific brand of masculinity it incubates. Conservative titans like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used football as a vehicle to promote their support of the Vietnam War. But no conservative gave a more impassioned rallying cry for football than Max Rafferty, a populist conservative in California who told the California State Conference of Athletic Directors in 1969:
“The love of clean, competitive sports is too deeply embedded in the American matrix, too much a part of the warp and woof of our free people, ever to surrender to the burning-eyed, bearded draft-card-burners who hate and envy the athlete because he is something they can never be – a man.”
When I make these claims about football’s relationship with masculinity, they are not limited to a world of theory. It’s simply what the men who love football and support football have said for years. And it’s the same thing they say today. What Rafferty said could easily fit into Baltimore Ravens coach John Harbaugh’s “Why Football Matters” letter from 2015.
“That’s why high school football – and particularly high school coaches – play such a vital role in our society. Our football coaches are on the front lines of the battle for the hearts and minds of the young men in our society. The culture war is on and we see it every day. These young men are more vulnerable than ever.”
Same shit, different decade.
Very few of football’s defenders today would dare make the argument that football isn’t dangerous. Not even Merrill Hoge, in his recent book attacking those researching and writing about CTE, makes the claim that football is safe. Kelly, a Marine Corps veteran, is similarly surely aware of the body count his desired war would create. At this point, given the similarities in the arguments that have been used for over a century, it’s clear this body count is a feature, not a bug.
Both Kelly’s lust for war and the impassioned defenses from football’s defenders make the conservative position terrifyingly clear: Their battle against the perceived feminization of the American male is never over, and the body count it leaves behind, whether in broken brains or casualties of war, is always worth it. This callousness, this willing sacrifice of young men in the service of some nebulous concept of masculinity, has driven my renunciation of football more than anything else. They would literally rather see us dead than embracing the feminine, in any way, shape or form. They just won’t say it so clearly.