Okay, we here at the Sports Desk get it now. It's taken us a couple of years, but thanks to the teachings of the Rev. Andrew Young, social psychologist Dr. Jonathan Haidt, slugger David Ortiz, and Tom, the physicist who jogs through our neighborhood and occasionally tries to explain quantum entanglement to us by the mailbox, we think we're finally starting to get it.
But first, we have to acknowledge that our NCAA basketball bracket, although off to a good start, completely collapsed on Sunday. We were doing fine Thursday and Friday for the first round, even with Virginia's historic upset loss, and we still held our own in the second round on Saturday, but when Xavier and North Carolina and Auburn and especially Cincinnati (who we had picked to win it all) went down on Sunday, we were out. As it stands now, we only have one team (Villanova) left in the Final Four, and our predicted champion won't even be in the Championship game. It's over for us.
But meanwhile, the question we here at the Sports Desk are just now starting to understand has actually been bugging us for a long while now - namely, how can otherwise intelligent people say with a straight face that they support Donald Trump? We mean, c'mon, really?
But we get it now. It's not an intellectual position or one arrived at, say, by side-by-side comparisons of foreign and monetary policies, the way good liberals like to imagine they've come to endorse the candidates of their choice. We understand now that it's not unlike the way we've come to identify with our preferred sports teams. Here at the Sports Desk, we're not Red Sox fans because we've crunched the numbers and determined that statistically they've fielded the best teams over a certain relevant period of time. It's not because their epic struggles and subsequent redemption, although we do like that. No, we're Red Sox fans and will always be Red Sox fans because at some certain pivotal moment in our lives, we've come to identify with the team and began labelling ourselves as "Red Sox fans" and it's part of our tribal identity to always cheer for our chosen team, no matter who they field in any given year, no matter who's coaching, no matter how bad - or how good - their record is.
So it is, we imagine, with conservatives. They've come to self-identify with "Team Republican" and their tribal custom, just as it is for sports fans, is to support their own tribe, no matter who takes the field any given year, no matter who is selected to lead. So, like it or not, some years they're cheering Abraham Lincoln or Dwight D. Eisenhower, and other times they find themselves defending some truly reprehensible human beings, from Newt Gingrich to Ted Cruz to Donald J.Trump, if that's who's taking the field for their team.
Dr. Haidt tells us that loyalty to one's own group is a common and highly-ranked moral value among conservatives. Liberals put value in that too, but it's just not prioritized as highly for them as it is for conservatives. Liberals are suspicious of loyalty because at its worst it can devolve into xenophobia and racism, but on a less toxic level it's, well, supporting the home team, and if this year's Republican presidential candidate is a venal, egomaniacal, lying, womanizing narcissist, well, at least he's not a Democrat, and so they vote for their team and support their team and, if necessary, defend their team. If you didn't observe the core value of loyalty, then you're not really a conservative.
Rev. Young reminds us that many of the president's core supporters are among the poorest of the poor with the least prospects for any improvement - the coal miners and steel mill workers barely hanging on to outdated jobs in outdated technologies, the small farmer trying to compete with global agro-business. It seems to them that year after year, decade after decade, nothing gets better for them no matter who's in Washington, Democrat or Republican, so after a while, why not vote for the non-politician, the not-politically-correct outsider who's not afraid to say what they've been thinking all along ("Mexicans are stealing our jobs," "blacks just don't want to work," and "the Chinese are laughing at us"). How could it be worse for them than the last 30 years? How could someone who secretly believes that Ivy League elites just want to tell them what to say and do, and that Jewish bankers are hoarding all the money and good-paying jobs for themselves, ever hope that salvation will someday come from the marbled buildings of Washington, D.C.? So now they have a new head coach, and no matter how dysfunctional the team is under his leadership, loyalty requires them to suppress all doubts. At least he's not Hillary!
Tom the jogging physicist confirms to us that there is no intellectually defensible basis for supporting Trump-brand conservatism, which is not to say that there's not an intellectually rigorous school of conservative thought, it's just that Trump, with his abject lack of curiosity and limited problem-solving capacity, probably couldn't find that school with a Garmin GPS.
We'll complete the analogy this way - if one year the Red Sox fielded an entire team who were, well, dim, we wouldn't suddenly start cheering for the Yankees (shudder to think). We'd still cheer for the Sox and consider ourselves part of Red Sox Nation, even if we didn't have high hopes for the team that particular season. It doesn't matter what Curt Schilling ever subsequently says or does, he still pitched that one epic playoff game with a bloody sock, and there's nothing he can say or do that will make us love his team the less for it.
Even if he demands that Mexico pay for a wall.
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