We All Lose

I have zero interest in football and zero interest in the fortunes of the NFL (which undoubtedly has done and will continue to do quite well without my interest). I had never even heard of Colin Kaepernick until he started not standing for the National Anthem as a protest and even then have paid little attention to the resulting controversy until it escalated to unexpected prominence as a national issue this past weekend, thanks to President Trump's deliberate highlighting of the issue. 

To the extent that professional athletes are high-status celebrities in our society, if an athlete chooses to use his position of prominence and privilege to advocate for those less prominent and less privileged, which I assume is Kaepernick's intention, that would seem to me to be a quite commendable use of one's status and privilege. Consider, for example, the good that Jimmy Kimmel, a TV celebrity of a different sort, may have accomplished this past week if his high-profile attack on the latest Republican assault on the Affordable Care Act successfully saves access to affordable coverage for those who need it!

I have serious reservations, however, about the manner of Kaepernick's protest. The National Anthem, like the Flag, is a symbol of who we are as a nation, a symbol of what unites us across time and space and across whatever else divides us from one another. In a sense, the Anthem and the Flag function as substitutes for a monarch and the monarch's role in those countries fortunate enough to have one. They serve as a sort of symbolic social glue. To disrespect the Anthem or the Flag is inevitably experienced as disrespecting the whole society, disrespecting what we share in common, dividing us at our very core. This is seldom helpful - and is more likely hurtful to society over the long term. 

Even as a tactic, it is, I submit, generally a somewhat ineffective tactic. Instead of calling attention to the legitimate issue underlying the protest, it makes the protest itself the issue. Conflict is unavoidable in any society, no matter how well ordered. It is inevitable in a society such as ours with so many competing interests and ideas. Equally inevitably, however, a protest against injustice, which already presumes a degree of division in society, usually needs to reach across at least some of those divisions to appeal more broadly and widely. All political movements in a democratic polity are about widening their base and building coalitions with others to whose interests and/or ideals they must appeal. The most successful protest movements in American history (e.g., the Civil Rights movement, the Labor movement) have done this, and they have highlighted their identification with our society's purported values. In contrast, those movements have generally been unsuccessful that have emphasized their alienation from and their rejection of our purported principles and ideals and the rituals that symbolize them and thus bind us together.

Kaepernick, of course, has every right to choose whatever tactic he wishes, even if it risks making him (rather than his cause) the issue and risks alienating people who might otherwise have been potential allies. 

But then the President intruded into the controversy Kaepernick's tactic had caused. He did so in a profoundly "unpresidential" way, suggesting players should be fired for their protests, thus causing more players to protest, and to focus their protests primarily on the president's intervention. .However one judges this particular president's political talents, clearly he has a notable talent for sensing and identifying divisions in our society and exploiting them. Like most emotions, anger can be positive or negative. It can be exploited for good or for ill. Jimmy Kimmel exploited his own anger and that of many others to try to salvage affordable health care for those less privileged than himself. But anger can also become an end in itself and be exploited simply to achieve or maintain power. The campaign Donald Trump waged in 2016 was all about anger - sensing, identifying, and exploiting anger to increase (rather than to resolve) conflict and to further divide society so as to secure political victory and then continue in office to increase conflict and further divide society. 

Ours is a society increasingly divided into two hostile tribes that share less and less in common and so seek only to hate and despise each other. Protesters who disrespect our few remaining shared symbolic rituals and politicians who stir up resentment against those protests play into each other's hands. When we no longer share even the most basic civic rituals in common - when the Anthem becomes a battleground between those who support and those who oppose a particular president or policy - we all lose.