The New Republic senior editor Alex Shephard set out to refute the claim, advanced by some on the Right, that the U.S. women’s soccer team’s 5-4 loss to Sweden on penalty kicks was an outgrowth of the team’s commitment to “wokeness.” In that effort, he does a workmanlike job of demonstrating why the team’s tactical decisions on the field are sufficient to explain Monday’s unsatisfying results.
Shephard does, however, take up the claim from “mediocre” former U.S. soccer player Alexi Lalas who called the women’s team “polarizing” to such an extent that it has hurt its brand among right-of-center Americans. That, Lalas implies, explains why some of the loudest voices in our cultural discourse appeared to view the team’s loss as a source of personal validation. This, Shephard argues, is a misrepresentation of the sequence of events.
It’s figures like Donald Trump—and, for that matter, Ron DeSantis, who Lalas has endorsed—who have injected politics into the sports discourse, drawing the women’s team into a conversation no one asked for and attacking them for their own benefit. The U.S. didn’t polarize anyone by speaking out—figures like Trump did by warping their work into culture-war bric-a-brac and stump-speech fodder.
Well, that’s just nonsense.
For the better part of a decade now, the U.S. women’s soccer team has served — often willingly and with the direct participation of its members — as the avatars of a campaign to illustrate the supposed “pay gap” endured by women performing the exact same roles as men. President Barack Obama deployed the team’s members as human props in a campaign to popularize the injustice of the so-called pay gap — a claim so baseless Obama’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics and a handful of U.S. district courts disputed the pay gap’s very existence.
U.S. women’s national soccer team co-captain Megan Rapinoe has delighted in starting political feuds with Republican lawmakers and using her celebrity to advance divisive political causes. She is not shy about using the most incendiary language available to make her points, even at the risk of alienating would-be consumers of her sport. She has so deliberately inserted herself into the national political debate that Democratic pollsters tested her appeal in a hypothetical presidential election against Donald Trump. And Rapinoe isn’t alone. In 2019, the Associate Press celebrated the team’s “off-the-field activist role” as champions for a variety of “social-justice causes.”
Rapinoe and her teammates engaged in polarizing political debates, and that activism has had a polarizing effect. Republican lawmakers are not responsible for injecting politics into the apolitical conduct of professional athletics; they’ve merely noticed its injection and singled out those doing the injecting for criticism.
This inversion of cause and effect is the foundation upon which all “Republicans pounce” commentary rests. It is a bankrupt style of journalism that seeks to redirect a reader’s attention away from an event — usually, one Democrats find discomfiting — by highlighting the Republican reaction to the event. If the enterprise is successful, the public becomes conditioned to the idea the GOP’s response to a controversy is more newsworthy than the controversy itself.
I don’t endorse rooting against American interests in a contest with foreign countries, even if those interests are as frivolous as winning a soccer game. But if some conservatives are indifferent to the U.S. women’s team’s loss, that reaction is the culmination of years of efforts on the team’s part to cultivate that response. If the team and its supporters are today put off by the sentiment that prevails on the right, the most you can say is that they are a victim of their own success.