The way fans live now
By 
William Davies has a long and interesting essay in the London Review of Books on my new book A Fan’s Life, connecting its argument to various strains in American, British, and European contemporary political culture:
Much of what Campos reports had permeated the zeitgeist before most of us had ever logged on [to the Internet] in earnest. Fandom acquired a political and economic utility at a moment in history when passion became required of us both in the workplace and at the shopping mall, and when nations were reimagined as giant corporate brands in a race against one another.
What monsters were unleashed in the process? Nationalism, after all, is a form of fandom, which rebels against the constraints of liberal reason by expressing an unapologetic bias for one ‘side’ against every other. Outrageous conservative media outlets such as Fox News (founded in 1996) and Breitbart (2005) have nourished the sense that nobody is free from bias or prejudice, and that it is only the liberal elite who would ever pretend to be so in the first place. The internet isn’t just a space where fans debate with one another, but also where tribes build up a distorted and hateful picture of their enemies. ‘While sports allegiances can be seen as a sublimated form of politics,’ Campos argues, ‘political allegiances can also be understood as a form of sublimated fandom of the more traditional kind.’ Trump is one result of this. Similarly, James Meek has observed of Jacob Rees-Mogg that
his career shows how much like sport British politics has become, where politicians have fans and supporters, rather than voters who are swayed by their arguments or troubled by their extra-parliamentary activities. If you don’t support the Rees-Mogg team, you have no time for him anyway; you’re not going to hate him more. If you’re a fan, it isn’t so important that he should take personal responsibility for making the country better or that he should be morally consistent.*
Just as dangerous, the mentality that distrusts all claims to neutrality ends up seeing corruption everywhere. The introduction of VAR into football in 2019 seems to have exacerbated a tendency among online fans to allege that matches are being fixed or officials bribed. Every time a decision goes wrong, fans demand to know why this keeps happening to them, not to other teams. There is no limit to how long such debates can rage, and no decision too unremarkable to be considered an injustice. In the political domain, something similar is going on with the populist rhetoric according to which everything is ‘rigged’, nothing is ever ‘fair’, and the gravest enemies are those liberals who claim otherwise. Campos expresses some fondness for the way these absurdities attach themselves to his football team, but is all too aware that the Republican Party has recently nurtured the same spirit of ressentiment.
The mentality behind instant replay, which seems obsessed with the idea that sporting decisions should be quasi-scientifically correct/morally fair, is worth contemplating. One of the things I argue in the book is that the tradeoffs involved here in terms of the psychology of the fan experience are quite complicated. Something valuable is lost now that every controversial decision is open to review — the valuable thing being the unmediated catharsis of experiencing the thing that has just happened as it has happened.
Life, unlike football, is generally not subject to further review.