Are you ready to receive a powerful piece of information? OK, here it comes: Politicians can increase their chances of getting elected to office if they are seen as down-to-earth and relatable by their constituents.
This novel observation, unearthed for the first time this week, is the premise of a Nathaniel Frum column that appeared on The Atlantic on Tuesday. Before you ask, yes, Nathaniel is awful Atlantic staff writer David Frum's stupid son. Not content with simply blowing his readers' minds by telling them that being likable is a boon to politicians, Frum uses his powerful thinking abilities to lay out a brilliant plan for exactly how a politician might go about appearing more normal and cool: They should express idiotic and insincere sports opinions, as frequently and as loudly as possible, in the spaces where such opinions are most abundant.
Frum begins his column by (correctly) dinging New York Governor Kathy Hochul for challenging Donald Trump to name the starting lineup of the Knicks' "1993 championship team," which was in point of fact more of a lost-in-the-Eastern-Conference-Finals team. Hochul came off like a real dope because her error underlined what was already obvious: She only occasionally pretends to like sports in order to curry favor with her constituents.
One might think that the lesson to take from Hochul's episode is that politicians should avoid putting themselves in situations in which their inauthenticity would be most easily and embarrassingly revealed, but that conclusion would leave Frum without the ability to subject Atlantic readers to a column that is both thuddingly obvious and a thinly veiled pretense for airing some tiresome sports bullshit of his own. And so Frum goes in the other direction, and argues that the secret sauce for Democrats who want to get elected is to engage in an even more cynical performance than Hochul attempted:
As Democratic politicians scramble to seem in touch and ensure that their faces appear on our phones as much as possible, they are neglecting the free real estate offered by sports talk. A popular meme mocks men for being content to sit and name obscure athletes to one another for hours. It’s popular because it isn’t far from the truth. The politically disengaged male voters whom Democrats are so desperate to reach aren’t at bars arguing about Medicare funding. They are arguing about a roughing-the-passer penalty. Bettors on Polymarket give Stephen A. Smith higher odds of winning the 2028 Democratic presidential primary than Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, and Ruben Gallego. Nothing gets attention like sports takes.
OK, sure. Let's see how long Frum can keep this take humming before collapsing under the weight of his own performance:
If Democrats want to defeat authoritarianism, they need to win the trust of people who are not necessarily politically engaged. To do that, they could do worse than to start expressing their own hot takes on sports. These shouldn’t repeat already-popular opinions as a way to seem relatable. The perfect take should be actually unpopular, counter to the consensus, and specific.
The Senate candidate James Talarico doesn’t need to run away from his meatless-taco order. Instead, he could prove that he’s a regular guy by calling into ESPN Austin to accuse the University of Texas quarterback Arch Manning of being a nepo baby who got millions of dollars just for his name. Or perhaps he could compare Jerry Jones, the Dallas Cowboys’ imperious owner, to Trump: an egotistical old man destroying a once-proud institution.
Ah, there we go. That didn't take long.
Silly as this all is, it's a good reminder of just how durable this type of neoliberal political delusion really is. Democratic politicians have been eating shit for decades by following the advice of consultants and columnists—that is, fatuous elites very much like Nathaniel Frum—who insist that a willingness to just say stuff is an effective stand-in for having genuinely held beliefs or interests, and that voters will always be too stupid to tell the difference. Simply make the right noises at them, and they will make those noises back and accept you as one of their own; once you're in office, you can do pretty much whatever to those voters, provided you're still willing and able to make those sounds in a convincing fashion. No matter how many times this maneuver fails to work, people like Frum just keep making the same recommendations.
Even more maddening is the fact that the guys encouraging politicians to just get better at faking it are themselves horrible fakers, as evidenced by young Frum's total inability to describe what a "regular guy" might do or say. All of my normal, salt-of-the-earth, sports-loving buddies are constantly listening to "ESPN Austin." And when we get together at the sports bar—we refer to it as "the local watering hole"—we are often saying things like "Arch Manning is a nepo baby" and "Jerry Jones is Donald Trump" to all of the other regular guys, who love talking to us. They might not agree with us, they might be confused by why we're popping off with all these annoying non sequiturs, but dammit, they respect how smugly we do it. Only rarely do we get punched in the face.
