Athletics may be the closest thing we have to a blueprint for how to disagree well.
Athletics may be the closest thing we have to a blueprint for how to disagree well.
T he last few weeks have seen a remarkable run of milestones for American sports, with the Knicks’ first title in 53 years, the Carolina Hurricanes’ first Stanley Cup since 2006, and the World Cup filling American stadiums and cities with fans from across the globe. Underneath this summer’s great athletic spectacles, countless everyday Americans young and old are participating in athletic contests of their own: Little League, high school sports, rec leagues, run clubs, senior pickleball tournaments, and Saturday-morning pickup games, to name a few.
Yet while 75 percent of Americans say respecting opponents in sports is very important, just 30 percent say the same of political opponents. That gap points to something sports have quietly preserved and politics has lost: A shared sense that the person across from you is a rival, not an enemy. Sports may be the closest thing America has left to a national blueprint for how to disagree well.
That physical education contributes to the formation of character isn’t new, but it’s often forgotten by today’s political culture. Both Plato and Aristotle praised athletic competition in their treatises on politics, for its role in forming the souls of citizens. Athletics, they argued, cultivated habits of courage, discipline, self-mastery, and endurance, all prerequisites for governing oneself and therefore participating in the political life of the polis.
This is as true today as it was thousands of years ago, and it turns out that ordinary Americans hold these same intuitions about character formation and sports, even if they couldn’t name them. Nearly 8 in 10 say being a good sport is similar to being a good citizen, according to the Reagan Foundation Center on Civility and Democracy’s recent survey on civility and sportsmanship. Additionally, 97 percent say following the rules matters even if breaking them would help you win, and 93 percent think it’s important to congratulate the winner when their team loses. These are not the views of a handful of philosophy professors. They are a consensus among the American public.
Along with self-discipline, sports foster pro-social virtues needed for leadership: cooperation with a group all working towards the same end, respect for rules, accepting defeat, following legitimate authority, competition without violence. Both on the field and in public life, character is developed through countless low-stakes contests and choices. How we react in a big moment — when an opponent veers beyond fair play into cheating or disrespect, for instance — is downstream of habits built well before that moment ever arrives.
Sports are one of the last arenas where Americans regularly practice ritualized, structured conflict, where many learn to compete intensely against an opponent without treating them as an enemy to be destroyed. Instead of eliminating conflict, sports channel it. Competition becomes rule-bound, predictable, symbolic, limited, and repeatable. In sports, you compete until the final buzzer, then you stop and shake hands. You play again tomorrow or next week.
Yet too often today, these instincts fail to carry into politics. Political violence is on the rise in America, and just 11 percent of young men today strongly disagree that violence is ever justified when politics fail. Incivility in the news media, online, and throughout the halls of Congress is rampant.
The reason many don’t bring the lessons of sport into politics is because the stakes are so much higher. Championships are great entertainment, but they aren’t life and death. Policy, on the other hand, determines our country’s military strategy, taxation, infrastructure, and social safety net, and influences everything from business to unemployment, health care, and the wellbeing of American families.
Yet with so much on the line in politics, character, discipline, and civility are more important, not less. When legislation is stalled by point-scoring, and Washington is paralyzed by the inability to find common ground and compromise, we all suffer, especially the vulnerable. American freedom and prosperity depend not only on this or that set of policies being enacted, but on our government’s institutions functioning with integrity and good faith.
That doesn’t mean politicians should play soft and let the other side win. Rather, it means competing vigorously for one’s principles, treating political opponents with respect even as you give everything you have to best them, and then accepting the outcome no matter who came out on top. Again, sports should guide us. It’s completely fair for a linebacker to sack a quarterback or force a fumble. What’s not fair is using an illegal hit to injure a player.
There’s a vice in refusing to compete seriously at one extreme and another in showing contempt for the rules themselves. Cheating, denying a legitimate result, and treating a rival as an enemy all undermine the integrity of competition. Playing to win — be it on the field or fighting for your beliefs in the halls of Congress — is the virtue in the middle. Politics, like sports, depends on institutions capable of converting raw conflict into productive competition.
With so many significant athletic contests happening on the national stage this summer, it’s a good time to remember that sports not only entertain us. They also shape our character and illuminate how we might compete just as fiercely in public life without losing sight of one another’s humanity. Our politics would be healthier — more would get done and Americans might start trusting their institutions again — if we consciously adopted the discipline and respect that sports demand of us.