Go Short!

A meditation on why passing is better than rushing – in football and in politics

In 1972, American football overtook baseball as the most popular sport in the country—the year after the US had its first trade deficit in almost eighty years, a real signal of the economic paradigm shift in motion. While the “hallmarks of neoliberalism,” as Perry Anderson helpfully lists them—“privatization of services and industries; reduction of corporate and wealth taxation; attrition or emasculation of trade unions”—weren’t yet apparent to football fans, they were already underway. In 1972, it may not have been evident that football would dominate the next decades, but it has—the others aren’t even close, and haven’t been in decades. It’s not just that football is the most popular sport, it’s that the NFL dominates American culture, attached to and promoting a very specific form of cis, racist, masculine toxicity: militaristic, punishing, dangerous, deadly, and racist AF. The NFL dominates in a marriage of neoliberal material and ideological realities condensed into UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, There Is No Alternative. 

Read the whole thing in Dilattante Army’s Spring 2025 issue, Rebuilding Year