Nothing to Lose But the Olympics
The convergence of populist movements and anti-Olympic protests in France is a wake-up call for the American left.
Dear readers,
This past week witnessed the Grand Purge of Hated Media Figures, with Tucker Carlson getting the boot at Fox and Don Lemon being shown the door at CNN. Personally, we were hoping the contagion would spread to the world of sports media, perhaps claiming Dave Portnoy and Stephen A. Smith along the way. But no such luck. Next time, God willing.
Meanwhile, we’re turning out attention across the Atlantic today to explore the curious convergence of populist political protests and the anti-Olympic movement in France — and to suss out some of the lessons that this phenomenon holds for the American left. Happy reading.
-Calder and Ian
For the past few months, citizens across France have taken to the streets to protest President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to sign a controversial pension reform act. Much of the protesters’ anger has been directed at Macron’s government’s unilateral move to raise the retirement age in France from 62 to 64 — an initiative that is deeply unpopular with France’s rapidly aging population — but the protests have tapped into a deeper strain of populist discontent with Macron and the elite political establishment that he represents.
In the midst of the protests, however, a curious hashtag has begun to appear across social media: “#pasderetraitpasdeJO” — or, in English, “no withdrawal, no Olympics.” France, of course, is slated to host the 2024 Olympics in Paris, but at least to an American audience, the proliferation of the hashtag raised an interesting question: What does anti-Olympic sentiment have to do with pension reform?
The most obvious answer is that the Olympics represent another gilded leaf in Macron’s political cap, and mobilizing against the Games might pressure Macron to roll back his pension reforms. Despite global protests, the Olympics remain a symbol of international political prestige, and Macron has vigorously supported France’s bid to host the upcoming tournament. (Most prominently, Macron is championing a $1.5 billion effort to make the Seine and Marne rivers swimmable by the time of the Olympics — a project that, despite its apparent environmentalism, has drawn ire from protesters as a wasteful expenditure of tax dollars.) In this respect, targeting the Olympics might simply be smart political maneuvering: put pressure on Macron by undermining the Olympics.
But a slightly more sophisticated interpretation of the hashtag came from Danielle Simonnet, a member of France’s National Assembly from the left-wing populist party La France Insoumise. As Simonnet told The Nation’s Dave Zirin and Jules Boycoff this week, “Connecting the rejection of the Olympics with the rejection of the pension law marks the level of popular awareness of the same logic that underlies them: a policy for the profits of a handful, at the expense of the overwhelming majority.”
This interpretation might sound foreign to audiences in the United States, where sports remain assiduously depoliticized, but it comports with the broader politics of sports in France. The mobilization against the 2024 Olympics predates protests against Macron’s pension reform act. Since the Games were announced in 2017, French activists have been drawing attention to the tournament’s economic, environmental, and human costs: public gardens and parks that have been destroyed to make way for Olympics facilities, immigrant workers who lost their homes to Olympic construction, and the National Assembly’s decision to green-light AI-powered video surveillance technology during the Games, among other things.
So far, the resistance has been spearheaded mostly by the French left. Just last month, a French labor union cut power to the Olympic building sites to protest the pension reform, and international anti-Olympic groups are encouraging supporters to sign up to volunteer at the Games — and then withdraw at the last minute — to throw a wrench in the tournament’s logistics. But it remains to be seen who — if anyone — will benefit politically from the union between the anti-Olympic protests and the resistance to Macron’s pension reform. Even more so than the American right, the French right has successfully harnessed the political energy of the populist reaction to globalization, economic financialization, and, to a lesser degree, environmental destruction — three trends that find their perfect expression in the Olympics. (A recent poll showed that, if last year’s election between Macron and far-right leader Marine Le Pen were to take place today, Le Pen would win by a ten-point margin.)
Of course, the French right’s political resurgence also depends to a significant degree on stoking racial and ethnic resentment among voters. But that fact shows why it’s so important that the left — both in France and in the United States — double down on its own critique of rapacious capitalism in sports. The lesson from France is that sooner or later, the global populist movement will come for sports — but that movement can take either a right-wing or a left-wing form.
In the U.S., the right’s reactionary view of sports has mostly expressed itself in calls for athletes to “shut up and dribble,” to use Laura Ingraham’s famous phrase. But it would be a mistake to believe that this will be the final form that those views will take. In the U.S., we’ve already seen whimpers of a more robust right-wing critique of sports in the form of the GOP’s minor freakout about the “woke-ification” of sports leagues — for instance, raising hell when Major League Baseball moved its All-Star Game out of Georgia in 2021 to protests the state’s restrictions on voting rights. The efforts have been half-hearted and short-lived, but we would wager that they’re only just beginning to gain traction on the right.
The major intellectual thrust of right-wing politics in the post-Trump era has been toward populist critiques of “woke capital” — with the emphasis being on the “woke” part rather than the “capital” part. Professional sports are not immune from that line of critique — especially major international sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup — and we’d bet that we’ll see them come to fruition before long.
As is true of critiques of capital more broadly, the left cannot allow the right to set the terms of this debate. Unfortunately, it looks like progressives in the U.S. are largely prepared to do just that. Since the broad-based mobilization of athletes during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the Democratic Party and the left more broadly have largely backed away from using sports as a vehicle for political change — or, even more modestly, as a prism to understand inequality in America. The anti-Olympic protests in France should serve as a wake-up call: If the American left doesn’t offer a robust critique of sports grounded in the need to protect working people, the environment, and democratic values, the right will offer a critique grounded in racial resentment, cultural chauvinism, and hyper-nationalism. We’ve seen that critique before, and we will almost certainly see it again.
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
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