Southpaw 16: How To Build an Antifascist Sports Franchise
We can look to a small European football club as a model.
Dear Readers,
Tough week. We have all sorts of thoughts spinning in different directions, and we did our best to get some of them down below. Boston Celtics Guard Jaylen Brown summed up our general mood pretty well:
After the violence, the hypocrisy from the Right has probably been the most appalling part of this week. For example: after endorsing a military coup because he thought it might help a future presidential bid, Ted Cruz is now getting mad online about Joe Biden’s “vicious partisan rhetoric” that is “dividing the country.” Dearest Ted—go to hell.
At the end of the day, having Biden saying nice things about the fascists will not stop them from being fascists. The only thing to do now is win. We have some ideas on how to do that.
-Ian and Calder
What Does an Antifascist Sports Team Look Like?
We wish this post could be about a WNBA team full of Black female players helping to elect a progressive Black pastor from Georgia to the United States Senate, thereby heaping scorn and embarrassment on a racist, pseudo-populist, reactionary millionaire who, in an almost Sophoclean twist of fate, inadvertently used her riches to subsidize a successful effort by her own employees to destroy her political career and cement her fate as a fraud, a grifter, and a disgraced political charlatan. That is, after all, what happened on Tuesday, when the members of the Atlanta Dream helped lift Rev. Raphael Warnock to victory over Kelly Loeffler in Georgia’s special election. As we have written before, the Dream’s campaign against Loeffler had no precedent in the history of athletic activism. On Tuesday, it worked.
Of course, this isn’t that post. We don’t want to spill more ink parsing through the details of the terroristic temper tantrum that Trump and his supporters threw on Wednesday, other than to say this: if there is a single and unambiguous lesson to be drawn from Wednesday’s events, it is that American fascism—real, home-grown, domestic fascism—is no longer an abstraction. It’s likely that the participants in Wednesday’s violence weren’t acting on any unified set of political ideals, or intelligible vision of governance, but fascists rarely do. As scholar Robert Paxton has argued, fascism never stands still. It is always in motion, always progressing through stages of development and reinvention, with each stage bearing only a passing resemblance to its previous iterations. Wednesday moved us further along in that progression, and if we wait any longer for Trump’s distinct brand of fascistic terror to achieve some sort of ideological coherence or political cogency, it will be too late. Until Wednesday, Paxton, the leading American expert on the history and theory of fascism, had refused to use “the F-word” to characterize Trump and his thugs. While watching cable news on Wednesday, he changed his mind.
It’s difficult to see how sports might factor into an appropriate response to Wednesday’s insurrection, but the Dream’s victory on Tuesday provides a clue. The last time the violent foundations of American political life were broadcast across social media and on national television, athletes took notice. The police murder of George Floyd and the subsequent shooting of Jacob Blake compelled professional sports leagues, owners, and athletes to publicly acknowledge that their lukewarm diversity initiatives were not enough to address the reality of anti-Black violence. While the leagues themselves have quickly retreated into safe and inoffensive marketing campaigns, players have taken real and decisive action to win political power for antiracist causes. On Tuesday, that action helped elect the first Black man from the former Jim Crow South to the United States Senate.
The violence of Wednesday should send a similar message to athletes and other stakeholders in the world of sports about the threat of domestic fascism and the need for real and immediate antifascist resistance in professional sports. As The Nation’s Dave Zirin wrote in a tweet this week, “The argument to ‘ignore’ fascists is just wrong . . . Ignoring them doesn't make fascists go away. It just gives them confidence to try again.”
Admittedly, the idea of an actively antifascist sports team is foreign to most American fans, who are more likely to associate antifascism with black-bloc street resistance than with peaceful demonstrations during sports games. But the idea is not as radical as it sounds. Take, for example, FC St. Pauli, the German football club from Hamburg. St. Pauli has gained something of a cult following in the past few decades thanks to its fanbase’s eclectic culture, which blends typical football hooliganism with working-class radicalism, radical feminism, and the punk-rock energy of Hamburg’s infamous underground music scene. Since the 1990s, though, the foundation of the club’s cultural politics has been opposition to fascism. In the early ‘90s, the club became the first in Germany to ban racist chants and neo-Nazi symbols at its games. In 1999, the club changed the name of its stadium because its namesake had been a member of the Nazi Party, and it later became the first German club to contribute to reparations for Holocaust survivors.
More recently, the club has turned antifascism into a local organizing principle. With the support of the team, fans have coordinated aid for the refugees who have become targets of right-wing violence, participated in demonstrations to protect squatters in Hamburg’s downtown district, and funded local leagues to get more young girls involved in football. The club’s “Statement of Fundamental Principles” begins, “St. Pauli FC is a part of the society by which it is surrounded and so is affected both directly and indirectly by social changes in the political, cultural and social spheres . . . St. Pauli FC is conscious of the social responsibility this implies, and represents the interests of its members, staff, fans and honorary officers in matters not just restricted to the sphere of sport.” A large mural in the team’s stadium reads, “No Football for Fascists.”
It’s not likely that any American teams will recreate St. Pauli’s organic countercultural ethos, but all American teams have something to learn from the club’s vocal antifascist activism. As St. Pauli’s owners know, merely withholding support for fascism—a seemingly low bar that even some American teams nevertheless fail to meet—will not stop fascists’ rise to power. In the wake of Wednesday’s violence, leagues, teams, and fans need to embrace antifascism as not only an ideal but also a practice.
What does this practice look like? For one, leagues shouldn’t ban antifascist symbols and expressions at games, as the MLS did in August of 2019 when fans of the Seattle Timbers began flying Iron Front flags during games. In the short term, it would mean applying both social and economic pressure on major sports figures who have supported the fascist attitudes displayed by the likes of Trump and his enablers. Loeffler, who for months aided and abetted Trump’s attempted coup before backing down Wednesday evening, should be compelled to sell her stake in the Dream. Fans, players, and coaches should demand accountability from team owners with deep financial interests in Trump—like the Patriots’ Robert Kraft, the Miami Dolphins’ Stephen Ross, the Dallas Cowboys’ Jerry Jones, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Robert Plummer, and the Houston Rockets’ Tilman Fertitta—and boycott these teams if they don’t denounce his actions. They should demand the same accountability from owners like the Detroit Pistons’ Tom Gores, who has made a fortune through a telecom business that price gouges the phone calls of the incarcerated people and their families.
In the longer term, teams should put their money and support behind openly antifascist causes. In the coming election cycle, entire organizations should publicly endorse candidates who challenge Trump’s supporters and donate generously to their campaigns. They should explicitly ban fans from displaying right-wing symbols like the Confederate flag and the Gadsden symbol at games and events, as the NCAA and NASCAR have already done. Ultimately, they should repudiate flag-drenched displays of militarism like flyovers and recruitment events that conflate patriotism with imperialist jingoism.
Of course, this is no small task. Building a real culture of antifascism in sports, like building a real culture of antiracism in sports, would require reinventing the way professional leagues function at a fundamental level. But Wednesday was proof that we have to try. While the left continues to squabble over the merits of incrementalism versus radicalism, and electoralism versus revolutionary action, America’s right wing has quietly radicalized a significant portion of the population, many of whom are now willing to kill and be killed for a failed real estate developer who they quite literally believe to be the second coming of Christ. No matter how many times President-Elect Biden insists that “this isn’t who we are,” Trump and his brownshirts are here to stay. As Wednesday made clear, there are crazier things in this world than athletes trying to get their owner tossed out of the Senate.
The needle is moving in the right direction. In the days since the attack on the Capitol, athletes, coaches, and even executives have begun to denounce the participants in Trump’s failed coup as racists, insurrectionists, and, in the immortal words of Golden State Warrior Draymond Green, “fucking terrorists.” The next step toward building a genuinely antifascist culture in sports would be for athletes and the leagues to call out Trump and his supporters for what they really are. And if anyone’s looking for a new slogan to plaster on jerseys and playing fields, we think our friends over in Hamburg have settled on a pretty good one: “No Sports for Fascists.”
RODNEY’S ROUNDUP
Do you want to read about . . .
. . . how an offensive line coach was so triggered by Stacey Abrams that he tweeted himself out of a job? “‘Hateful’ Tweet About Stacey Abrams Costs University Football Coach His Job” by Neil Vigdor in The New York Times (January 8, 2021).
. . . the Dream’s own insights into their campaign to oust Kelly Loeffler from her senate seat? “WNBA Players Just Showed Their Political Power” by Dave Zirin in The Nation (January 7, 2021).
. . . Loeffler’s future (or lack thereof) as a WNBA owner? “WNBA players helped oust Kelly Loeffler from the Senate. Will she last in the league?” by Candace Buckner in the Washington Post (January 7, 2021).
. . . why athletes understand the power of protest in a way that rioters do not? “Athletes know what rioters don’t: Real power is discipline, not unchecked rage” by Sally Jenkins in the Washington Post (January 8, 2021).