Soccer is a terrible game. And conservatives are terrible people.

Soccer is a terrible game. And conservatives are terrible people. What does the one have to do with the other? Not much, really, except that as the FIFA World Cup Tournament progresses in Qatar, words like “soccer” and “conservative” remind us again of just how clouded the American worldview really is.

I should define some terms. By “soccer” I mean, of course, what the rest of the world calls “football.” And by “conservatives” I mean what the rest of the world calls “American conservatives.”  I was born and raised in the USA, so naturally my worldview is colored by my native country’s self-perception that it’s the greatest thing since, well, soccer. It’s what the rest of the world calls “American Exceptionalism.” But I’ve spent a large part of my life living outside the United States, and so for decades I’ve tried hard to remove my distorted American lenses and see the world as it really is. But those lenses don’t come off easily.

In the summer of 2014, as the FIFA World Cup tournament kicked off in Brazil, the right-wing American pundit Anne Coulter penned an op-ed that outlined her distaste for the game of “soccer.” She raged against its shortcomings. It’s boring. There’s not enough scoring. It isn’t manly enough. But mostly, she didn’t like soccer because it wasn’t “American” enough. Football is so much better, Coulter argued. She meant American football, of course. Most of my foreign friends disagreed. They’d ask me, “Why do you want to watch a bunch of commercials, occasionally interrupted by scenes of men standing around, talking about playing a football game? Or being carted off the field on a stretcher?” Coulter had a point about the scoring. But my foreign friends had a point as well. Americans are too used to having their sports delivered in bite-sized chunks, wedged between thick slabs of advertising. It’s possible that soccer isn’t as popular in the USA as it is elsewhere because it can’t be commercialized enough. Can anyone imagine a soccer match being interrupted every four minutes for a TV timeout, like US college basketball is?

When Coulter wrote her op-ed in 2014, the coach of the US men's national soccer team was a guy named Jürgen Klinsmann. When I lived in Stuttgart Germany in the 1980s, Klinsmann was the hometown hero and star of Stuttgart’s biggest team, Vfb. He’d done amazing things on the pitch, and my introduction to the game came by watching Klinsmann’s on-field heroics. Early on during my introduction my girlfriend, a graduate student at the University of Tübingen, invited me over to eat some quark and to watch an important Fussball match. (What is “quark” anyway?) She’d spent a year studying in Colorado, and she was painfully aware of American’s woeful lack of knowledge about the Beautiful Game, but she wasn’t quite prepared for the depths of my ignorance. I kept peppering her with annoying questions. (“Why is the clock counting up instead of down?” “Why doesn’t it stop when the ball goes out of bounds?”) After 90+ minutes of exciting nil-nil action (“null-null” to the Germans) the match went into overtime. “How much time is left now?” I wanted to know. My girlfriend patiently explained how overtime worked. “You mean, I have to take 90, add 15, and subtract the number on the screen so I can figure out how much time’s left? That’s too much bother,” I told her. I could tell that she was getting very annoyed.

Eventually the home team scored, and I thought that the game was over. Sudden death, I supposed. But the game continued, in accordance with the rules, and before the end of overtime the home team committed a foul in front of its own goal. The other team was awarded a penalty kick. “He gets a free kick from there?” I asked my girlfriend. “That’s like giving him 50 free throws!” She grew more annoyed. The free kick was successful, overtime expired, and another expired, and then the important match was decided with a shootout. “That’s like ending a basketball game by playing HORSE!” I protested, and then I tried to explain how the game of HORSE was played with a basketball. My girlfriend wasn’t having any of it. “Shut up and watch,” she said.

We broke up not long after that, and I took up with a Canadian girl who was studying at the University of Freiburg. Eventually we married and moved to Montreal, and we became good friends with a couple across the street. She’s a liberal. A Canadian liberal. He’s a conservative. A Canadian conservative. He coaches soccer. They rarely argue about politics because they agree on most issues. He doesn’t like Justin Trudeau, but he’s proud of Canada’s health care system and its social safety net. He despises Donald Trump, and it mystifies him how the man who caused the January 6^th insurrection could ever be called a great president. He thinks that abortion should be legal, and that gay people should be free to marry. He has a gun, but it’s been rusting in his basement for 20 years. My neighbor can’t imagine how anyone could keep a gun in the house for “protection.” He’s disgusted by American gun culture and the bloodbath that it’s causing. He doesn’t understand it. None of my conservative friends understand it. But none of them are American conservatives.

A couple of years after the 2014 World Cup, the Americans fired Jürgen Klinsmann. His team was terrible. I didn’t care. I’ve tried, but I’ve never managed to wrap my American brain around the game of soccer. Its rules are too flawed, I decided, and so for me, that makes it a terrible game. Maybe Anne Coulter was right, I've thought, but then comes the follow-on thought that agreeing with Anne Coulter about anything is positively frightening. Now, as another World Cup plays out, visiting nations are protesting against human rights abuses in Qatar. Brave souls are fighting for democratic freedoms in China, Iran, and Ukraine. At the same time, American conservatives are headed in the opposite direction. They’re fighting to diminish democratic freedoms and human rights at home. At least 170 election-denying Republicans will serve in the US Congress in 2023. None of my foreign friends can understand it. That, they tell me, is what makes American conservatives terrible people.  Maybe they’re right, too.

Now I have to turn my thesis on its head. Soccer isn't really a terrible game. Of course it isn't. Playing it well requires grace and stamina, and at its best it really is a beautiful game, even if the rules are a bit arcane. A few tweaks might make it more palatable to Americans, but that's our problem. And naturally, not all American conservatives are terrible people, even if a disconcertingly large number of them are these days. The difference is that a few tweaks aren't going to make American-style conservatism palatable to the rest of the world, or even to sane American conservatives. They're in dire need of some serious soul searching, and even Anne Coulter seems to have recognized that. We can only hope that other American conservatives do, too.