Larsson läser
Janerik Larsson
Janerik Larsson
Peter Beinart skriver i The Atlantic om varför det är bra att USA nu omfamnar fotboll (kallas soccer i USA). Han gör det mot bakgrund av en attack mot att fotbolls-VM blivit populärt i USA. Attacker kommer från en av USAs mest kända högerradikala skribenter Ann Coulter vars argument mot fotboll är dessa:
First, it’s collectivist. (“Individual achievement is not a big factor…blame is dispersed.”) Second, it’s effeminate. (“It’s a sport in which athletic talent finds so little expression that girls can play with boys.”) Third, it’s culturally elitist. (“The same people trying to push soccer on Americans are the ones demanding that we love HBO’s “Girls,” light-rail, Beyoncé and Hillary Clinton.”) Fourth, and most importantly, “It’s foreign…Soccer is like the metric system, which liberals also adore because it’s European.” Soccer hatred, in other words, exemplifies American exceptionalism.
Beinart drar denna slutsats:
Embracing soccer means embracing America’s role as merely one nation among many, without special privileges. It’s no coincidence that young Americans, in addition to liking soccer, also like the United Nations. In 2013, Pew found that Americans under 30 were 24 points more favorable to the U.N. than Americans over 50. According to a 2011 Pew poll, Millennials were also 23 points more likely than the elderly to say America should take its allies’ opinion into account even if means compromising our desires.
Coulter would find this deeply un-American. But it’s a healthy response to a world that America is both less able to withdraw from, and less able to dominate, than it was in the past. In embracing soccer, Americans are learning to take something we neither invented nor control, and nonetheless make it our own. It’s a skill we’re going to need in the years to come.