Musings on Soccer and Progressive Elitism

The U.S. national women’s soccer team has qualified for the World Cup final match, as expected. It is interesting that women’s soccer is dominated by a team from a country that doesn’t really care much about soccer. Perhaps this teaches us something about the politicized nature of women and “women’s sports” in North America. I’m not sure what it teaches, to be honest, but I suppose it could be something to do with American women having been hardened and masculinized by feminist radicalism to a greater degree, at least proportionally, than their counterparts in Europe and Asia. That is certainly suggested by the anti-feminine behavior and outward imagery of the U.S. team’s most prominent players over the years, and by the team’s “mannishly” classless and unsportsmanlike humiliation of a weak opponent during this year’s World Cup.

Or perhaps their success is merely due to the fact that among team sports, most of the popular North American pastimes have proved largely ill-suited to the skills and body types of women, so North American women athletes have been forced to pursue their team sport glory in a realm that has little to recommend it to American sports fans — by which I mean sports fans who have retained something of the American spirit.

What do I mean by that last comment? In short, I regard soccer, in both its rules and its popular style of play, as the quintessential Euro-socialist sport. I wrote about this last year here in Limbo, if you are interested.


Speaking of Euro-socialists, progressive online trolls (professional and amateur) had a field day this week mocking a video from the G20 summit, featuring Ivanka Trump apparently being snubbed and looking awkward while trying to nudge her way into a conversation among Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron, Justin Trudeau, and IMF head Christine Lagarde. 

For American progressives to jump all over this “meme” as part of their anti-Trumpism is quite revealing, and likely to blow up in their faces. For the suggestion is that Ivanka Trump, at the summit with her father as an accredited presidential advisor, has no right to think herself worthy to join a conversation among real world leaders. And this implicit premise embodies everything that “ordinary Americans” understandably despise about the progressive elite, today’s global political establishment. 

“Oh, my god,” laugh the online commenters, “look at the blonde nobody thinking she belongs in the same conversation with these important people.” 

“Ha! The look on Christine Lagarde’s face says it all!”

I thought America was founded on the principle that no one is above the people, that the leaders come from the people, and therefore that in theory no leader, merely by having achieved (temporary) political power, thereby becomes essentially superior in worth or human status to any citizen without such power. 

In short, who the hell are Macron, May, Trudeau, and Lagarde? What makes them so elevated in humanity that no mere presidential advisor should dare to think herself worthy to insinuate herself into their exalted discussion? The idea that these people are somehow “more important” than an unelected American government representative is utterly anti-republican in its presuppositions. Trump’s rise to power was partly a reaction against precisely this kind of profoundly un-American view of an untouchable “ruling class” that need not deign to be interrupted in its champagne scheming by the little people.

As for the elitists in question themselves:

Macron is a phony little progressive compromiser whose great presidential achievement so far was putting public piss-pot planters all over Paris, in a ludicrous effort to discourage Frenchmen from peeing all over the streets of the capital. 

May is a failed British Tory in the “moderate” anti-Thatcher mold, an empty shell who has lost the confidence of her own party and population, and accomplished nothing but to encourage the rise of populist nationalism, progressive radicalism, and anti-Western Islamism in her nation.

Trudeau is a laughingstock of a fop, an Ivanka-style rider of his daddy’s coattails in his own right, whose most important achievement, apart from further normalizing the most extreme neo-Marxist “equality” sensibilities in Canadian politics, has been to legalize and quasi-nationalize recreational drug use, thus ensuring that Canada’s population will remain docile and compliant with progressive soft despotism forever and ever, since it is now the State itself, à la Brave New World, that regulates and controls the distribution of soma.

Lagarde is, well, a snobbish global administrative state elitist.

By the way, I also notice that Lagarde tweeted this today:

Oops, another progressive meme bites the dust — but not before revealing the tone-deafness of the American left, all too eager to treat global politicians as superior beings merely as a cheap excuse to belittle a Trump. As if the Trumps don’t afford us all plenty of opportunities for criticism that do not require us to demean ourselves before progressive elitists.

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