i just read an interesting piece by an old comrade and awesome researcher/writer: dania rajendra’s “go short”. it’s an extended analogy between the NFL and the Democratic Party, using a careful look at the history behind the belated shift towards the “passing game” in u.s. football as a lens to see the absence of any comparable strategic evolution in the electoral party. it’s worth reading, but to me its imaginative horizon – made very visible by what it carefully doesn’t say – is what’s most revealing.

the piece crisply explains the history of u.s. football and the monopolistic organization that controls it, going into its direct and explicit connections to militarism, white supremacy, and misogyny, but staying concretely anchored in the destruction of human bodies that is inextricable from the sport’s structure, and focusing on the various rounds of ‘reform’ that have incrementally lessened its immediate harms (centered, from teddy roosevelt’s 1906 rule-change to this century’s un-legislated shift in dominant strategy, on replacing running the ball with throwing it). it nods to the parallels with the monopolistic organization that controls the electoral liberal and left spheres, clearly naming its structural function of “stomping out challenges to the status quo”, but going into far less detail about how this inextricable counterinsurgency function operates.

doing that would, very plainly, give away the game. it would open questions that the piece quite openly excludes as it frames its intent: to extract from contemporary NFL football “lessons for American leftists interested in trying to advance strategies that could win a new feature of the only opposition party we have”.