Soccer, the anti-American pastime

After taking that in, Mr. Zakaria observes that soccer fans in the United States look a lot like the Obama coalition. To which Beinart replied: “That’s exactly right, and if you look at the states where soccer is most popular, they’re overwhelmingly blue states and the states where soccer is least popular are red states.”

You see: Soccer is much more than a game that puts people like me to sleep. It’s a bunch of guys running up and down a “pitch” in short pants teaching us an important lesson — a lesson about how the tide is turning, about how the same people who embrace soccer embrace the idea that despite all the talk from those old right-wingers, America isn’t so special after all. Or as Peter Beinart explains it: “Younger people are far more likely than older people to say they like the United Nations. There’s a willingness to accept the idea that America is one of many nations. Yes, we have a special affinity for it. But it doesn’t mean in some objective sense [that] us, and everything we do are necessarily better.”

So there you have it. He grants us that as Americans we might have “a special affinity” for our homeland, but thanks to soccer we can learn a lot from the rest of the world. We can learn that we’re not as great as we think we are — or, more precisely, that we’re not as great as old, conservative, red-state Americans think we are.