Last week, Ross Douthat argued against the use of instant replay in baseball after the now-notorious not-perfect-perfect game. Douthat contends that it would somehow erode the sanctity of baseball, and I'm thinking of it today because the World Cup can become a proxy for all kinds of weird geopolitical issues. My blogmate at PostBourgie, G.D., writes:
But also, you may never read a better distillation of conservatism than this. Douthat thinks that giving managers a chance to revisit egregious bad calls will tug at one of the cosmic threads that binds baseball fans together: the misery of being on the losing end up of an important blown call. But as long as there are shaky relievers and other actual human beings playing baseball, there will always be plenty of opportunities for a team's fans to have their souls crushed in a big game. Douthat is calling on those conservative ideals — tradition and respect for authority, no matter how inept — that are always marshaled in response to calls for progressive change outside of sports. Never mind getting the calls right — which by the way, takes nothing off the table in a game that should have been on the table anyway — what concerns Douthat is that instant replay might raise fans' expectations of fairness. It's pretty telling.
That's true for any number of conservative positions on almost anything: same-sex marriage, a public option in health care and charter schools. I'd only add that this makes perfect sense, because men like Douthat benefit a great deal from these institutions. Douthat's personal abilities are almost incidental to his success and make almost no difference on the generally good outcome he could expect in his life, barring catastrophe. He was born into a world designed to give middle-class, white men like him just about everything they need to succeed. Someone born on the outside, however, needs extraordinary merit and wearwithall to break through. In that sense, fairness becomes much more important. So, I'm with G.D. on this. His views on baseball illustrated Douthat's conservatism better than any other topic on which he's written.
-- Monica Potts
