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{"text":[[{"start":5.52,"text":"In the era of digital TV, Britain has shown the world two distinct faces. One is the twee, backward-looking nation of Downton Abbey and similar period dramas. This stuff sells well to credulous foreigners even as it infantilises us. The other is the Premier League. In this Britain, even medium-sized towns in conservative regions have multinational teams, and without second thoughts. No people could seem more at ease with the modern world, or with itself."}],[{"start":34.28,"text":"If the league were to decline, as the Italian Serie A did after its own scandal, Britain would lose the most attractive calling card that it has right now. And so last weekend was dark. “We cheat when we want”, sang some Manchester City fans, about their club’s financial wrongdoing. (It is challenging the verdict.) The Emirati proprietors were hailed, not disowned. While the scandal itself is survivable for the league, the raw tribalism might prove too much for some. It almost did for me. But it also shored up my view that team sport is much the best guide to modern politics."}],[{"start":68.72,"text":"For a decade now, smart (in fact, over-rational) commentators have attributed populism to the elites’ failures. And true, in the first instance, a banking crash or migrant surge might send voters into the arms of a Donald Trump. The question is what keeps them there. To someone who knows fandom from the inside, there is no mystery. Membership of the group becomes self-reinforcing, that’s all. The “emotional sunk cost”, as a friend puts it, is too hard to abandon. This is even truer in the internet age, as a person’s past political utterances are there on Facebook or WhatsApp. (“Suez? Invasion? Great idea”, lots of people said in 1956, and then pretended otherwise after the event.)"}],[{"start":null,"text":"
A banking crash or migrant surge might send voters into the arms of a Donald Trump. The question is what keeps them there
"}],[{"start":110.52,"text":"In other words, the initial motive for voting populist, though real at the time, becomes irrelevant. And still the best minds strive to answer it: with higher growth rates, with tighter borders. To them, politics is inputs and outputs. Govern better, and voters calm down. Fail to, and, well, look. This model of the world can’t account for the millions who turned to Trump after the Iraq-Afghanistan debacles and stick with him through his own expensive war of choice. Or the Nigel Farage voters who regard Brexit, his life’s work, as a mistake."}],[{"start":143.08,"text":"To understand them, it helps to have an irrational allegiance in your life: if not a sports team, then something. City fans were drawn to the club for a contingent reason: it was the local one, or the most stylish, or noble in its sufferings. After that, however, the fandom took wing on its own and the initial reason fell away. It is too much to expect someone to switch team if it started to play more crudely, or moved borough, or even became a ruthless state-sponsored machine. Yet people do a version of this in politics, striving to answer “very real concerns” that have long since ceased to be the point."}],[{"start":178.18,"text":"In recent weeks, some City fans have alternated between, one, claims of innocence, two, roguish indifference to guilt and, three, opposition to the rules themselves as an Arsenal-Liverpool-Manchester United stitch-up. (The “red cartel”.) Likewise, there are Trump and Farage fans for whom stories of corruption about their man are fake news, or true but unimportant, or true but proof of his manly defiance of a bad system. Whether this is confusion or bad faith, only a clever fool would treat these people as at all persuadable."}],[{"start":208.92,"text":"In certain social experiments, researchers sort people according to nothing more substantial than which food or expressionist painter they like. Once labelled as such, each group shows intense fraternity and mistrust of outsiders, as though they had stormed Juno Beach together. This “minimal group paradigm” explores how little it takes for human beings to form tribes."}],[{"start":229.04,"text":"But arguing against any hard-wired trait is futile. Save the blame for those who deny it: who, a decade after populism broke through, still think it is all about negotiable grievances. For lots of voters, it isn’t. They have chosen their team. The mental block, I think, is that intellectuals cannot believe the species is really as odd as this. And yet."}],[{"start":255.24,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1792219395_6891.mp3"}