The debate, ostensibly tactical, is largely split down ideological lines. Hewing closely to public opinion are Democratic moderates; those looking for a more expansive political vision are to their left. How Democrats respond in 2028 will largely depend on which of these sides wins out. And having a response that works, having one that maximizes the chance that the Democratic nominee beats the Republican nominee, is obviously the most important question. I think saying things that most Americans agree with is the better way to win. I think the data backs that up. 

But there’s also a deeper point, not just about the immediacies of American politics but the way democracies work more generally. If politics was about performing and persuading, the people wouldn’t really be in charge! We talk about political theater, but politics would be literal theater under the persuasion model. Voters would be members of the audience, clapping and cheering for the best performances but lacking the ability to change the course of the show. We’d have a society ruled by the most persuasive actor, or, worse, by the slickest used-car salesman.

That might seem possible in the age of Donald Trump. But it just doesn’t match the history of the past decade. He won in 2016 because, yes, people liked him more than Hillary Clinton. But they liked him because he moved right on immigration and left on entitlements, and Hillary Clinton ran to the left of Obama. In 2020, Joe Biden didn’t have a charisma advantage over Trump — the economy was tanking and people were tired of Trump’s chaos. In 2024, Trump won again after Biden had governed from the left on immigration and presided over a period of high inflation. To me, it seems like political life is dominated less by master manipulators than by the set of ideas Americans have about immigration and the economy. 

That political parties are beholden to the tyranny of public opinion isn’t a bad thing — it’s something to be optimistic about. Donald Trump doesn’t have some kind of black magic that makes him invincible. Democrats won’t need a once-in-a-lifetime, transcendently charismatic visionary. They can win again by saying things that more people believe in.

If the dominance of popular beliefs is then both an obvious byproduct of living in a democracy and something that those who oppose the current president should be happy about, why are certain left-leaning commentators — including those who have written in favor of “majoritarianism” — so opposed to it? The best answer is that those who adopt the persuasion model do so because they have policy preferences out of line with the majority of Americans. And so they take up ideas about how people are being misled about their self-interest. Instead of realizing their shared interests, the masses are plagued by false consciousness. This is the move that Marxists like Lukacs and Gramsci turned to when it became clear that the working classes of the world didn’t want to rise up in unison. If you define your politics as doing what is good for the many, but the many turn out not to like you very much, it’s easier to conclude that the masses have been misled by your evil opponents than it is to abandon all of your ideas about the world. It’s what you turn to when you’re losing and out of ideas.

Still, theories like this are made plausible by the slightly counterintuitive beliefs of the American people. Non-college voters, generally poorer than average, are less likely to back redistributive economic policies than the educated, upper-middle-class professionals on the other side of that redistribution. A multiracial, working-class coalition voted for the candidate who stripped poor Americans of their health coverage. It doesn’t feel like people are rationally pursuing their self-interest. And I don’t want to say that this idea is totally wrong. People form their beliefs about what’s best for them in the context of the news they consume. Media companies need to turn a profit, and stories about chaos on the border and migrant invasions get more eyeballs than ones about how the vast majority of undocumented immigrants work full-time and pay taxes. Certain right-wing social media tycoons boost some kinds of ideological content and not others. I’m happy to concede that.

But let’s assume the strongest version of this theory is true. Americans are pro-immigration socialists brainwashed by the capitalist media into believing that a better world is not possible and that migrants are the source of their problems. Even if this was the case, and it’s not, what do you plan to do about it? The people believe what they believe. Why would someone who runs on a platform of trying to convince people to believe something else outperform one who runs closer to what people actually think? It doesn’t make intuitive sense. 

There are indeed times when long-term, successful campaigns changed public opinion. But that’s exactly how public opinion changes: through long-term campaigns of persuasion, usually outside of government. Politics has a different function, and muddying the distinction between it and activism makes the job of winning elections much harder. 

Abraham Lincoln once told a crowd in Columbus, Ohio that “public opinion in this country is everything.” Jamelle Bouie himself recently wrote in reference to right-wing ideas about indoctrination on college campuses that people “come to certain conclusions about the world based on their experience of it.” I would encourage the Democratic Party to recognize that — and act accordingly.

TEDDY WITT is a first year in Berkeley College. His biweekly column “The American Crisis” explores history, politics and current events in America and at Yale. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu.   

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But for all of the “Yale: Respect New Haven” signs, it’s not Yale that disrespects the city. The University now gives New Haven a substantial amount of money, $135 million over the current six-year period. And for all the uproar about the size of the endowment, running the University is expensive; and furthering knowledge — improving the world through “outstanding research and scholarship,” as Yale’s mission statement reads — is valuable. Most Yale students should appreciate that, given that, after all, they’re at Yale. 

There’s a concept — completely unrelated to Yale —  that my uncle likes to talk about. Rage, especially that of the young and idealistic, is proximate. When there’s an injustice in the world people often get mad at what’s close to them and not what’s really to blame. Yale students upset about Israel’s conduct in Gaza get mad at Yale; Yale students upset about climate change get mad at Yale; Yale students upset about New Haven get mad at Yale.

You can see this dynamic in the Yale-New Haven relationship. Yale is simply not the cause of poverty in New Haven. That would be the decline of industrial manufacturing, a phenomenon that devastated many cities in Connecticut: Waterbury, Danbury, Bridgeport, Hartford. Waterbury was the “Brass City,” the center of America’s brass industry. Danbury was the “Hat City,” the home of mad hatter’s disease due to the immense amounts of mercury used in production. New Haven made guns — a touch ironic since the proponents of arms divestment at the University are campaigning against the industry that once created New Haven’s middle class. But the Winchester Repeating Arms factory, now an apartment building in Yale’s rapidly expanding Science Park, closed in 1980. Another manufacturer, Marlin Firearms, shrank its business and shut down its North Haven plant in 2011.

The city’s plight, starting with the loss of the industrial base, was compounded by a demographic shift that accompanied deindustrialization. The white middle class, in large part built by factory jobs, left as soon as the factories disappeared and continued to leave through the 1990s. New Haven was left with Yale as its primary employer. Waterbury and Bridgeport were left with less. The result is that Connecticut is a state with very rich suburbs and very poor cities. If you look just a short drive down I-95, you’ll find vaster riches by far than you would at Yale: the five wealthiest men in Greenwich and Darien have more than $60 billion between them. Immense wealth in Fairfield County doesn’t have to face the same scrutiny Yale’s endowment does because it moved far enough away. And stopping there would itself be a kind of proximate rage. Why not blame the mismanaged globalization of American industry writ large? It doesn’t make sense to reward people for abandoning struggling cities and punish the institutions that stayed.

I can think of a couple of reasons for protesting Yale specifically. Of the powerful and rich institutions in Connecticut, Yale is a highly visible one. More importantly, Yale is willing to cave to student demands. Why aren’t more Yale students protesting the Sikorsky plant just off the Merritt Parkway, which manufactures and supports helicopters destined for Gaza? Probably because Sikorsky would call the cops and not bother negotiating like they did in 1972 when hundreds of Yale student protestors — alongside Noam Chomsky! — descended on the facility. 

If you believe that Israel is committing genocide, Sikorsky is much more directly implicated than Yale is. Students target the University because (a) it looms largest in their minds; and (b) because it’s to some degree willing to tolerate encampments. This is another kind of proximate rage: rage at the people who are friendliest to you. That’s why there were more pro-Gaza protests at the DNC than the RNC. When activists cause headaches for Kamala Harris but not Donald Trump, does that make Democratic leadership more likely to bend to protestors or more likely to shun them? Did Trump’s election benefit Palestinians? The president now says wants to “buy and own” the Gaza strip and expel its residents en masse, so it would appear that the answer is “no.”

That doesn’t mean that the University is perfect or blameless. Yale’s influence over the Broadway/Elm commercial area — the “Shops at Yale”— is probably not great for New Haven. It’s a problem for the city that so much central real estate is owned by a tax-exempt nonprofit. 

Without Yale, though, I’m not sure the generated tax revenue would be more than New Haven gets from Yale and from Hartford’s PILOT funding. Bridgeport, which is slightly larger than New Haven and not dominated by a nonprofit corporation, pulls in less property tax revenue than our city does. 

A better way to help support New Haven’s schools and most vulnerable people might be something like Mayor Justin Elicker’s proposed tax on towns that fail to meet the state’s affordable housing target. I wouldn’t call it a “segregation tax” — that formulation came out of a 2020 political moment that has long passed — but a way of sharing the responsibility for teaching and housing Connecticuters. Better still would be a national share-the-responsibility tax. There’s no reason to keep America’s costs proximate.

TEDDY WITT is a first year in Berkeley College. His biweekly column “The American Crisis” explores history, politics and current events in America and at Yale. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu.  

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This could be illegal. Congress has appropriated money to be used on the program; the president isn’t allowed to unilaterally cut spending. Nor are untrained, uncleared, temporary government employees allowed access to closely guarded national security information.

It’s also morally unacceptable. Trump’s order for a 90-day pause in foreign aid has irreparably damaged PEPFAR — the organization that, for pennies on the American taxpayer’s dollar, saves the lives of hundreds of thousands of HIV-positive mothers and their babies. We, residents of the richest country in the history of the world, have an obligation to help the sick and destitute, even if they’re thousands of miles away.

But providing foreign aid to countries that need it isn’t just an ethical duty. It’s central to the way America engages with the rest of the world. And it’s central to the way that we project power and goodwill. That creates a bit of a dilemma for the program’s supporters. You only have limited time and resources to fight against the Trump administration. Do you focus on the illegality of the order, hoping that the American public still believes in process? Do you try to generate public backlash by appealing to the shutdown’s immorality? Or do you appeal to national self-interest, by explaining the strategic case for continued aid?

I think the last of those three options is the most effective. And the idea that the best way to persuade is to align with people’s interests, even in situations where there is a greater moral obligation, isn’t a new one. A 2,400-year-old example of this comes from Thucydides’s “History of the Peloponnesian Wars.” 

When the Athenians captured Mytilene, a rebellious city on the island of Lesbos, they were left with the question of what to do with its inhabitants. In the first debate, the Athenian assembly voted to execute every adult male and enslave the rest of the population. They were quickly filled with remorse, though and so held a second meeting to decide whether the initial order should be recalled.

Diodotus, speaking after Cleon, is the one who argues against the mass killings. He tells the audience that they must act in their own interests, regardless of the guilt of the Mytilenians. They’re a political assembly, not a court of law. The case Diodotus makes is completely strategic and hard-headed — but he hints at being against the massacre on ethical grounds. One of his arguments is broadly applicable: to preserve international power, it is better to “voluntarily put up with injustice” done against you on this small scale than it is to “justly” massacre the offenders. In preserving American hegemony, it’s better to let a couple dollars slip through the cracks than it is to put vast swathes of the planet at risk of sickness and death.

Like Cleon, the Trump administration is making a serious strategic mistake. China’s Belt and Road builds infrastructure quickly but saddles countries with vast debts. USAID allows us to build goodwill over longer periods of time. That means a stable flow of aid is crucial — and stability is exactly what Trump and Elon are disrupting. We’re already picking fights with Canada, Mexico, Panama and Denmark. We don’t need much of sub-Saharan Africa, South America and Southeast Asia to see us as unreliable allies as well. For all of the new administration’s Monroe Doctrine bona fides, his new foreign policy would stop an anti-coca production program in Peru and already seems to be turning Latin American leaders away from the United States.

It’s not just about keeping other countries friendly. Richer countries with working populations and secure political institutions are more likely to be viable locations for U.S. commercial expansion. A steadier, more interconnected world will be a safer place for our interests. In September 2024, U.S.A.I.D. signed a $600 million agreement with the African Development Bank to strengthen the Sahel, the site of recent military coups by Russian mercenaries and the new home of the Islamic State, or ISIS. Now the web page for U.S.A.I.D.’s West African projects is down, and the road ahead for the Sahel will be even more treacherous. But of course, precarious regions with anti-American governments have never been sanctuaries for international terrorism before. 

Diodotus ends his speech by saying that those who act with wisdom are “more formidable to their enemies than those who rush madly into strong action.” We’re lacking that wisdom in Washington right now.

TEDDY WITT is a first year in Berkeley College. His biweekly column “The American Crisis” explores history, politics and current events in America and at Yale. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu. 

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Ganz wrote in The Nation that Trump’s core appeal is “gangster Gemeinschaft.” Gemeinschaft is a German word that roughly translates to “community” — as opposed to Gesellschaft, or civil society. While Democrats scold and preach from above, the GOP offers the perverse “warmth” of belonging to something like a criminal organization. This mobbed-up version of the Republican Party, bred in the petri dish of 1980’s New York real estate, isn’t exactly welcoming. But it has a story to tell about itself. You can be one of us. You might not be a “made man,” as Ganz writes; it won’t always be pretty; and the guys on top will keep all the money. But Trump isn’t hiding anything. He invites you into the “clubhouse where the deals go down,” as Ganz puts it, or “the room where it happens” if you prefer “Hamilton.” It works because the alternative is, to many, even less appealing.

If Trump’s party is the force of Gemeinschaft in the United States, the Democrats are the instrument of American Gesellschaft. Civil society — nonprofits, writers, academia — lines up almost entirely behind the party of technocratic rationality. Democrats trust the science. They write better policy papers. They govern better. Yet only 35 percent of voters believe the Democratic Party is “in touch,” according to recent polling by the Progressive Policy Institute. That number represents an absolute failure to connect with Americans of all stripes. Kamala & Co. would be well served by appealing to a Gemeinschaft of their own.

It seems like the central problem of American politics is to create belonging apart from Trumpworld’s reactionary clown show and to harness the power of liberal policy-making without the accompanying atomization and sterility. How do you get the virtues of both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft? How do you encourage people to feel a sense of local belonging while living in a vast and plural society? David Brooks wrote recently about the importance of civic and moral education. Another answer might be a new approach to American history, as I wrote in November. 

It’s also possible that the answer lies close to home, on college campuses like Yale’s. Thousands of strangers are brought to New Haven every year by the vaguely meritocratic admissions machine. The college admissions process is about as atomizing as it gets. But these thousands soon develop close, heartfelt relationships and a collective identity — just by living and learning alongside each other. Americans spend increasing amounts of time in our increasingly comfortable homes and invite fewer and fewer friends over. We’re getting physically farther from each other, helped out by regulation that makes it hard or even impossible to build dense housing. Fixing our zoning codes and bringing Americans back together might facilitate the kind of socialization possible in dorms and once widely available on front porches, stoops and balconies across the country.

Trump’s gangster Gemeinschaft is only appealing in the absence of other, more powerful forms of belonging. Many readers will know “Bowling Alone,” Robert Putnam’s investigation of the declining social institutions of 20th-century America. His thesis was that Americans were watching more television and participating less in communal activities like local bowling leagues. But since the book’s publication in 2000, we’ve stopped bowling entirely. Derek Thompson writes in a piece for The Atlantic that American kids hang out with each other far less than previous generations, that restaurants across the country are closing their bars because adults prefer takeout, and that we simply spend less and less time talking face-to-face — a trend that, interestingly, especially devastates the young, the poor and the uneducated. We don’t have a culture that places a premium on togetherness. If that could change, through government investment in public spaces or hard age limits on social media, mafia-don politics wouldn’t have the same draw. Americans might find themselves instead drawn to humanity’s traditional sources of community: friends and family, neighbors and colleagues.

Those last two solutions are top-down interventions — but we’ll also need to convince people from the bottom up. The classic stoner movie “The Big Lebowski” has a line that I think is telling. Sitting at the bar in a bowling alley, Vietnam veteran Walter decries the German nihilists hunting the Dude: “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it’s an ethos.” Say what you want about MAGA, but at least it’s an ethos. A political movement needs a story to tell about itself and the one Kamala Harris told wasn’t particularly moving. Winning back the seats of power in Washington will require a story that appeals to ordinary Americans — and, above all, an ethos.

TEDDY WITT is a first year in Berkeley College. His biweekly column “The American Crisis” explores history, politics and current events in America and at Yale. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu. 

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We live in a country that has lost its civic religion. America has always been very different things to very different people. There was famously a civil war about that. But in the past 150 years, I’m not sure that there’s been more confusion and uncertainty about our national identity than there is now. The country is locked in a struggle over what the word America means. 

One side of that struggle has, if not a civic religion, a particular idea about what this nation has been and what it should be. It’s an illiberal, Old World, blood-and-soil vision for America, replete with mass deportations and an end to birthright citizenship. With Donald Trump’s reascension to the imperial presidency, that’s the country we could become. 

But I think there’s a hollowness at the center of that story of America. I don’t think it’s the most persuasive story, and I don’t think that’s the story most people want to accept. There is a story to tell about our country that is neither pessimistic nor triumphalist and that speaks to the legitimate uncertainties of American life. This narrative evokes the great collective projects of our country’s history. It tells the story of America from the revolution itself through Jacksonian democracy, the Civil War, the New Deal, World War II and the fight against segregation. It also speaks to the future of our national commitments. In this respect, Trump’s Quantum Leap plan to build ten new cities on federal land and restore the America of “big dreams and daring projects” is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing. National service requirements for high school or college graduates is another option. The goal is to help people develop a sense of collective purpose, a sense that they live in a community that cares about them and that they have a responsibility to.

America has long tended towards the Eternal City. There is an important Christian tradition in this country, from the Puritans of early New England to the modern Evangelical movement. Nor does the American obsession with the individual and with the sanctity of private life lend itself to public religion. This almost anti-political drive for purity is apparent on both sides of our great divide. On the left, there’s the activist wing of the Democratic Party that repudiates America — and compromise — entirely. Kamala Harris’s campaign avoided the anti-political style this cycle, but some part of her loss comes down to the Democrats’ association with the excesses of the left. This school of thought is about as old as the country itself. William Lloyd Garrison famously denounced the American project from the heights of the Eternal City. It was other abolitionists, like Gerrit Smith and Frederick Douglass, whose earthly politics were ultimately vindicated by the events leading up to the Civil War. 

The right is also afflicted — or maybe blessed? — with devotees to the City of God. The Tea Party movement was evidence enough of that. Marjorie Taylor Greene certainly wouldn’t have won Augustine’s praise, but she is adamant about preserving her own purity over earthly political victories. Her church is just the House Freedom Caucus, and its first commandment is “Thou shalt not RINO.”

These distinctively American strands of purity politics and veneration of the private are the biggest obstacles to civic religion in the United States. Our nation’s fiery impatience, only fanned by the 24-hour news cycle and social media’s instant updates, is another barrier. Reviving a country’s collective spirit is furthermore not something that will reverse the depressingly addictive trend towards gambling and drugs and doomscrolling. But I do think that it could have near-immediate electoral effects. The national mood is every four years altered by several million people in swing states who aren’t really sure what they want. Averting an illiberal future for our country means convincing a few extra people in Pennsylvania with a bigger and more persuasive vision of America. 

America is an idea — but it’s an idea you can see all around you. A month before we read “City of God” in class, we read the Funeral Oration from Thucydides’s “History of the Peloponnesian War.” In it, Pericles demands that his fellow Athenians lovingly gaze upon the “greatness” of their democratic city. There’s a national religion that could shift the long-term window of American possibility. Abraham Lincoln originally proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving to both “heal the wounds of the nation” and rejoice in our “fruitful fields and healthful skies.” Let this Thursday serve as a rededication to those collective blessings.

TEDDY WITT is a first year in Berkeley College. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu. 

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A few days after Della Volpe’s opinion came out, I went canvassing for Kamala Harris in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. One conversation I had there suggested a different story. I talked to a guy in his early twenties who was a long-haul trucker — at least, was one until diesel prices forced him out at their peak in 2022. Nevertheless, he had found a good job since, had a restored Corvette in the driveway and generally seemed to be thriving. He was also planning to vote for Donald Trump. If my canvassee was not lonely, depressed or uncertain, what could motivate that choice? Moving past the latent condescension there — “my political opponents must be mentally unstable” — the answer was that he thought Kamala Harris was weak on the world stage and at home and that weakness was more compromising than any of Donald Trump’s defects. 

That’s obviously anecdotal evidence, but I think it bears out a truth in our politics: Republicans are seen as the party of strength and Democrats as the party of weakness. That’s importantly untrue on foreign policy. The Biden administration has been strong on Ukraine; it’s Trump who cravenly appeases foreign dictators. But in many ways it’s the driving ethos of the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of people who need help: old people who need Medicare and Social Security, poor people who need Medicaid and SNAP benefits, DREAMers, women who need the freedom to make their own healthcare choices.

The GOP presents itself as the party of masculinity and strength. To some degree, that’s been the case since Richard Nixon ran on “law and order” in 1968. But there’s been a shift in the past several years. The Republican Party, in the name of projecting strength, has increasingly embraced outright cruelty. You can see it on the border, on foreign affairs and in the latest news cycle: Tony Hinchcliffe’s disastrous set at a Trump rally in which he seemingly thrilled at mocking as many electorally important ethnic groups as he could.

Some of that might stem from Donald Trump’s character and the departure from political norms that he represented. Trump isn’t actually like the tough guy from an old Western; he breaks his oaths, lies constantly, and cravenly hides from all responsibility. Instead, he papers over his own faults with bluster and vitriol and an incredible talent for getting away with things. For the Republican Party, those Trumpian idiosyncrasies mean a kind of political tradeoff. The GOP chose to prioritize the votes of young men, who are largely attracted to that kind of masculinity, over the votes of suburbanites — who shifted blue after 2016 and have remained largely Democratic despite several years of high inflation. And it isn’t news that young men are attracted to the kinds of aggression that Trump and JD Vance LAW ’13 represent. One of my takeaways from reading the Iliad this semester was that young men have reveled in having power over others for thousands of years. What’s changed is that fact is now an electoral strategy.

The Democratic Party is partly going to have to put up with the loss of young men. Its opposition invested political capital in courting those votes; it is just going to be more expensive to get them back. Every minute Kamala Harris spends talking about the “Generation Z Compact to Rebuild and Renew America,” as Della Volpe writes she should, is a minute she could be winning over voters more naturally inclined to vote for her.

On another level, though, Democratic messaging towards young men is hilariously bad — and relatively easy fixes could have an impact. Tim Walz’s favorability has declined since its mid-August peak, and his rollout as the icon of progressive masculinity has mostly failed. Part of that failure is his terrible social media outreach. One recent tweet referred to a “final quarter” comeback. People who watch football — unlike the staffer who was Walz’s Twitter login — know that it’s called the fourth quarter. That’s not a major mistake, but it immediately conveys to the target audience that Walz, or at least his social media team, doesn’t speak the language. It discredits Walz’s “man’s man” persona. And Republicans notice. Tommy Tuberville, the senior Senator from Alabama and former Bama football coach, quote tweeted Walz, saying “we call it the 4th Quarter, ‘Coach’.” Young men don’t vote for Trump because Walz is lame online. They don’t vote for Trump because the boxer Dave Bautista makes corny, long-winded Jimmy Kimmel appearances about him. But it doesn’t help, and all the Harris campaign would have to do is hire a couple of interns who spend their Sundays watching RedZone.

The right-wing shift of young men isn’t reducible to depression, anxiety and loneliness. The consensus that self-confidence is the central cause is a little infantilizing. It’s also not a useful one for people trying to reverse that shift. Male Trump supporters vote for him because they like the aggressive strength he aims at. They’re wrong, but they don’t do it because they’re deeply troubled people.

TEDDY WITT is a first year in Berkeley College. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu.

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Just a month before the World Series starts, the A’s — who spent only $53 million on their roster this year — played one final game at their home stadium, the Coliseum. That’s because their owner, John Fisher, lured by the prospect of new sports-betting-fueled markets, doesn’t want the Oakland A’s to be the Oakland A’s anymore. He wants to move the team to Las Vegas after a multi-year layover in Sacramento. Putting aside the fact that Fisher’s plan is poorly conceived — there is no stadium in Vegas to move to, the A’s will be playing in a minor-league stadium until there is and the Nevada media market is significantly smaller than Oakland’s — the move is bad for baseball. The A’s will leave behind a fanbase that, while embittered by 19 years of non-investment, remains loyal to the team. They also leave behind a storied history and some of the most celebrated players and characters in baseball, like Rickey Henderson, Reggie Jackson, Dennis Eckersley and Vida Blue.

It’s not as if Fisher is a small-market underdog suffering at the hands of rich teams like the aforementioned Yankees and Dodgers. He’s worth $3.1 billion dollars, twice as much as Yankees owner Hal Steinbrenner. Fisher could field competitive teams if he wanted to — but he doesn’t. He wants to run the Oakland A’s to maximize his own profits, the way he’d run any other corporation. If there’s money to be made in relocating operations, Fisher will do so. He’s not a terrible person. He’s just following the logic of profit. In fact, it would be naïve to expect anything else from the proprietor of an  enterprise worth more than a billion dollars.

The issue is that sports occupy a different place in society than IBM or PepsiCo do. Sports are about the emotional connection between team and fan, about the stories that come from superhuman performances, perennial losers finally winning the World Series or from a late-career resurgence. 

It’s currently the case that the owners have all the power over their franchises, but there’s no reason to think that has to be the case. Major League Baseball is exempted from antitrust law by a 1922 Supreme Court decision, a decision which was upheld 50 years later in Flood v. Kuhn. In the latter, Justice Harry Blackmun describes baseball as a uniquely American institution: it’s “the ‘national pastime’ or, depending upon the point of view, ‘the great American tragedy.’” If that’s really the case, shouldn’t owners have a responsibility to the institution and to the country, not just to their own bottom line?

In an ideal world, team owners would be more like patrons of the arts than businessmen. But as long as baseball is privately owned, it won’t be possible to fully rid the game of the profit motive. Baseball has always been a business, and there’s a lot of money tied up in it. Profit isn’t necessarily bad for the sport either. The recent rule changes that sped up the pace of the game were driven by falling viewership and a desire for bigger television deals. But regulating team owners could constrain the worst of profiteering impulses. A hypothetical Protect the National Pastime Act might limit the ability of owners to pick up and move and provide incentives for fielding a competitive team.

Such a law, passed by Congress, could solve a couple of problems. Team values would fall if the option to leave for greener pastures was heavily restricted — but assuring communities of their teams would have its own value for the league. Perhaps fan advisory boards could have a say in the decision to move on, or elected officials could exercise some kind of power over the process. As a carrot for the owners, Congress could offer matching funds to encourage poorer franchises to spend on their rosters. This added incentive would have the effect of bettering the game — accomplishing something that the current league setup seems unable to do — and making sure that teams stay loyal to their communities. As a certain baseball fan whose Brooklyn Dodgers moved away later told Los Angeles media, “The idea that [the team] was a private company who somebody could pick up and move away and break the hearts of millions of people was literally something we did not understand.” Bernie Sanders “thought the Dodgers belonged to Brooklyn,” and while that might not be a realistic model for modern sports, it’s certainly how fans think of their teams.

Sports matter to people, and it’s bad when their teams get taken away. The story of the Oakland A’s illustrates that. I’m a Yankees fan; the Yankees are of course never going to move. But the basic premise remains. If New York somehow did become a bad media market, Hal Steinbrenner would take the team to San Antonio. Franchises ultimately need to take all the money they can get from their consumers. The fans have deep, heartfelt relationships with their team. It’s an emotionally abusive relationship. Regulating Major League Baseball would limit the damages.

TEDDY WITT is a first-year in Berkeley College. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu. 

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