The Article below was published in Vol. 136, Issue 7 of the Lake Forest College Stentor on April 2, 2021.
Nathaniel Bodnar ’21
Staff Writer
Every March, with the exception of 2020, tens of millions of Americans fill out brackets in preparation for the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament. This spectacle is affectionately called “March Madness.” The 68 team tournament is filled with upsets, Cinderella stories, dynasties, and quests to make history. Having single games instead of a series fuels the drama in the tournament and the unpredictability; one bad night in the course of a month will end your team’s hopes of a national title. I also think these components of the tournament say something about the body politic of the United States.
Our love for upsets and Cinderellas in basketball transfers over to politics into the love of the outsider. Almost every year, the country falls in love with a mid-major school that doesn’t have the traditional basketball lineage, recruiting program, or facilities, all advantages that come with being a blue-blood program. Previously, America has fallen in love with Loyola University Chicago and their beloved Sister Jean. This year, many felt captured by Oral Roberts University, a small Christian college in Oklahoma that was truly competitive against Power 5 schools in three straight games, and failed to beat the SEC’s Arkansas.
Abilene Christian University, a school that only recently has been competing at the D1 level for a few years, upset the University of Texas. No single game has lived up to the shock of number 16 seed University of Maryland-Baltimore beating the number one seed, University of Virginia by 20 points.
In politics, increasingly, we want a sort of Cinderella story. Americans are increasingly attracted to “outsiders” in politics. In the 2016 GOP Iowa caucus, three of the 10 candidates who received at least 1 percent of the caucus votes had no political experience; about half of those candidates could be perceived as anti-establishment. In the 2020 Democratic Presidential primaries, it essentially took the entire establishment to gang up against the outsider, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), to keep the outsider from running the party. For a younger generation of progressives, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY) has inspired them as a Cinderella story, a bartender who became a Congresswoman. These stories, whether in sports or politics, tend to captivate the American mind.
Americans also are captivated by spectacles. Something in the American civitas enjoys the pressure of having to perform when the lights shine the brightest. The one-and-done atmosphere of March Madness doesn’t necessarily mean the “best” team will win. Upsets will happen, inferior teams will get lucky, the best team can get unlucky. We take a similar approach to elections; we enjoy the spectacles around the election almost more than the actual results they produce. We have debates designed to produce witty quotes, but they are not necessarily the best platforms to create better policies. On election night, we have election parties where we root for our preferred side and celebrate when we win and mourn when we lose. These practices are not totally different from the range of emotions we feel while watching basketball. Both the tournament and politics believe in the spectacle of the event; while people may say they have accurate predictions, we still contest the game or the election; something about the event playing out in the real world makes it more of a spectacle.
