The American Crisis 2024: Sports Gambling

I’d like to bring up a number of issues at beginning of year that go together to describe the social problems tearing up America, perhaps especially those that aren’t partisan issues or social media scandals. A review of the year before, if you will, or notes on how we live now.

First, sports gambling based on apps, a problem I’ve mentioned before, but which I’ve seen writers I admire mention recently. Then a friend of PoMoCon reminded me I had taken up the issue before, so I decided to speak up. Or rather point to more successful writers speaking up.

The best thing written on the problem of gambling wiping out men who should be struggling to make it into the middle class or to stay there—that would be Chris Caldwell’s writing in Compact Magazine:

For years now, anyone who watches sports on TV or the internet has been bombarded with advertisements that insist you aren’t really enjoying the game unless you are betting money on it. FanDuel, an online sports betting firm, promises that you can “make every moment of the game mean more” by laying a so-called prop bet on whether Tony Gonsolin’s next pitch will be a strike, or Jordan Spieth will birdie the 11th, or Rhamondre Stevenson will gain 30 yards or more in the second quarter. DraftKings, a decade-old sports-betting concern now moving into casino gambling, also has a bunch of products that will help you, in its odd phrase, “celebrate all the moments out there.” Back in the 2016 football season, many “moments” beside that Central Michigan game were ruined for lack of a multinational corporation to place bets with. How could any fan possibly have enjoyed the Patriots’ 25-point fourth-quarter comeback against the Falcons if he didn’t have “skin in the game”?

I would like to remind you that the troubled men who lose their lifesavings or their hope to gambling have fathers & that the proper response of such a father would be to torch down the HQ of these kinds of businesses. Historically, the only reason gambling survives as a business is its connection to crime. That, at any rate, is an admission that righteous indignation would otherwise put an end to it. Drinking & whoring are different as vices go, because those pleasures are more natural. Gambling becoming so sophisticated & technologically implemented is a sign of its artificial character. But it is also a taint on all sophisticated society, business, technology. It’s a remarkable corruption of America that sports gambling is becoming legal—a loss of the faith of the republic which may be beyond repair. But it’s the better way to try to repair it by destroying these corrupt practices, hopefully in a public, legal way that reasserts the American way of life.

I’m happy to say that people on “the right” who are much more popular than me are complaining about the matter. Maybe something starts off this way that leads to political action! Maybe we should think about ways to shame sports legends for betraying their fans this way.

A very successful conservative journalist has also talked about it, Saagar Enjeti:

So also with popular social media figures on the right.

The major reason there is no outcry here is that this is a problem that affects men & especially the kinds of men that elites could not bother to care about; moreover, middle class people, being primarily organized around family & hence suburban community, are blind to the concerns that go beyond that charmed circle.

But what happens if middle-aged men are impoverished? Or young men? How could there not follow bad consequences for the whole of society? Granted, this affects a fairly small minority, but it’s nevertheless adding a plague to a number of others. It would be a stupid thing to do in a healthy society, but perhaps not too dangerous. America cannot afford it now.

We have had decades of strange stories like this—maybe the first one was the opioid crisis. It happens in legal ways, but the corruption is stunning; yet we have neither mandated anyone to stop it, nor paid anyone to stop it, nor organized ourselves to stop it.

To conclude: Maybe the more worrisome thing is not the few wretches whose lives are destroyed & who seem like they have no other resource left than to throw themselves on God’s mercy. Maybe the ease with which our society is becoming corrupted is the more worrisome thing, not least because we have so much to lose.