Flawed Country, Inconsiderate Guests: What Being "Pro-Working People" Truly Means
Not having been brought up on soccer/football, I have only in the last twenty years or so learned anything at all about the World Cup. This year is the men's version, and even with my years of living outside of the US at least temporarily behind me, I have been paying fairly close attention to the tournament and everything around it. Not that I have actually watched any matches, mind you, given the stranglehold that Fox has on the broadcast rights, but I have certainly followed the results and surrounding news carefully enough to have formed three thoughts that I will share here to end the week.
Actually, it is not so much three thoughts as two thoughtlets and one angry observation.
Thoughtlet #1: As soon as I learned that this year's tournament had been expanded in both the number of teams and by adding a Round of 32 to the knockout rounds, I had no doubt that the commentary would lapse into one of my longstanding pet peeves: meaningless "first evers." I have commented on this in the context of both college football and the NFL, where everyone acts as if it is a big deal when a season-long record falls after games are added to the season. And sure enough, teams that made it into the Round of 32 were being lauded for "making the knockout round for the first time ever," and players' goals in knockout games (individual goals and contributions toward goal totals) will rise as a matter of course but still be called HISTORIC. Oy. I saw it coming, but it is still annoying.
Thoughtlet #2: After the Trumpists managed to ruin any good feelings from the Winter Olympics by hijacking the men's hockey gold and disparaging the women's hockey gold (and women in general), it was a relief not to see anything like that happening in the World Cup. Yes, it was ugly to see how the Trump Administration was selectively using immigration enforcement in unprincipled ways, but the vibe of the football itself had not been ruined by any White House actions.
As everyone now knows, however, Trump managed to turn the entire world against a perfectly likable (albeit high-mid in talent, at best) American team. How? Trump called the guy who came up with the FIFA Peace Prize and awarded it to Trump last year to convince him to allow the best US player to play after he had been disqualified by a red card in the previous game. That was bad in every way, but it at least did provide some comic relief when Trump claimed to know the game very well but then said that he was surprised that red cards resulted in disqualifications from subsequent matches.
At best, Trump's rambling statement amounted to saying that a core rule of international football should be changed, because it did not make sense to him to penalize a player for subsequent games. To be clear, the US has such rules, including the college football rule that a player who is called for "targeting" must sit out the first half of the next game. That rule has been tweaked over time, but there is nothing weird about sports rules that extend punishment past a particular contest. But Trump? Well, it just didn't make sense to him. So even though the rule exists, it should not be enforced, because who would write such a rule?
The analogies to the way Trump thinks about elections and the legal system more generally are obvious. Even so, I was greatly amused when he did the equivalent of saying: "What is this rule where basketball players can get called for traveling? Why should anyone have to bounce the ball?" or "False starts on a track? He started before everyone else, which makes him smart"; or "Fifteen yards and a loss of down? What kind of commie scum would think that made sense?"
Angry Observation: One of the YouTube channels that I watch that is generally lighter in content is called Feli from Germany, on which a very perky now-30ish German woman posts the familiar run of culture clash videos, with listicles like "12 Things you NEED TO KNOW before traveling to Germany! *in 2026*." She moved to the US about ten years ago and became an American citizen, but last year she and her new American husband moved back (in her case) to Germany. Even then, her "reasons why" video only vaguely scraped up against anything political. She does occasionally take on slightly heavier topics, but she is not a go-to source for depth (and I doubt that she would find that assessment troubling).
In any case, she recently posted a video about non-American fans' reactions to being in the US for the first time: "World Cup tourists discover everything AWESOME about the USA! (German-American Reacts)." Most of the video was the expected light fare, gathering much of the content that has made the rounds of social media, including things like non-Americans' surprise at the enormous serving sizes in restaurants, shock at the idea of free drink refills, and on and on. Most everyone has by now heard that Europeans in particular have somehow decided en masse that Ranch Dressing is the greatest thing ever, to the point (according to Feli's video) where US manufacturers have rushed flight-friendly take-home cases of ranch onto the market. All good fun.
My angry observation, however, involves these visitors' reactions to the tipping expectations in the US. That is a culture shock that people talk about all the time, and because it has a tax law angle, I have even written about it here on Dorf on Law, such as this column during a trip to Australia and New Zealand in 2016.
Yes, tipping is a foreign idea to foreigners. As Feli pointed out, however, the current crop of ecstatic visitors to the US who are delighted and surprised by the big, not-so-bad-it-turns-out USA suddenly turn surly when the topic turns to tipping. She added a section to her video to point out that they are wrong to do so, and in the latter stages of the 36-minute video she also corrects some politics-tinged hot takes from non-US visitors.
What is it about this surly reaction that is making me angry? Feli put up example after example of people saying, in one way or another: "Hey America, pay your workers a fair wage, like we do! It's not my responsibility to pay your workers for you." What rot. Actually, it is much worse than that: perhaps I should call it rot-plus.
To be clear, I of course agree that the US should increase the minimum wage (and enforce it) nationwide; and I have long argued that the very notion of a "sub-minimum wage" (a logical impossibility, but that is hardly the important point here) for service workers should be abandoned. That is not the rot-plus. What infuriates me, of course, is the sense of entitlement from people who say, "Not my problem," while taking advantage of a system that can only work if it is their problem. Should that system change? Yes. Does it exist in bad form now? Emphatically yes.
Any number of analogies could make this obvious point, but the most vivid one that jumps to mind is to picture a bunch of Americans who have fallen off a boat and need life preservers to survive. A boat of Europeans pulls up and (after taking advantage of whatever the US boat has to offer) then pulls away without helping the drowning people, shouting: "Why should we pay for life preservers when the US government should have made the boat safer in the first place? We don't fall off of our boats!"
To be clear, the free refills and huge portions that the visitors to the US are ooh-ing and aah-ing about are offered at lower prices specifically because the restaurants and pubs continue to lobby the US federal and state governments to offload the cost onto customers. That should change, but unless it does, the "Let the employers pay for it, not me" sneering retort more accurately means: "I don't care that you're telling me that the employers won't pay for it, even if it means that the people bringing us plate after plate of cheap fatty foods are working for nothing."
The reason I am bothering today to emphasize what should surely be an obvious and immediate response to the "Not my problem, Jack" attitude is that it uniquely exposes a lack of ... what to call it? ... class solidarity, human compassion, or simply not being a jerk.
In my column earlier this week regarding the spectacular Graham Platner mess in the US Senate race in Maine, I faulted Democratic progressives who hide behind the ideas of "being for the people" and "promoting economic justice" while backing an obvious liar (and credibly accused rapist) because he is supposedly a Regular Guy™, which ended up meaning that they think that Regular Guys™ are irretrievably -- ahem -- "rough around the edges."
As I argued on Tuesday, that is the ultimate in condescension, treating working class people as though they all are so uncouth (at best) that they must be coddled. Or, as one commenter on Michelle Goldberg's New York Times column discussing that fiasco put it: "And the left wing has insulted many working class folks by assuming a person of Platner’s character was representative of their values."
Two paragraphs above, I put "being for the people" and "promoting economic justice" in scare quotes. That is not to disparage either idea, of course, because I enthusiastically support both goals. Instead, I want to make it clear that everyone should support those ideas in reality and not merely as rhetorical cover.
And the visitors to the US are claiming that they support US workers but only by saying that they deserve a different set of laws under which everyone could work for a fair wage. Wonderful. Great. But the servers who are working in this reality are being stiffed with $0 tips on $700 checks from customers who had them running for hours. I forget who said that "I like people, it's just that I don't like people," but "I support workers unless it ends up inconveniencing me" is not even that deep.
As the title of this column summarizes it, the US is indeed a country with many flaws, but guests who enjoy the benefits of those flaws and then harm the very workers they self-righteously claim to support are, to put it bluntly, inconsiderate sh*ts.
- Neil H. Buchanan