The difference between Red Sox conservatives and Cubs conservatives?

In my previous post, one commentor posed the following question:

Drezner, I would think that as a gung-ho supporter of the free-market system, you would naturally be a Yankees fan. The best rise to the top, right?

Well, to tell the truth, I became a Red Sox fan because, even as an eight-year old, I believed in balancing behavior. Everyone else in my family pulled for the Yankees, so I started instictively pulling for the Red Sox. The rest is history. Painful and gut-wrenching history. I generally don’t think there’s any correlation between political persuasion and favored sports teams. However, George Will thinks otherwise. The Chicago Tribune has an amusing story about the Emil Verban Society, a DC-based organization of Cubs fans whose namesake epitomizes the dilemma of the Cub fan: In 2,911 career at-bats, Emil Verbanhad only one home run. Buried in the story is this little nugget from George Will:

Will, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist raised in Champaign, Ill., said he, too, will be in the stands, supporting the team that shaped his political philosophy. “All my friends grew up happy and liberal as Cardinals fans,” he said. “I became bitter and conservative because life was not fun as a Cubs fan. But now it is.” (emphasis added)

Will all due respect to George Will, I’m a conservative but I derived a different philosophy rooting for the Red Sox. While life can indeed be nasty, brutish, and short, the worst sin is to respond to the cruelties of existence by giving up hope. The spectre of defeat is ever present and must be acknowledged. However, the optimism that comes with the prospect of next season is never extinguished for the true Red Sox fan. And only by nurturing such optimism can one truly appreciate the joy that comes from the occasional triumph. On the other hand, maybe baseball has nothing to do with politics — the most optimistic conservative of them all was also a Cubs fan and proud member of the Emil Verban society. UPDATE: Well, David Brooks disagrees with me as well:

For example, while most people in the Southwest seek pleasure and avoid stress, we in the Northeast do not have that orientation. The place in their culture that is occupied by the concept “happiness” is occupied in our culture by the concept “cursing at each other.” So when you go to a game at Yankee Stadium or Fenway Park you will see lawyers, waiters and skinheads sending off enough testosterone vapors to menace the ozone layer. If a Martian came down and landed in the stands of a Yankees-Red Sox game, he would get the impression that human beings are 90 percent men and 10 percent women in tight T-shirts, and that we reproduce by loathing in groups. It’s interesting, for example, to turn and watch Yankee and Red Sox fans as they watch a game. As the game goes on, they almost never display pleasure, contentment or joy. Instead, during the game they experience long periods of contempt interrupted by short bursts of vindication.

To which I say, what the f#$% does Brooks know? If he ain’t going to declare which team he’s rooting for, I have no use for him on this subject except to admire his prose style from a bemused distance. UPDATE: Reader A.M. e-mails an interesting point — that even if there is little correlation between political and sports affiliations in the United States, there is a strong correlation in other parts of the globe:

In Rome for instance, conservatives (often from outside Rome) have and still do tend to support Lazio, while their left-wing (often Communist) counterparts support AS Roma. The same divide certainly used to be the case in Milan where AC Milan drew support from the left (ironically they are now owned by Signor Berlusconi) and Internazionale from the right. Today this divide is, I think, less apparent in Milan than it is in Rome…. In Barcelona being an Espanyol (the second team in the city) supporter was, particularly in the past, to repudiate Catalan culture and identity – much of which was, particularly under Franco but still is, rooted in the extraordinary institution that is Barcelona football club…. In Scotland the two great Glasgow teams, whose rivalry is still riven by sectarianism, used to be seperated by politics as well as religion. In the days when the Conservatives could count on working class support, Rangers fans voted for the Tories (largely for God, King and Ulster) whereas Celtic’s catholic support, much of it of Irish descent, has always tended to support the Labour party. The collapse of Toryism in Scotland has rendered many of these differences irrelevent but it’s still the case that my middle-class Tory friends tend to be Rangers supporters. In Argentina the great football rivalry in Buenos Aires is between the working-class Boca Juniors and the middle-class, even patrician River Plate (if memory serves River are one of the few football clubs in the world to also run a University).