SELLOUT CULTURE IS A PROBLEM FOR PRO GOLF
Even if you don’t play or follow golf — which I don’t — you’re probably aware of the controversy now engulfing the game. A number of the world’s top-ranked pro players made extremely lucrative deals to play in a new tour, the LIV Golf International Series, sponsored by Saudi Arabia. The PGA Tour, which has traditionally dominated the sport, responded by suspending 17 of these players.
The Saudis are obviously engaged in reputation-laundering — greenswashing? — in an attempt to make people forget about the atrocities their regime has perpetrated. It’s less clear what motivated the PGA. Did it consider the LIV series flawed, not a proper golf tour? Was it attempting to squash competition? Or was the problem with the LIV series’ sponsors?
PGA attendees surveyed by ProGolf weekly were in no doubt: An overwhelming majority attributed Phil Mickelson’s exclusion to “media/cancel culture.” And I hope they’re right. I mean, if getting paid big bucks to provide favorable PR to a regime that deals with critical journalists by killing them and dismembering them with a bone saw doesn’t warrant cancellation, what does?
So if you ask me, the real story here isn’t that the PGA may (or may not) have found a line it won’t cross. It is that so many members of the American elite evidently have no such lines.
That is, the rise of cancel culture seems much less important and ominous than the rise of sellout culture.
This isn’t a purely partisan issue, although sellout culture may be somewhat more prevalent on the right than the left. It remains extraordinary, given Donald Trump’s bellowing about America First, how many members of his inner circle — including Michael Flynn, his national security adviser, and Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer — have been credibly accused of, in some cases have been convicted of, or even confessed to serving as paid agents of despotic foreign governments.
And even before Trump left office, both his son-in-law and his Treasury secretary were courting Middle Eastern investors, with both soon receiving huge sums from the Saudis and other Gulf governments.
But it’s not a purely partisan thing. On Sunday, the president of the middle-of-the-road Brookings Institution resigned in the face of an FBI investigation into whether he illegally lobbied for Qatar.
But haven’t people been cashing in on power and celebrity since the dawn of civilization? Yes — but I don’t think I’m idealizing the past by suggesting that there used to be more restraint, more opprobrium associated with selling out too obviously.
Full disclosure: Yes, I sometimes give paid speeches within the limits set by New York Times rules. But I try, not always successfully, to be sure that the sponsors aren’t bad guys, and don’t do paid advocacy — which is, coming back to golf, exactly what Mickelson & Co. were effectively doing when they signed on to play for the Bone Saw Tour.
What explains the rise of sellout culture? Tax cuts may have played a role: Selling your soul becomes more attractive when you get to keep more of the proceeds. Soaring income inequality may inspire envy, a desire to keep up with the super-elite. And there is surely a process of normalization: Everyone else is selling out, so why shouldn’t I join the party?
Whatever the explanation, something has clearly changed; there is a lot more obvious corruption at the top than there was. And the costs of that corruption, I’d argue, include a process of demoralization. Kids used to look up to public figures, sports stars in particular, as role models. Do they still? Can they, given what public figures will do if the checks are big enough?