Just as Team USA’s World Cup victory over Iran qualified it for the knockout round, my fiance and I headed for a late lunch at the pub around the corner. In the heart of Old Town Alexandria, where Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 55 points in 2020, dozens of Virginians decided to pack the place on a dreary Tuesday afternoon — some of them clad in American flag gear — to stand and salute the national anthem and cheer on the stars and stripes.
My fiance and I stuck to Diet Coke, but the rest of the bar cheered, dined, and drank beer, something they couldn’t do in either Qatar, the site of the World Cup, or Iran. Both genders fraternized freely and cheered for a country we love precisely because we can criticize it for its imperfections.
TEAM USA SURVIVES LAST-MINUTE SCARE TO SCORE WORLD CUP WIN AND ADVANCE IN TOURNAMENT
Since the start of the scandal-ridden World Cup, the worst actors on the planet have attempted to draw some sort of moral equivalency between the West — more specifically the United States — and totalitarian theocracies such as Qatar and Iran. FIFA President Gianni Infantino charged critics concerned that Qatar used slave labor to prepare for the World Cup with “hypocrisy” and “racism.”
“I think for what we Europeans have been doing for 3,000 years around the world, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people,” Infantino raged. “How many of these European companies who earn millions and millions from Qatar or other countries in the region — billions every year — how many of them have addressed migrant-worker rights?”
In a press conference prior to the U.S.-Iran match, an Iranian journalist lambasted the American team captain, Tyler Adams, for mispronouncing his country’s name and asked Adams if he was “OK representing a country with so much discrimination against black people.” Adams, who has a black father but was raised in a white family, had the perfect response.
“One thing that I’ve learned — especially from living abroad in the past years and having to fit into different cultures and kind of assimilate into different cultures — is that in the U.S., we’re continuing to make progress every single day,” Adams said. “Growing up for me, I grew up in a white family with obviously an African American heritage and background as well. So, I had a little bit of different cultures, and I was very, very easily able to assimilate in different cultures. Not everyone has that ease and the ability to do that, and obviously, it takes longer for some to understand. Through education, I think it’s super important, like you just educated me now on the pronunciation of your country.”
America is not perfect, but it is the closest thing on Earth to it. Our constitution enshrines our right to point that out. Legal discrimination against black Americans, and for that matter, women and gay Americans, is still just barely within living memory. Yet, as Adams pointed out, we have something that Iran and Qatar obviously don’t: progress.
Illiberal governments are inherently unstable, lacking the mandate of the governed and unusually predisposed to the dictator traps created by the silencing of dissent. America may seem like a mess in the debate and rancor running up until an election, but as a general rule, we accept the outcome precisely because we play by fair standards of our collective creation.
And contrary to some fears from flyover country, even the most indigo blue of America still loves this country. In a 2021 poll, Pew found that 3 in 4 Americans consider America either the greatest or one of the greatest countries in the world. Only 1 in 3 Democrats believe that other countries exceed ours. We have fears about our democratic process but remain positive about our future prospects on a bipartisan basis.
Not to mention, on a random Tuesday in the tiny town of Alexandria, a few dozen denizens were having more fun and actual drinks than at literally any common, public place at any given time in unenlightened theocracies such as Iran and Qatar.
As demonstrated on the football pitch, the U.S. still reigns supreme. And when it comes to values, there is no moral equivalence between the West and the rest.
