What would happen if Democrat diversity mandates rocked the sports world?

Editor’s note: This is an exclusively adapted excerpt from Clay Travis’s American Playbook: A Guide to Winning Back the Country from the Democrats.

America needs to look more like sports — where the best man or best woman wins regardless of race, sexuality or socioeconomic status — and less like the Democrat vision of identity politics.
 
No scoreboard begins with diversity points added, there aren’t different rules for the game based on the races of the participants. You either can or cannot make a play. All that matters is your talent and whether you make a team more or less likely to win. Sports is naturally anti-woke, it’s pure capitalism on the field and court, you either win and get rich off your talents or you lose and find another job.  
 
In fact, if sports applied modern Democrat diversity and identity politics rules, every team, sport and league would be worse off. As I explain in my new book, "American Playbook."  

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If Reagan, Clinton, and Obama were so popular, why didn’t their electoral popularity translate to their successors? Because, quite simply, all three men were unicorns, incredible political talents whose skill sets aren’t easily replicated.  

Democrat commitment to diversity has resulted in unpopular candidates like Vice President Kamala Harris. (SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

That’s understood when it comes to Reagan, of whom Republicans have been pining for a modern version for a generation now, and to Clinton, who even Republicans acknowledge was an incredible political talent, but I think it hasn’t been readily admitted of Obama, not even by Democrats. 

Instead of recognizing that Obama was a unique and transcendent political talent, Democrats took from his two presidencies the reductionist idea that they just needed a Black politician on the ticket to motivate Black turnout.  

Well, if that was true, why did Kamala Harris and Cory Booker fail so disastrously in their 2020 presidential campaigns? Heck, why did Harris, who explicitly played the race card in a Democrat debate to paint Joe Biden as a racist, end up dropping out of the presidential race before any votes had been cast?  

After all, wasn’t she the killer app based on identity politics — a Black woman who could finally unite the Obama coalition once more and break the glass ceiling? 

Yet her presidential campaign failed in a disastrous fashion and her vice presidency thus far has been rooted in incompetency — so much incompetency, in fact, that Democrats are terrified to put her forward as a presidential nominee.  

If identity politics really was a great game plan for Democrats, then Kamala should be the most popular vice president ever. Instead, in many surveys she’s the least popular vice president ever, at least through the first two years of a term in office. But it’s not just Kamala Harris who demonstrates the disaster of identity politics.  

In 2016 Hillary Clinton was also supposed to replicate the Obama coalition and finally take the White House for women and shatter the glass ceiling once and for all. Remember all those balloons that never got released at her election night party?  

So what happened with Kamala and Hillary? Why couldn’t they capture the Obama magic? I’ll tell you: because Democrats think Obama won because of identity politics, when the truth is he won because he was a phenomenal political candidate.  

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton failed as a presidential candidate because Democrats mistakenly believed President Barack Obama's popularity was due to diversity. (AP/Mary Altaffer)

Obama didn’t win because he was Black. His race may have helped his overall narrative, but it wasn’t the defining aspect of his presidency. But Democrats are so defined by race now that they took the wrong lesson from Obama’s win: it’s not the race of the candidate that unites people from diverse backgrounds, it’s the candidate.  

Americans of all races overwhelmingly reject the concept of identity politics. If this weren’t true, then Kamala Harris would be president right now instead of Joe Biden. Or Hillary Clinton would have won in 2016 instead of Trump. Instead both failed.  

Despite the election of an old White guy, in fact the oldest White guy to ever be elected, the noxiousness of identity politics continues to undergird the entire premise of the Biden presidency.  

During the campaign Biden said that any Black person who voted against him wasn’t Black and he even promised something extraordinary, as I noted above: if he was elected, his nominee for the Supreme Court would be a Black woman.  

We’ve never seen anything like this in American political history — for a candidate to announce he was limiting his search for a job to a person of a particular sex and race. (Sex alone has been used, but women make up more than half of the population.) Minorities, particularly Asians, reject the noxious politics of affirmative action.  

That is why Republicans should allow Democrats to keep running their identity politics playbook: it’s a disaster for Democrats. Republicans believe that all people are unique individuals, while Democrats believe every person is a prisoner of their identity.  

Republicans believe in the power of the individual to succeed; we believe in individual excellence and the meritocracy. We believe our country is like sports — the best man or the best woman wins, regardless of their background. Everyone should play by the same rules, but we also understand the outcome might look different.  

In other words, sports competitors don’t always perfectly represent the underlying racial dynamics of a country. Your identity doesn’t dictate your success or failure in life; your individual talent does. And that’s okay. That’s what the meritocracy is all about!  

Democrats went from failing with a diverse candidate like Hillary Clinton to nominating the oldest White guy to ever hold the presidency, Joe Biden. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Despite what Democrats want to argue, excellence isn’t defined by race. Identity politics, as practiced by Democrats, also leads to an obsession with diversity and inclusion. But it’s only cosmetic diversity, based on skin color, not actual diversity, based on true diversity of thought, which is the only diversity that actually matters.  

I want to hammer this home with a perfect analogy that I believe Republican politicians should adopt regularly in their 2024 stump speeches. The U.S. men’s basketball team is the best in the world, but it doesn’t look like America. The team is made up entirely of Black players. That’s despite the fact that only 12 percent of the United States population is Black.  

If we insisted that our men’s basketball team reflect the diversity of American life, we’d have to fire a lot of Black guys. Instead of having 12 Black guys on the roster, we could have only one or two. That means at least 10 Black guys would lose their spot on the U.S. team. The majority of the team would need to be White, and we’d have to have Hispanic and Asian players, too.  

So if we wanted our basketball team to perfectly reflect the racial diversity of America, it would go from twelve Black guys to seven White guys, two Black guys, two Hispanic guys, and one Asian guy. Sure, the team would be far worse and probably wouldn’t win the gold medal, or maybe even any medal at all, but it would be perfectly cosmetically diverse.  

Plainly, that’s a ridiculous idea. In this scenario diversity isn’t a strength at all, it actually makes the entire team worse. It’s a weakness, not a strength. It’s also unfair because it removes many of the people who are most deserving of their spots from the team, to be replaced by players of inferior talent. Put simply, sports is the last refuge of the meritocracy in American life.  

The NFL is the largest and most competitive business in sports. But the NFL is also wildly lacking in American diversity on the football field. There are hardly any Hispanic or Asian players, despite the fact that Hispanic and Asian people make up around 16 percent of the American population.  

Just like in the upper echelons of basketball, the NFL is significantly overpopulated by Black players. Indeed, roughly 68 percent of the NFL rosters are Black, 25 percent are White, and Hispanics and Asians make up just 0.5 percent.  

What if we argued that diversity and inclusion mandated that only 12 percent of NFL rosters could be Black so that Black guys weren’t overrepresented in the NFL? Well, that would mean roughly eight out of every ten Black players in the NFL would lose their jobs.  

Deshaun Watson of the Cleveland Browns signed the largest contract in the NFL at the time, despite accusations from 30 women. (Nick Cammett/Diamond Images via Getty Images)

Again, this is plainly ridiculous because we all know the NFL is an extremely competitive league and the goal is for every team to put the best players on the field. Teams aren’t trying to lose games; they’re maniacally pursuing the best possible talent to maximize their win totals.  

(This is also, by the way, why arguments that the NFL is racially biased against Black quarterbacks or coaches are so laughably absurd. The NFL owners are so competitive they would hire people from any background to play quarterback or coach if it made them more likely to win.  

And if racism truly existed in the NFL with quarterbacks or coaches, then the teams that were the least racist, that is the teams that hired Black quarterbacks or Black coaches, would win far more frequently than those that did not.  

Plus, let’s be honest, Deshaun Watson, a Black quarterback who was accused of sexually assaulting more than 30 women — he settled most of the civil complaints and didn’t face criminal charges — just signed the largest contract in the history of football. The largest contract in the history of football!  

So if we wanted our basketball team to perfectly reflect the racial diversity of America, it would go from twelve Black guys to seven White guys, two Black guys, two Hispanic guys, and one Asian guy. Sure, the team would be far worse and probably wouldn’t win the gold medal, or maybe even any medal at all, but it would be perfectly cosmetically diverse.  

The Watson contract by itself pretty much destroys any argument that there is racial discrimination against Black quarterbacks. Especially when you consider that Jameis Winston, who also had a sexual assault allegation outstanding against him, was the No. 1 overall draft pick a few years ago.  

If anyone is being discriminated against in the NFL, honestly, it’s women whose sexual assault claims are pretty much ignored if the player is good enough.) NFL teams, despite being wildly competitive and paying very high salaries to their players, are not remotely reflective of our nation’s racial diversity. And guess what? That’s okay!  

Because the best players make the team. Race should have no impact at all here. Only talent should matter. Indeed, an NFL team that perfectly represented America’s racial diversity would be far worse than a team that merely sought to sign the best players. A perfectly diverse NFL team, in fact, might not even win a single game all season long.  

Diversity, once again, far from being a strength, would be a huge weakness when it came to winning games. In fact, if you really want to make this example even more absurd, let’s consider gender, too, and make teams even more diverse and inclusive.  

Because, remember, women are eligible to play in the NFL, too. They just aren’t, at least so far, big enough, strong enough, or fast enough to make a team. So what if we had the wokest NFL owner of all time, an NFL owner who believed in identity politics and cosmetic diversity and followed the Democrat lead to its logical conclusion?  

What if that owner mandated that his team’s players, in addition to being perfectly racially diverse, had to be half women, too? Well, that team would never win a game. And they might not ever score in a season. And some women might die playing the game.  

It would be a competitive disaster. But the team would perfectly reflect the diversity of the country! And isn’t that the most important thing!? My point here should be clear: all talent isn’t evenly distributed across race and gender lines.  

Some racial or ethnic groups might be overrepresented in certain professions and it might have nothing at all to do with discrimination. In fact, it probably doesn’t, especially not in competitive industries where making as much money as possible is the goal. 

The NFL is the largest and most competitive business in sports. But the NFL is also wildly lacking in American diversity on the football field. There are hardly any Hispanic or Asian players, despite the fact that Hispanic and Asian people make up around 16 percent of the American population.  

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Sports is, therefore, a perfect representation of the meritocracy and of an industry that will go wherever it needs to go to find the best possible talent. The more competitive the marketplace is, in fact, the more likely an industry is to find the best man or woman for the job, because that man or woman can be the difference between victory or defeat, a thriving company or a bankrupt one.  

Identity politics will eventually destroy the Democrat Party. I’m certain of it. It’s completely antithetical to American individualism and ultimately leads to diversity and inclusion disasters. Identity politics also leads, as I’ll show you in a few chapters, to left-wing battles because you end up with dueling identities. Who is more oppressed, a transgender woman or a Black person?  

Good luck figuring that out. It’s not just that Democrats are running a bad playbook with identity politics; it’s that ultimately the players on their own teams will start feuding with each other in a modern-day oppression Olympics. Who resides at the peak of the victimization pyramid?  

Which means we just need to get out of the way and let them run their plays here, let them tell their story, because Americans hate it and reject it. When your opponent is running a disastrous game plan, let them keep running it! Don’t stop their own idiocy from destroying them.  

Democrats have lit themselves on fire with identity politics. The worst thing Republicans can do is grab a fire extinguisher and help them. 

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Clay Travis is the founder of the fastest-growing national multimedia platform, OutKick, which produces and distributes engaging content across sports and pop culture to millions of fans across the country. OutKick was created by Travis in 2011 and sold to the Fox Corporation in 2021. One of the most electrifying and outspoken personalities in the industry, Travis hosts OutKick The Show where he provides his unfiltered opinion on the most compelling headlines throughout sports, culture, and politics. He also makes regular appearances on FOX News Media as a contributor providing analysis on a variety of subjects ranging from sports news to the cultural landscape.