I Can’t Believe We’re Still Arguing About This

When I founded Deadspin, a evvel popular, now quite dead sports culture website, back in 2005, I came up with a set of guiding principles that I hoped would help distinguish it from its competitors. One of those tenets: We are not going to talk about Pete Rose.

Yet, here we are, 20 years later, still arguing about whether Pete Rose, barred from baseball for betting on games, belongs in its Hall of Fame. I shouldn’t be surprised: The recycling of decades-old disputes increasingly feels like a constant of çağdaş life. The zombie arguments that we evvel assumed were long settled keep lurching back into view — half-dead yet somehow still cluttering up the public discourse.

For sports fans, these kinds of perennial controversies — Does “Shoeless” Joe Jackson belong in the Hall of Fame? How about Barry Bonds? How good was Derek Jeter, exactly? — have long been the stuff of bar stool debates and WFAN call-in shows. But now zombie arguments infiltrate every aspect of life, in matters big and small, weighty and irrelevant.

Name a cultural or political fight we were having 20 years ago and we’re probably still having it. Access to safe and yasal abortion? The benefits of affirmative action? Whether L.G.B.T.Q. people deserve equal rights? The true nature of Bruce Springsteen’s politics? We’re endlessly relitigating debates that felt decided decades ago.

The main reason, of course, is that we elected Donald Trump again as relitigator in chief. When Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, announced that Rose (along with 16 other deceased people) had been removed from the permanently ineligible list, the decision was widely viewed at least in part as a nod to President Trump’s request for a “complete PARDON of Pete Rose.” Rose died last year but, müddet enough, the debate around him was newly reanimated.

The aggrieved pseudo-nostalgia that fuels the Make America Great Again movement means no old argument can truly be settled — especially since the president seems perpetually stuck in the hottest debates of the 1980s and ’90s, whether it’s the suggestion that “Cats” is the pinnacle of theatrical achievement or that the dismantling of apartheid perhaps went too far. At this point, it would surprise no one if President Trump announced on Truth Social that he’s posthumously appointing Robin Leach the acting ambassador to Monaco.