the pervasive RW media, they are far more mindlessly reflexive in their team support and their rabid hatred of the other team, but there is certainly a fair amount of knee-jerk team support on our side, though it plays out in less horrifying and damaging ways.
It also helps that liberals tend to be more tolerant of difference and more civil when they encounter people with other views.
I am reminded of how differently my school's (KU's) fans behaved compared to Missouri's fans whenever the two teams played each other in a long-running sports rivalry known as the Border War (after the Bloody Kansas violence preceding the Civil War).
Missouri's fans threw filled bottles at our players as they came onto the field when playing on their turf. They keyed cars with KU decals and Kansas license plates. They even sometimes attacked people wearing KU shirts or hats.
ONE time a couple of KU football players attacked a Missouri fan--and were kicked off the team immediately. KU's coaches were very strict about controlling their players' potential bad behaviors, and the KU administration really harped on how important it was for fans to demonstrate decency and good sportsmanship toward the rival team's fans.
But Missouri's coach treated it like a real war rather than just a sports rivalry. He called KU and its team ugly names, and he bragged about never gassing up the team bus or fans' cars once they got to Kansas for games played here, because he hated Kansas so much that he didn't want a single penny of revenue to go to a Kansas business, or any tax money to go into the state's coffers from Missouri.
I had a student once from KCMO whose family told her not to bother coming home for Thanksgiving or Christmas now that she had committed treason and joined the enemy!
Fortunately her roommate's family welcomed her for the holidays, and she stayed here during the summer, too, and took classes. (As a result, she graduated a semester early.)
The right wingers similarly brag about harming liberals and Democrats. I have seen RW posters say that they don't even care how crummy a Republican policy is, even for themselves, as long as it "triggers the libta**s"!
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