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This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.

If you’re asking for my goals, you need a Kansas City Chiefs victory. And then you need Travis Kelce to marry Taylor Swift in a royal wedding —

And model good behavior.

He has to win first. They have to marry on the 50-yard line. And —

Oh, my god.

It’ll just all go your way, Ross.

I need you to get out of the house more, Ross.

At some point, it does. At some point, it has to start all going my way.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From “New York Times Opinion,” I’m Carlos Lozada.

I’m Michelle Cottle.

I’m Ross Douthat.

I’m Lydia Polgreen.

And this is “Matter of Opinion,” where thoughts are allowed.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So our thoughts today will surround the Super Bowl. Super Bowl Sunday is upon us.

[SIGHS]:

Go, team.

And we, at “Matter of Opinion,” are going to talk football, right?

Nothing but football, I was promised.

Are we? Are we?

Not really. No, no.

You’re so naive.

No, actually, we’re going to try to understand the Super Bowl as a cultural event, as a collective cultural event. But I wanted to ask you guys. It’s sort of the season for lots of these kinds of events. We just had the Grammys. We have the Oscars coming up next month. We have the Olympics in the summer. I’ve been thinking about what is the impact and the purpose of these kinds of events. What social and cultural function do they serve? Are they unifying or not, especially in America that, as everyone tells us, is very divided? So I hope that’s what we can kind of figure out.

And maybe one way to do that is instead of looking forward is actually look back. We’ve all experienced these kinds of events before. Is there one kind of very memorable moment in your life, where you were part of some kind of mass cultural event —

Ooh. Ooh, yes.

— that you feel kind of marked you.

Me, me, me. Me.

All right, Michelle, shoot.

1981, the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Di.

Oh.

Oh, yeah.

It was not just me. 750 million people across 74 countries watched this bad boy.

How old were you?

11? So I had to get — they’re five hours ahead of where I lived. I had to drag my butt up way too early to watch all the pre-gaming, the glass carriage. It was kind of glorious.

Yeah, it’s funny. My moment is actually more recent. And it is the finale of the first season of “Survivor,” a show that careful listeners of this show will —

Yes, this is a deep callback.

— know that I’m completely obsessed with. So much about what our media landscape became, and, of course, the presidency itself with Donald Trump and so on, really kind of call back to that creation moment with “Survivor” and “Survivor” becoming this thing. It was a time when we all watched shows the day that they came out on television.

There was no YouTube. The recapping industry didn’t really exist. You know, so it really was a kind of “watch it live” thing. And I think it was the last time that I remember having a sense of, I cannot miss this. Like, I will be a social outcast if I don’t watch this, and I’m not able to talk about it tomorrow morning. And that was in 2000, I think?

Was that that long ago?

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

I mean, I was trying to think of a good one with the Olympics. But really, when I’m thinking about collective events, I was just a huge baseball fan. And I was thinking about the playoffs and World Series after September 11, right? And in its own dark, horrifying way, 9/11 was itself a kind of collective cultural event, among many other things.

But then there was this way in which that postseason, because the Yankees were in it, and I was a Red Sox fan, so I hated the Yankees, but it was the only time sort of all of America was kind of rooting for the Yankees — to be clear, I was not, but most of America —

You aren’t falling for that.

I wasn’t falling for that.

Stay true, Ross.

I stayed true.

Stay true.

I stayed true, but it was like — it was sort of this rolling collective sports experience culminating, as all great collective sports experiences should, in the Yankees ultimately losing.

Ouch.

Ross, I thought you were going to say George W. Bush throwing out that first pitch.

Well, I mean, that was —

I do remember that.

That was a wonderful moment.

That was in there, too.

That was big.

That was his whole re-election campaign. I mean, really. 9/11 was the entire re-election campaign. But it’s interesting to see that your experiences, like all these experiences are things that are mediated for you through television, right? Like, I think definitely, 9/11, I mean, we were all glued to the TV watching it happening. That was experiencing trauma together.

Oh, 100 percent. And I think the fracturing of that experience is a big part of the story of what has happened to us. We all are all, if not bowling alone, we’re all watching different channels. And the sense that we’re coming together around big events, big cultural events that affect us as Americans, it does feel much more fragmented.

And of course, that biggest event coming this weekend is, is the Super Bowl. I mean, it brings in more than 100 million viewers. Think about that. The only TV show finale — we talk about television a lot — to do that ever was “MASH.” “Cheers” didn’t. “Seinfeld” didn’t. And those were like series finales, right? The Super Bowl is just a season finale. I mean, it’s been going on for 58 seasons, right? Like, it’s just one more. So why do you think this event, this game, has so much resonance and staying power?

So I think there’s a couple of things. One, it’s become a secular ritual. And people need ritual, and especially as we’ve become a less religious society with less connective ties and less common media ecosystem, there are different elements that have grown up to surround and elevate this central piece. I think people love that. You have the commercials. You have the halftime show. You have the parties with the really bad wings and nachos, which are my favorite part of this whole thing.

I’m sorry, fact check — there’s no such thing as a bad chicken wing.

Oh. God, I gotta disagree on that one.

So I just — true confessions, I have never watched the Super Bowl. I actually really —

Wow.

— really, really have some deep moral qualms about football.

No Beyoncé halftime show, Lydia?

No, no, hold on. I’m coming to it. I’m coming to it. Like, I think that it’s sort of a modern-day gladiator sport where we tolerate the breaking of men’s bodies in ways that are incredibly brutal and tragic, and I just like — I don’t know — I can’t sign off on that. So what I do instead is look at YouTube to see the halftime shows because they’re just — they’re really wonderful. And I think the most successful halftime shows do have this quality of just sort of bringing people together. And so I was looking back at some of my favorites. And I think one of the greatest of all time was when Prince played in the rain.

And of course, he sang “Purple Rain” in that moment.

Of course, he did!

There’s a great mini documentary about that Super Bowl and that halftime show, where the producers of the show or whatever reached out to him. And they’re like, we’re really sorry, but the forecast is for pretty serious rain. And Prince just said, Can you make it rain harder? Right? Because he obviously knew what a moment it was going to be, right? And that’s why, 17 years later, people are still talking about that halftime show.

Well, that and he was one of the coolest ever, so.

I mean, I think part of it, part of the appeal of the Super Bowl is just, it’s this kind of climax event of American culture, right? It’s athletics and it’s violence and it’s commercialism and it’s regional rivalries. And I mean, part of the appeal is precisely the fact that it’s a gladiator sport, like it’s bread and circus, you know? I mean you can have very specific reasons why you’re into it.

I follow college football, especially Notre Dame. And so I look to see which Notre Dame players are advancing in the playoffs. And so the Kansas City linebacker, Drue Tranquill from Notre Dame, is starting in the Super Bowl, and Aaron Banks, the left guard for the Niners. So I’m rooting for the two of them more than for the teams, even though I grew up a Niners fan. So I think it sort of captures a lot of what we like and maybe dislike about America, all in one night.

I mean, it is liturgical. It just is sort of — I mean, the Super Bowl is a liturgy. I mean, and I think people who are actually religious who also like the liturgies of American pomp and power need to recognize that there is something sort of slightly debasing about going all in for a sort of pure secular liturgy of American excess and so on. The only thing worse than having a somewhat debased secular patriotic liturgy is not having any collective —

Yes, any kind at all.

— liturgy at all, right?

Yeah, sure.

Then you just kind of drift aimlessly eternally —

From one —

— in your separate directions.

Well, from one YouTube clip to the other.

So assuming that you do watch this game on Sunday — Lydia, I’m looking at you, and the rest — why are you watching? What are you looking for specifically in this experience on Sunday?

Well, I’m very interested in how we come to hold the identities that we have. And my feeling is that a lot of the ways in which we hold the identities we have is just sort of constructed. It’s stuff that we get from various places, and we put it together. And usually, it’s good enough to make something that feels satisfying, and that’s great. And being the fan of a sports team and feeling that’s really a huge part of your identity and who you are is a great example of that.

And so I stand on the side and just be like, wow, it’s kind of amazing that people have this level of devotion to players of this extremely hard to follow, slow-moving, lots of stops game. And how nice for them because it’s not easy to find a sense of belonging in this fractured and polarized world that we live in. So if this works, that’s totally great. I’m into it. Better this than, say, QAnon.

Those are our choices.

So Lydia, you think the Super Bowl transcends politics, rather than is becoming just one more politicized event.

I think historically, it has. It’s funny. I was also thinking about what exactly is it about sports that illuminates something about the American character, right? And I think the NFL is racially mixed. It is an integrated institution where people cheer for stars from all races. There’s the opportunity of being discovered for your raw talent. So I think it has these sort of mythic qualities that feed into the possibility of it being a place where this convening can happen.

But I think those very same qualities also create the conditions under which people want to bring to the attention of this kind of great public forum the issues that matter. And I think that’s why we saw the taking a knee and people’s anger at that. So I actually think all these controversies about, quote unquote, “politics” at the Super Bowl or at NFL games in general have actually been great for the sport because it just underscores how important this institution is in our culture.

I think, obviously, football has interacted with the culture wars. And the entire Colin Kaepernick taking a knee debate was sort of itself clearly connected to larger debates about race and policing wokeness — you name it — in American life. So it’s not that sort of politics hasn’t intruded, but in many ways, I mean, you can see this just in the ratings.

It really is much more than the Oscars, which is seen as, I think, fundamentally left wing, just because Hollywood is quite left wing, and any political statements are going to be left wing. I think, yeah, football is in a not apolitical, but sort of supra political category, all its own, even now. I think maybe we gave too much attention — and I was guilty of this, too — to the kind of right-wing, anti-Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce stuff. It’s not clear to me that that was much more than a bunch of right-wing influencers asking for attention which then —

We obliged.

They got. They got.

They got, right?

So needy.

But I mean, I think the potency of the Super Bowl is such that it is uncancellable by any faction, right wing or left wing.

Huh.

I think what keeps football going is that there’s nothing else that’s sort of a load bearing point in our national culture. So as sort of common culture recedes, the things that remain take on more and more significance, and in their own way, become harder to get rid of. I think the NFL is, in a way, its cultural position is much stronger today, precisely because other forms of common athletic experience have diminished.

That is a very good place for us to take a break. Let’s call it halftime. And when we come back, we will talk about whether we need more mass Super Bowl-style events and where we might find them.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And we are back. So given all the sort of cultural and political divisions that we’ve hinted at, is the Super Bowl really the last example of a truly shared mass culture? Ross suggested it’s in this unassailable position. Or are there other cultural institutions that have the power to bring us together or at least draw our attention in a similar way?

I don’t see any. I mean, isn’t that what makes everybody nervous? Kind of shared rituals and institutions are fading and have lost their pull, whether you’re talking about church or the Lions Club or even the Nightly News, which used to have this unifying effect on what Americans viewed as kind of cultural events and that’s fragmented into a million different pieces.

So I think what we’re looking more toward is kind of mini mass cultural events. And by that, I mean things like a show that is popular with a certain segment of America. And so you’re not approaching the 115 million necessarily, but you kind of look for your moments. And I think people definitely want that and crave that.

I mean, just look how crazy the Barbenheimer movie phenomenon was last summer. And people loved what was essentially a manufactured marketing ploy because people were doing it together, and they felt like a part of the thing. And social media was posting about it. And I got to buy my pink jumpsuit. I’m just saying. So —

I need to see this pink jumpsuit, Michelle.

I’ll hook you up. So, guys, I have a question, like, what do you think is going to happen if it fades or if — what are we looking at here if we lose these things?

See, I don’t think in the near term, it’s going to fade. That was sort of the point I was trying to make with the NFL. I think what has happened is that the dynamics of internet culture are not that the superstars disappear or the shared events. It’s that there’s just going to be like instead of 10 shared events, there’s one or two. But they’re bigger than ever.

Taylor Swift is a good example. Taylor Swift is bigger than any singer in my lifetime. I think she’s bigger than Michael Jackson, maybe not bigger than The Beatles in the early 1960s. But she is huge. When I listen to the tween girls who I am exposed to through being a father of tween girls, I remember my friends, and it was like, you would have five or 10 or 15 bands and singers you were into. And today, it’s really, it’s one. It’s just Taylor Swift.

Tay Tay.

And I think even in politics, I think you can see the Donald Trump phenomenon as, in a weird way, reflecting this sense.

I........

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