Illustration: Andrew Dyson The triggers here are quite different, of course. Trump is railing against NFL players kneeling during the national anthem as a protest against racism generally, and black deaths at the hands of police more specifically. Abbott's fellow travellers object to the NRL's decision to book Macklemore for this weekend's grand final entertainment, where he will perform his pro-same-sex marriage hit Same Love. But in both cases the "sport is sport" refrain conceals a massive assumption that sport is never political until it is conspicuously so: that there is no politics in its normal functioning. At stake here is not so much a concept of sport as a concept of politics. What's interesting is not what counts as politicising sport, but rather what doesn't. So "taking the knee" during the national anthem is clearly political. Fine. But can we honestly say that requiring players and spectators to stand for that same anthem in the first place somehow isn't? It is, after all, a ritualised form of national reverence; a declaration that the games that follow occur under an overweening banner that encompasses us all in some way. This scarcely seems a controversial statement, and accordingly, we do not recognise it as political. But if taking the knee is meant to convey anything, it is precisely that the continued unaccountable violence of the state against black Americans – and now the President's flirtations with white supremacists – mean many athletes cannot feel the nation really does encompass them, so much as it dominates them.

Illustration: Simon Letch Standing for the anthem, then, probably feels like acquiescence. At that point, the apparently benign requirement to do so becomes a forcefully political command. That much may not be visible to most of us. Indeed, the proof of nationalism's political pre-eminence is that we don't even notice its constant presence in our lives. In this way it comes to be seen as natural, not political. But it might look far less natural to, say, an indigenous person who looks at national symbols and sees the dispossession of a people. The NRL case is not one of nationalism, but a similarly slippery notion of politics applies. Here we have an international artist performing a song that, whatever else it is, is one of his biggest hits. Had Macklemore simply come, performed his hits, and left, his performance would probably have left barely any political residue. Credit:AP That, you would think is unremarkable, except that it happens to dovetail with a postal survey the government insists we need. That is, the government has explicitly asked us to "have our say" on the matter of same-sex marriage – an invitation the NRL has accepted only to find itself chastised for booking a performer who chimes with its view.

The command here seems to be either that the NRL refuses to book someone with that view, or forbid him from performing his hits that address the topic. This, apparently, would be the un-political thing to do, as though telling an artist not to perform his social commentary-laden pieces is not a political act. The paradox is that had no complaint been raised against this – had Macklemore simply come, performed his hits, and left – his performance would probably have left barely any political residue. San Francisco 49ers' Eric Reid kneels in front of teammates during the playing of the national anthem. Credit:AP The politics of all this has become amplified precisely by those complaining it is political. And this happens because of a narrow view of what is acceptable in these situations: a festival of socially benign pop entertainment followed by the standard nationalist rituals before a game shorn of any grander social meaning. The voices in the "sport is sport" crowd might be on stronger ground if instead of demanding sport be apolitical, they demanded that it not be divisive: that it not embrace causes on which there is substantial disagreement in society. That at least would be coherent. But it's a hard argument to sustain when you're busy pushing people into divisive corners yourself. You can't launch a series of incendiary rhetorical bombs on race in America and then complain when the sporting codes whose athletes are so deeply affected by this decide to say something about it. You can't devise an inherently divisive plebiscite as a way of stalling on same-sex marriage, then complain when sporting codes with gay stakeholders take part. Members of the Cleveland Browns take a knee during the national anthem. Credit:AP

Loading But that's the nature of total politics. It aims to polarise, then rails against those who dare oppose it. And in this process of making political heat from small moments, it obscures the biggest political questions there are. So, thundering about the cultural destruction wreaked by generically labelled Christmas trees allows us to ignore how commerce manages to strip things like Christmas of their cultural meaning in the first place. The designation of an intended "no" vote as "hate speech" invites us to overlook just how unprotected contract labour is in the brave new world of entrepreneurial "flexibility". And the insistence that sport be a theatre for an "apolitical" nationalism hides that there are those among us whose social contract is being breached. Then, with all this safely ignored, and a safe sense of outrage at smaller things, it's on with the show. Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist and a presenter on The Project.