On the first of February, the CEOs of corporations, small- and large-business owners, police chiefs, city leaders, pastors and priests, government and state workers, owners of trucking companies and convenience stores, and farmers participated in ...

“Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice. We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.” – Professor Neil Postman

If there are two spectacles that are almost guaranteed to render Americans passive viewers, incapable of doing little more than cheering on their respective teams, it’s football and politics – specifically, the Super Bowl and the quadrennial presidential election.

Both football and politics encourage zealous devotion among their followers, both create manufactured divisions that alienate one group of devotees from another, and both result in a strange sort of tunnel vision that leaves the viewer oblivious to anything else going on around them apart from the “big game.”

Both football and politics are televised, big-money, advertising-driven exercises in how to cultivate a nation of armchair enthusiasts who are content to sit, watch, and be entertained, all the while convincing themselves that they are active contributors to the outcome. Even the season schedules are similar in football and politics: the weekly playoffs, the blow-by-blow recaps, the betting pools and speculation, the conferences, and then the final big championship game.

In the same way, both championship events are costly entertainment extravaganzas that feed the nation’s appetite for competition, consumerism, and carnival-esque stunts. In both scenarios, cities bid for the privilege of hosting key athletic and political events. For example, San Francisco had to raise close to $50 million just to host the 50th Super Bowl, with its deluxe stadium, Super Bowl City, free fan village, interactive theme park, and free Alicia Keys concert, not including the additional $5-million cost to taxpayers for extra security. Likewise, it costs cities more than $60 million to host the national presidential-nominating conventions for the Republicans and Democrats.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that there is anything wrong with enjoying the entertainment that is football or politics.

However, where we go wrong as a society is when we become armchair quarterbacks, so completely immersed in the Big Game or the Big Campaign that we are easily controlled by the powers-that-be – the mega-corporations that run both shows – and oblivious to what is really going on around us.

Governor Bruce Rauner blew a perfect opportunity last week to finally drive a public wedge between Senate President John Cullerton and House Speaker Michael Madigan, to clearly put Madigan on the defensive, and to maybe finally make progress on an important issue that might save the state a billion dollars a year.

But he badly bungled the rollout of a deal with Cullerton on pension reform. Instead of describing the agreement for what it really was, Rauner greatly exaggerated its scope and portrayed it as a big defeat for AFSCME and other unions.

In reality, the deal with Cullerton (and there is still a deal with Cullerton, despite what you might be reading elsewhere) is narrow in scope and elegantly designed to put Madigan in a truly tough position.

On February 2, national media and presidential campaigns will decamp from Iowa. The state’s citizens will be freed from the barrage of political advertising, and its media outlets will need to figure out how to fill their news holes.

Ted Cruz or Donald Trump will likely “win” the Republicans’ secret-ballot caucus, with Marco Rubio having an outside shot. Hillary Clinton is poised to “beat” Bernie Sanders in the Democrats’ preference-group caucus system.

And in the short term, those relatively clear results will matter about as much as their grand-scheme relationship to each party’s eventual presidential nominee – barely at all. Instead, the media, pundits, campaigns, and donors will all parse the outcomes against conventional-wisdom guesses about how the candidates were supposed to do.

This muddle partly explains why Iowa and other small early-voting states regularly have their prized positions at the front of the process called into question, criticized, and mocked. In September, for instance, Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus told the National Journal that Iowa and New Hampshire should watch their backs after 2016. “I don’t think anyone should get too comfortable,” he said. “I don’t think there should ever be any sacred cows as to the primary process or the order.”

The quadrennial arguments against Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina – the four pre-Super Tuesday states – are familiar: These states are small in population, are unrepresentative of the country as a whole, and exercise an outsize and undue influence over the process of selecting nominees and therefore the president. (See sidebar.)

The criticism of Iowa’s role is amplified because of its first-in-the-nation status and the fact that it’s a caucus state – meaning that poorly attended party meetings with weird (or “quirky” or “arcane”) processes set the table for the remainder of the campaign.

On the other hand, those same criticisms form the foundation of the case for Iowa’s role: The relatively sparsely populated state and its caucus meetings represent a small-scale proving ground for candidates – their organizations, their fundraising, their ability to connect with voters one-on-one, and their stomach for local cuisine. If you can’t do well in Iowa, the thinking goes, you’re not going to do well in the country as a whole.

Yet both sides of the argument ignore a fundamental truth of modern presidential politics: Even if Iowa remains the first contest in the presidential-selection process moving forward, the state’s voters are playing an ever-diminishing role. As much as the state sets in motion the story of the presidential campaign, its people don’t much matter.