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When George Will described American football as a liberal institution in his weekend column for The Washington Post, the missive was discarded as an outgrowth of Will's reactionary crankiness. "George Will is a longtime hater of liberalism, and a longtime hater of football, so it makes sense that he would try to align his hatreds and write a column arguing that college football is an expression of liberalism," wrote New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait. Since we're talking about Will, the same guy who thinks trains are inherently liberal (and rotten), that initial assumption made sense. But what if Will's onto something? What if football really is a beacon of American liberalism?

Oddly enough, Will is not alone in this contention. Liberal HBO host Bill Maher thinks it's true. So dues New York Times Magazine ethicist Chuck Klosterman. But each concur in different ways. Put together, you have a case for why football, most beloved by America's reddest states, is America's strongest liberal institution:

Football is liberal because of its economics. If you think about it, the NFL's revenue-sharing and draft rules are basically ripped out of a page of the Communist Manifesto: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. A point Bill Maher makes well:

The NFL runs itself in a way that would fit nicely on Glenn Beck's chalkboard - they literally share the wealth, through salary caps and revenue sharing - TV is their biggest source of revenue, and they put all of it in a big commie pot and split it 32 ways. Because they don't want anyone to fall too far behind. That's why the team that wins the Super Bowl picks last in the next draft. Or what the Republicans would call "punishing success."

Football is liberal because it discourages individualism. This is a favorite of Will's. "Football taught the progressive virtue of subordinating the individual to the collectivity," he writes. He actually tracks back the inspiration for the sport to a need to have a societal power that is the "moral equivalent of war," according to Harvard philosopher William James. "Society found football, which like war required the subordination of the individual, and which would relieve the supposed monotony of workers enmeshed in mass production."