Just when American politics appeared to be getting down to bare-fisted fighting we get a re-affirmation that political ideologies are largely religious from one of the papacy of modern conservatism, George Will, in his inane discovery of socialist tendencies in college football:

The collective activity of team sports came after a great collective exertion, the Civil War, and two great social changes, urbanization and industrialization.

…

Progressives saw football as training managers for the modern regulatory state. Ingrassia says that a Yale professor, the social Darwinist William Graham Sumner (who was Camp’s brother-in-law), produced one academic acolyte who thought the “English race” was establishing hegemony because it played the “sturdiest” sports.

Ummm, sure, collectivism is like sports activity and, hell, like war or industry, where people collectively work collectively together towards some outcome. It’s almost like government itself, as one astute reader noted concerning the US Constitution:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare.” Those damned leftists!

Now, we might claim that George Will, confused by ‘roidrage, is just scrambling for material in his strange communist witch hunt, but this has profound implications for reinterpreting American history. For instance, until the Italian Fascists resurrected the old Roman outstretched arm salute that was then picked up as “Heil Hitler” by the Nazis, the Pledge of Allegiance was saluted by school children throughout America in the same way:

And, let’s not forget that Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge, was a Christian Socialist advocating the redistribution of wealth for the greater good of the American Christian people.

Will is right about all this sports nonsense.… Read the rest