At this point it is down to the wire regarding whether the Chicago Bears will continue to play their games in Illinois or head over the border for a fresh start—and new stadium—in Indiana. The Bears might stay or the Bears might go, but what is important here is what this saga about a storied football franchise tells us about the increasingly problematic collisions of politics and culture in our fragmented, furious, and frustrated nation.

Football is a very big business. It is estimated that the NFL’s 32 teams generated an estimated $22.2 billion for themselves in income last year which is certainly a nice chunk of change by any measure. The owners are themselves generally billionaires, star players earn tens—and sometimes hundreds—of millions of dollars, and the associated revenue generated by local hotels, restaurants, and bars, drops many more millions of dollars into local tax coffers and creates countless jobs that bring even more cash to city and state governments. If a stadium is renovated or, even better, constructed from scratch, the job bonanza for the building trades runs for many years and makes a great many very well-paid workers, contractors, and suppliers happy beyond belief. Tracking all the money changing hands surrounding the sport of football is a head-spinning task, and the numbers are both huge and significant.

However, it is the very existence of this very well-oiled profit machine that tends to raise hackles among legislators when tax breaks and government funding are requested—or extorted, perhaps—to build the next lavish sports complex to both thrill the fans and make their billionaire owners and millionaire players even richer. Financially-strapped states and cities start to wonder why they are subsidizing what is, in essence, a large and profitable private business enterprise when their own schools, hospitals, police, firefighters, and a host of state and municipal services serving the poor, disabled, and elderly must beg for cash at every appropriation cycle.

Worse still, the testosterone inherent in mostly male, often shirtless, and sometimes belligerent football fans gathering at tailgate parties and inside massive stadiums—where they pound beers, eat meat, and bond in ways that seem primitive and insulting to the prim and easily insulted—sets the teeth of America’s political and cultural Leftists on edge.

The hardcore supporters of Blue State Democrats, who shun professional football and all its masculine trappings in favor of harmony chants and a salad, are going to be implacably opposed to spending one thin dime on a playground for men who hoot like savages when a touchdown is scored or a pretty woman walks by. The mutual incomprehension that has afflicted men and women throughout the ages has been made even worse by the disdain many college-educated (or perhaps college-indoctrinated) females now display for any whiff of the masculine in both their private lives or in our nation’s public discourse. Just being a “guy” has likely never been as insulting to so many ladies as it is today.

However, the cultural divide is not the only issue here; the harsh politics of how money is appropriated plays a huge role as well. There are, to be sure, those who are simply uninterested in football and are positively repelled by the idea of taxpayer money being spent on what they deem both offensive and capitalistic, and they form the vanguard of a loud and significant voter bloc that has elected a lot of Leftist and grievance-oriented politicians in major cities where football teams have sat at the top of the sports pyramid for many years. Their white hot anger that a football team might get cash before their local library, dog park, or community theater is perhaps overblown, but it exists in the same mental space as the lingering pains that seem to afflict so many because they were taunted in gym class in 6th grade or did not have a date for their high school Prom. Hurt feelings can linger for a long time and inform decisions without one even being consciously aware of their corrosive influence.

Football is, it appears, a cultural signifier—and divider—in a way that sports like baseball and soccer simply are not. The sport’s abundantly ruthless aggression and shameless devotion to brutal and unforgiving physical domination rubs a raw nerve among the proudly peaceable and virtuously cooperative, who still like to believe that humanity’s long and disappointing history of slaughter can be resolved with a heartfelt conversation or two, and would prefer everyone spend their Sunday afternoons baking bread and reading poetry instead of watching football and chowing down on chicken wings and barbecued bratwursts.

The ongoing migration of football teams to other cities and states has always been about dollars and cents, but this move from downtown Chicago to the plan for a stadium in the suburbs—to now the possibility (or probability) that a cornerstone franchise of the NFL will be leaving one of most Democrat states in America—also speaks to a yawning cultural divide between those who love football and those who do not. The sheer sourness of the legislative debates about extending financial incentives to keep the Bears in Illinois speaks as loudly and clearly as a canary dying in a coal mind. The poisonous politics of division and hatred have crept into the obstinacy exhibited by Progressive state legislators who are more sympathetic to felons than to football fans, and the likelihood that “Da Bears” will leave has been far less of emergency for the Illinois Governor and Chicago Mayor than it would have been only a generation ago.

Wherever the Chicago Bears end up playing their home games a few years from now is almost beyond the point. The diehards will certainly make the trek if they end up further down the Lake Michigan shoreline, but those traveling to “home” games in Indiana will be quite distinct from those sitting back in Illinois—hating football and their fans.