It's Only Politics When the Left Does It

Irving Kristol, attempting to distinguish the neoconservatism of which he was the "godfather" from other ideologies, argued that neoconservatism was overtly and explicitly ideological--setting it apart from other forms of conservatism that treated ideology as a uniquely leftist trait (and intellectual sin).

The same seems to me to extend to the way in which those who sniff about the inappropriateness of injecting politics into art approach the matter. People are far more likely to object to politics there when those politics are not their own--and given who has the command of the review pages that generally means that (especially outside the culture war) it is the injection of the left's politics into art that gets artists a hard time from critics for having committed a supposed sin when the reality is that, as George Orwell put it, "All Art is Political."