Some years ago, a university that I once attended decided to promote new orchestral music by premiering three original compositions at three successive years’ end concerts. (The main items on the programs were works by Mahler, Mozart, Orf, and Verdi.) Whoever was in charge of the music program seems to have held left-wing political views, since he decided that the contests to determine which work should be played would be open exclusively to “female-identifying black, indigenous, or people of color.”

All of this was justified with the usual platitudes about opening up classical music to people who used to be excluded. But whereas it’s one thing to revive the works the works of composers like Florence Price (a half-black woman who wrote for orchestra in the 1930 and ’40s, and who didn’t get nearly as much attention as her talents merited), anyone could see that what this forward-thinking university was actually doing was excluding about 90 percent of the composers who might want to enter its contest — including half of all “people of color,” and a majority of women.

And this wasn’t just a one-off thing, with the race-based contest being one category out of several that people could choose to enter. There were three composition contests, three years in a row, and all three of them were open only to the ten percent or so of the population that managed to check the right pair of oppression boxes.

What does this have to do with electoral politics? Is it just a matter of leftists pulling leftist shenanigans in a subculture that’s left-leaning to begin with? Not quite, since even though most swing voters don’t care about classical music, some of them do.

Perhaps you remember how, when MLB commissioner Rob Manfred stepped onto a baseball field to present the Atlanta Braves with their trophy for winning the 2021 World Series, he got loudly booed by thousands of Braves fans? The reason was that, earlier that year, Manfred had moved the All-Star Game from Atlanta to Denver to punish Georgia’s Legislature for a set of minor reforms to the state’s voting laws.

The fact that one political party (and only one) regularly intimidates elected officials with collective punishments like this isn’t lost on the people who have to live with the consequences. And........

© American Thinker