Maybe it’s not proper to scorn Major League Baseball for its decision to move the All-Star Game from Georgia to Colorado for political reasons. Perhaps the more fitting reactions are mockery and pity.
There’s no defense for MLB’s action pulling the All-Star Game out of Georgia. A corporation based in New York, which has more restrictive voting laws than Georgia’s, has moved the Midsummer Classic to Colorado, which, like Georgia, has the supposedly objectionable voter ID requirement. It did so at the request of President Joe Biden, who is from Delaware, which also has more restrictive voting laws than Georgia. Why? Because Georgia passed a bill that generally expanded access to voting.
As Gov. Brian Kemp pointed out, when MLB issued its anti-Georgia announcement, the league didn’t bother to cite a single provision of the law it was supposedly objecting to. That’s easy to explain: MLB doesn’t actually care that much about voting laws — otherwise, it wouldn’t have its headquarters in New York.
What Major League Baseball wanted was a cheap and easy way of getting credit for being socially responsible. “Fighting for social change” is the generic term spouted by the advocates of Woke Capital, as if this were another civil rights era, and the “social changers” were clearly on the right side of history.
But the fights at the center of the Great Awokening are not simple fights about progress, rights, or equality. Half of the causes here are radical culture war offensives aimed at undermining the foundations of human culture. The other half are simple partisan power grabs, as in this case.
When MLB, Delta, Coca-Cola, and other big companies sidle up to these causes, they are either picking the wrong side in a civilizational struggle or else taking sides in naked partisan wrangling that has no socially redemptive value.
The resistance to Georgia’s election law is not radical culture war stuff, such as gender ideology or “defund the police.” It’s much cruder and more banal than that. Democrats know that the single best way to drive up turnout is to claim that Republicans are trying to disenfranchise them. One expects Democrats to do this. Failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams is a professional, full-time disenfranchisement and suppression grievancemonger. Good for her. It is the role she plays in the national and state party.
It’s sad but unsurprising that so much of the media would play along with the partisan game of someone who still won’t admit she lost her election in 2018. Yet one almost has to wince with embarrassment upon seeing major corporations, including Major League Baseball, became convinced that her partisan game is instead some great civil rights cause.
Most (not all) of the media have moved on from the original hysteria over the Georgia law. They now gripe that the law, described as worse than Jim Crow by a cluelessly dishonest Biden, was somehow unnecessary. The Washington Post will also argue that, in fact, Colorado’s voting rules are, if you squint really hard and look at the nuances, not quite as strict as Georgia’s laws.
Arguably unnecessary and slightly stricter than Colorado in a nuanced way is hardly the rallying cry of a true civil rights movement. The generous interpretation is that Major League Baseball and other corporations got sold a bill of goods or were scared by activists. There’s a less charitable interpretation that is at least partly true: They are trying to cozy up to those in power, namely the Biden administration and the Democratic-run Congress, in the most popular way these days — lashing out at political rivals.
It’s access-by-intolerance. It’s the rankest form of influence-seeking. Major League Baseball ought not assume this is cost-free.
