Political judgments are certainly relevant to criticism, and political presuppositions are probably unavoidable in criticism. The problem has been that so much of politicized criticism is heavy-handed and closed to discovery. The impetus of politicized criticism is to exploit its subject for the ratification of itself. A critical agenda that confines itself to indignant denunciation seems to me awfully constricted. Criticism has richer possibilities.
Good criticism is always a surprise.
It is a surprise in the sense that you can't anticipate what a good critic will have to say about a given artifact. I don't think that the expression of conventional opinions constitutes interesting criticism. It must in order to function as the ideological adhesion for a collective identity. Even anarchists have an orthodoxy. Although it seems impossible for any of us to live a civic life without subscribing to some body of received doctrine, that doctrine, even if the critic conceives it vividly and believes it ardently, is not the stuff of enlightening criticism.