Katharine Hepburn and Donald Trump

went on to win two more Oscars in the 1960's and an all-time record fourth in 1981.

One of those was for "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", a trite movie that has not aged well, and including an actress (Katharine Houghton, Hepburn's niece) who didn't belong in the same room with Tracy/Hepburn/Poitier. Hepburn won that award in part because the voters wanted to show how progressive they were, and also as a "Lifetime Achievement Award" for Hepburn. She was 10x better in "The Philadelphia Story", but unfotunately was beaten out by Ginger Rogers in "Kitty Foyle".

But the country was further to the left in the 1930s and 1940s than it is today

Only in the economic and political senses

Economically, the US was much further Left (in the sense of the classical Left's concerns, rather than the modern Left's) in the 1970's than it is today. Richard Nixon, a Republican President, signed wage and price controls into law today. Not even Obama, and certainly not Bill Clinton, would have done the same in recent times. Both politicians were much friendlier towards state social welfare program expansion then than today (again, including Republicans such as Nixon - who signed a lot of alphabet agencies hated by conservatives into existence and supported a state-subsidized health insurance program that by today's standards is to the Left of Obamacare).

I think that what has happened is this: today's "New" Left has given up on trying to be the movement or party that claims to defend the interests of the working and lower middle classes from abuses of corporations and finance. Sure, you get some traditional anti-capitalist rhetoric from Bernie Sanders and the "occupy Wall Street" clowns, but these are Democrats who haven't got the memo yet. The ones who are in with the program are fully in bed with big business (especially Silicon Valley) and Wall Street. Wall Street firms now give more money to Democrats than to Republicans, and every almost big name in Silicon Valley (Jobs, Cook, Zuckerberg, Bezos) is a big donor to Democrat causes.

The New Left has a symbiotic association with Big Business: in return for Democrats supporting "free trade", open borders (cheap labor), and agreeing to go along with Republican tax cuts and de-regulation, business elites are happy to play along with the cult of racial/cultural diversity, LGBTQXYZ issues, and radical feminism. Doing so costs them nothing financially. Similarly, Democrats decided to write off the working class (at least the white working class) in favor of pandering to racial and sexual minorities, which doesn't require old-school Left class warfare rhetoric (only racial warfare rhetoric, directed against whites) or supporting policies that impede the interests of big business and big finance in any way.

Good post. Paul Gottfried has said something similar in his books (which are better than his opinion pieces).

People who run Apple and people who complain bitterly about the labor practices of Apple's foreign contractors or the bonuses that corporations pay their CEOs can sound eerily alike on most political issues.

There's a lot of rhetorical and policy overlap between Wall Street and Silicon Valley Democrats on the one hand and progressive activist types on the other: diversity, feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ. People who run Apple and people who complain bitterly about the labor practices of Apple's foreign contractors or the bonuses that corporations pay their CEOs can sound eerily alike on most political issues.

The Silicon Valley/Wall Street Democrats will eventually succeed in completely marginalizing the few remaining prominent old school pro-working class Democrats. The way in which the Democrats will accomplish this is by portraying the American working and middle class as intrinsically reactionary and unfit for a political voice - they're too patriotic, too socially conservative on LGBT/feminist issues, too "racist" or "nativist", too opposed to "green" policies (i.e. "how dare these selfish jerks complain about rising gas and food prices when they should care about Mother Earth") etc. This means that eventually, any policies that benefit the working and middle classes, at least those who can't claim racial minority or some other collective victim status, will be seen as reactionary as well.

Fundamentally, this realignment of the elites with the Democrats is what the 2106 election was all about - the elites and their pet "minority" clients voted for Hillary, the working and middle class, including many people who previously voted for Democrats, supported Trump. Where else would they go when the implicit (and sometimes explicit) message to those voters from Democrats is "there's no place for you at our table."

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