In the 1980s, an art critic notes the establishment’s sharp turn to the left evidenced longing for the polarization of the 1930s:
For what we are now witnessing in this movement toward the politicization of art in this country is an attempt to turn back the cultural and political clock. And it is not to the radical counterculture of the Sixties that this movement looks back for its model and inspiration, despite the many resemblances it may bear to the outlook of the Sixties, but to the radicalism of the Thirties when so much of American cultural life was dominated by the hypocritical “social consciousness” of the Stalinist ethos. It is to a contemporary version of this old “social consciousness” that the protagnists [sic] of this political movement in the art world wish to confine the life of the artistic imagination. Hence the attacks on modernism and on such champions of the modernist aesthetic as Alfred Barr. For this new generation of radicals, it is the cultural life of the Forties and Fifties — when American art and literature finally vanquished the last respectable traces of the Stalinist ethos — that can never be forgiven. The Forties marked a great turning point not only in the history of American art but in the life of the American imagination, and any attempt to return American culture to the ideological straightjackets of the Thirties must inevitably attempt to discredit both the achievements and the values that belong to the post-World War ii period. Hence, too, the increasingly raucous attempts to dismiss the accomplishments of the Forties and Fifties as nothing more than the political products of the Cold War.
Kramer quotes Lionel Trilling: ‘…there was in the prevailing quality of the intellectual-political life a kind of self-deception: an impulse toward moral aggrandizement through the taking of extreme and apocalyptic positions which, while they seemed political, actually expressed a desire to transcend the political condition—which, as I saw things, and still do, meant an eventual acquiescence in tyranny.’
Hilton Kramer, ‘Turning back the clock: art and politics in 1984’, New Criterion
https://newcriterion.com/issues/1984/4/turning-back-the-clock-art-and-politics-in-1984