Have we already reached peak leftism?

The current situation is most definitely a historical outlier. Go back a hundred years, and views that would now be considered way far out on the right were considered normal and natural among the cultural elite. I wrote a while back about Elbert Hubbard, the founder of the Roycrofters community of artists that flourished in the late 19th and early 20th century, who started out as a socialist and ended up as a champion of free enterprise. (Best quotation: “Prison is a Socialist’s Paradise, where equality prevails, everything is supplied, and competition is eliminated.”) At around the same time, two of the leading poets of the age—poets, mind you—were G.K. Chesterton and Rudyard Kipling, who would be considered howling reactionaries by today’s standards. Even later, Hollywood was filled with staunch conservatives like Cecil B. DeMille, who by happy coincidence ended up hiring a young Russian immigrant named Ayn Rand for his scriptwriting department. Ayn Rand would stay in Hollywood through the 1940s, spending a few years in between in New York City working as an assistant to a popular newspaper columnist (Isabel Paterson, who, along with Rand, would become one of the “founding mothers” of modern libertarianism). Not exactly what you would expect today.

So what happens if our culture reverts to the mean? Even a small change in that direction would be experienced as a massive cultural swing to the right.

When a field swings back from 95-5 dominance to just an 80-20 majority, that would be experienced as a quadrupling of the number of right-leaning voices in the field. Moreover, any such shift is likely to have a snowballing effect.