Maybe not now. I wasn't alive for the Vietnam war but I remember saying anything bad about the Iraq war 2 was a quick way to get fired and a bunch of death threats for a few years. Now things have flipped, but you've got to keep in mind that attitudes change and people like to pretend they never supported viewpoints that have become unpopular.
Star Trek (1960s), MASH (1970s)—shit, the entire history of sitcoms that are regarded as decent-or-better is mostly just one fairly "political" series after another, going back to the earliest days of TV. I mean FFS today people'd probably complain that the first Star Wars movie (not just ROTJ, to which you allude) is "woke" because Leia's the only consistently-competent character out of the three leads, and is by far the least-whiny. "Boo! Why is the elite-educated noble woman who's also already deeply involved in an armed resistance so much cleverer and more-effective and cool under pressure than our farmboy hick hero who's away from home for the first time and wallowing in a whole pile of recent trauma and grief, and this random flaky braggart scumbag they picked up?"
Anyway, stuff like Dirty Harry or a bunch of traditional Westerns are extremely political in the same ways that "woke" movies are (presenting and normalizing certain roles and behaviors, presenting politicized views of history and of certain groups, ways of life, and attitudes, and using caricatures of their political opponents as bad guys), they're just not liberal so that means they "aren't political".
Hell, most of the silent films that were good enough that anyone still gives a shit about them are plenty political, and often (but not always) rather liberal.
> I mean FFS today people'd probably complain that the first Star Wars movie (not just ROTJ, to which you allude) is "woke" because Leia's the only consistently-competent character out of the three leads
Compare+contrast with 'The Last Jedi'. Turning the male characters into total idiots and sending them off on a massive wild goose chase, before the day is saved by completely breaking the physics of the Star Wars universe, making all the previous heroes look like idiots for not using a relativistic kill vehicle against the Death Star!
I don't remember hearing any complaining about strong female characters in the era of Leia, Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Major Kira, Susan Ivanova, and so on.
What has changed is not so much that writers' work is influenced by their politics. As you said, that has always been the case. What has changed is that writers these days don't recognize that their work needs to be a good work of art first, and a way to express their views second. They lack any skill in subtlety or nuance, so the work becomes little more than a soapbox for the writer that is off-putting to all but the most ideologically aligned audience.
I like to use Star Trek in the 90s as a good example of what I mean. While there are episodes where the writers got preachy (they're only human I suppose), most of the time the writers were very careful to not openly take sides on the issues they raised. Even if you got the sense that the writer for an episode might feel a certain way about the topic, the characters wouldn't tell the audience how to feel. They didn't call other characters who disagreed with them names. They didn't just bully their way to victory in the story. The topics were treated as complicated issues where reasonable adults could disagree.
Compare that to shows/movies/books today. The writers treat the story primarily as a vehicle to express their opinions on issues. They have characters tell people "this is how a decent person behaves", with the understanding that the message is really meant for the audience. They have characters who agree with them call their opponents bigots or worse insults. They portray said opponents as villains or morons who only hold their beliefs because of how evil/stupid they are. They have the "good guys" run roughshod over anyone who disagrees with them, and they get to win despite their bad behavior. And often, the writers (and even other people involved like actors) will openly express their contempt for their audience when speaking about the work. They pick fights where none needed to happen, saying stuff like "if you don't like this then I don't want you as an audience member anyway". They are, in short, bad writers who don't have the skill to successfully let their social views influence their work.
The result of all this is that these writers don't succeed at persuading anyone. In years past writers could actually make progress on advancing the things they believed in because they had the wisdom to not openly preach to people and call them names. They respected people enough to let them draw their own conclusions, and as a result were successful. But writers today aren't good enough to persuade people to continue breathing, let alone something more controversial than that.
There is also an uptick in how much politics get forced into art, with people trying to claim "everything is political" and the like. But that isn't nearly as big a factor as how bad today's artists are at using political themes in their work.
I think you'll find if you do a little research that Republicans use the idea of trickling down to justify their tax cuts. They even make the CBO change their accurate models to "dynamic scoring" models to help sell those tax cuts.
No, "trickle down" is just what the opposition called it.
"Political opponents of the Reagan administration soon seized on this language in an effort to brand the administration as caring only about the wealthy."
The argument was never that "tax cuts for the wealthy make it down to the middle class", it was supply side - lowering taxes gives people more money (in general) which stimulates economy activity.
Trying to justify stealing the election, then trying to rewrite history saying the other side broke stuff when they prostested is the laziest sort of whataboutism I've seen on this site.
Trump and his minons tried to undo the results of an election. An election he lost. Lost even while abusing his power as president (see his calls in Ukraine and Georgia as evidence).
Nobody on the left supports looters or rapists. If there is evidence someone committed a crime, prosecute them. Trump is the only person I know that supports rapists (see Epstien and Gaetz). He says if you are loyal to him, you don't have to face the consequences of your actions. That to me is what is most scary.
