"How much are folks like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi to blame for pushing Democrats to adopt unpopular identity politics that hurt us electorally?"

 I saw this question online and wanted to answer it here, as it is relevant to what got us to where we are.

Generally speaking, no, those activists are NOT responsible for the failures of the democratic party. The democratic party is responsible for the failures of the democratic party.

These were just weird hare brained activist sentiments until someone inside the democrats decided to mainstream them. And the person who is responsible is Hillary Clinton. It was HRC and her campaign that led to the rise of "woke" politics within the democratic party. The democrats elevated it because it offered a compelling counter narrative to Bernie Sanders and his democratic socialism. by arguing that Bernie and his voter base was "too white" and "too male", and "too privileged", the democrats found a way to attack him and his voters and unite a coalition of black activists, feminists, and LGBTQ+ people behind the democratic party. The democratic party itself didn't want to focus on economics. They wanted to discuss anything BUT the economic issues that plague us. So they elevated "woke" as a cudgel to browbeat people into line behind her. Keep in mind, in 2016, I was a "bernie bro", a college educated white male who actually understood actual ideas about how the economy worked and that made me bad or out of touch. And apparently I was "racist", "sexist", "privileged" and had to give up my core concerns on the altar of white male guilt and so called "electability" to endorse a centrist candidate who I had zero interest in and who didn't represent my politics. And that candidate lost to Donald Trump. 

  I noticed as early as Trump's first inauguration that "woke" was here to stay. It wasnt just a fad for the election. People were radicalized by it and were acting as if 2017 era Trump was as much of a threat as 2025 Trump is, claiming to be "anti fascist" and pushing their paradox of tolerance nonsense. The threat wasnt even apparent back then. Trump governed like a normal republican in his first term. Yeah, he was always this crazy in a way, BUT, he had an army of advisors who actually kept him in check. It wasn't until Trump lost in 2020 that he went off the rails and turned into the fascist he is today. Ever since then he got more authoritarian, dangerous, and started aligning himself with some very dark people. BUT...if we look at the rise of woke culture in the democratic party, it wasnt in response to trump's actual fascist shift. They were treating him as if he were a fascist back in 2017, and even back in 2015, when he came off as a relatively normal, if not rambunctious politician. 

From there, those guys just rose to prominence because of the zeitgeist that Clinton started. New atheism died, and "woke" replaced it. And everything became an insufferable hugbox on the left about race, gender, and sexuality and privilege, with BLM rising to prominance in 2020, and so much of the 2020 election cycle being dominated by race and gender. It was because of 2016. Clinton enabled those factions who were largely a bunch of terminally online weirdos before then, and by 2020, you couldnt NOT be woke in the democratic party and get anywhere. Bernie bent the knee. Yang didn't appeal to wokeism and was mostly ignored. And yeah. That's where this came from.

And while by 2024, the democrats started to distance themselves from this monster they created and just embrace full centrism, the stink of "woke" followed them, and this did contribute to the dems' loss.

Because let's face it, while this stuff played well within the democratic primary, it was deeply unpopular outside of it, and the core demographics it was intended to appeal to. Straight white male types were turned off massively by it, and if anything, many of them were driven to Trump, with some younger zoomers embracing a form of conservatism I would outright say is basically fascism or even nazism. Because 2016 created a contrast between Trump's brand of political incorrectness, and wokeness, with wokeness helping radicalize some to fascism. And now we DO got open fascists going around, who view "woke" as an existential enemy, and they're winning. We are losing...because of this stuff.

Basically the dems pushed a culture war they they couldnt win, because that brand of politics was inherently divisive and unpopular. I mean, sure, you gain an advantage with women, minorities, and LGBT, but then you lose support among whites, men, and straight people. And then you fail to even win over all of your target demographics consistently because eventually they realize all this crap is performative and the democrats dont actually do anything to make their lives better. And that's how we lost. The democrats couldnt even reliably turn out their own core demographics this strategy relied on, because they werent feeling the dems either. So this stuff appealed to no one.

But really, to go back to the question, is it Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X Kendi  responsible for this situation? No. They were nobodies until the democrats decided to elevate those ideologies and sentiments to win elections around them. Just like they ignored bernie, they ignored yang, etc. they could have ignored those kinds of people. The democrats CHOSE to elevate them. As such, they're the ones truly responsible for it. You can be a thought leader behind ideas but if no one takes you seriously, you arent gonna get anywhere. Just like I dont get anywhere because no one takes human centered capitalism and UBI seriously except for literally like 2% of the democratic party. If the people in power wanted to elevate those ideas, or elevate bernie and AOC and their ideas tomorrow, they would suddenly win elections based on them. But instead, they chose to ignore them.

You know, I didnt write an article about this because I was too tired at the time, but I saw an article someone else wrote not long ago arguing that wokeness was basically a psy op created to distract the left from more traditional left wing ideas. This "new left" was actually a creature of the 1960s, and it was designed as an "anti communist" program, which drew people away from labor activism and class politics and toward social justice. And we kind of saw it in play in 2016. If anything, the combination of wokeness combined with accusations that everyone else was a russian plant was that playbook at work. Because that's what this stuff was originally designed to do. People feared that the Soviets would influence American politics and push some machurian candidate to destroy America from within, and that this threat would come from the left, since, obviously, the far left aligns with communism. And Clinton used that playbook to attack both Trump and Jill Stein in her election campaign, which was why the democrats were obsessed with Russia.

Sadly, in a sense, Clinton was right, the russians did play the dissatisfaction on the left, while elevating trump in their own way to try to destabilize the US, because let's face it, the understood that trump was stupid and erratic. Still, can you see where this stuff was coming from? "Wokeness" was a tool used by the democrats to beat back the more traditional progressive economic left in order to distract people with a bunch of culture war nonsense. We shouldnt blame the activists who came up with these ideas, we should blame the democrats for giving these guys so much of a platform that that ideology became so dominant within the party. Things didn't have to go that way. They were artificially pushed that way by the democrats to avoid giving the progressive economic left their much deserved time in the sun.  

So yeah, that's my stance on that. The dems elevated wokeism to pull people away from a more productive economic left, and everything that's happened since is basically "blowback", to use a CIA term.