That’s a very naive reading, pretending all that is happening is because of Twitter flame wars.

It may appear so, because that’s how the actors involved use social media, but it’s not caused by it.

What caused it are the journalists that moved their work from on the ground reporting to on the twittersphere reporting. Rather than go out and see what people feel, they decided they could just sit at home and browse twitter as a stand-in replacement for public sentiment.

This gave an enormously disproportionate voice to the fringe groups that had long been deeply entrenched in the online space.

The Democratic Party lost to Trump, not "the left" and they lost based on either: not opposing the genocide in Gaza or because even ostensibly progressive voters won't vote for a black woman; there's only two data driven possibilities and neither of them is "culture war/identity politics has just gone nauseatingly overboard"

and of course the idea that the Republican Party hasn't been running on "identity politics" would require a wilful ignorance and complete lack of thought about any of their campaigning in the last few decades.

Most people didn't actually care about the culture war and wanted to focus on the economy. Unfortunately those people also failed to absorb the fact that the fast-talking grifter was in fact grifting them into supporting him by lying that he is a master of the economy.

The democrats losing support of hispanics, blacks, and men under 50 in the 2024 election is directly a function of the culture war.

If you insist on using the term "Latinx" and every Latino tells you that you are a self righteous idiot, listen to them. If you run the slogan "defund the police" despite inner city populations being the most in favor of police funding, listen to them. If you push the phrase "toxic masculinity" while young men move to the right in droves, listen to them.

And if your response to this is "That's not what those terms mean!", taking a marketing 101 class.

Having met several of them, the people who use terms like latinx, toxic masculinity, and defund the police aren't even democrats and hold almost as much antipathy towards them as they do towards republicans.

The polls speak for themselves. Why would hispanics suddenly be turning on Trump? Is he now pushing latinx himself or is he actually not good at the things he claimed he was gonna be good at?

Polling on the issues: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-t... https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-...

Recently support polling: Latinos - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/03/somos-votanes-poll-...

>Having met several of them, the people who use terms like latinx, toxic masculinity, and defund the police aren't even democrats and hold almost as much antipathy towards them as they do towards republicans.

Yes, and the Democrats throw away elections trying to cater to these people because the media dramatically overstates their relevance.

I don't think you realize that the Culture War is originating from the Right, and that it's a tar trap for those on the Left.

More so, that the whole point of this War is to foster anger and division, so that we squabble amongst ourselves rather than the elite who own us all.

I don't think that's quite right. I think over the last 10 years a lot of the anti-corporate energy of Occupy Wall Street has been funnelled - by means of the culture war - into "identity" issues that have little potential to harm corporate power or profits. I would argue that this did not originate on the right or left but was the result of a political class that's beholden to endless donations.

To me, one really clear example of this is immigration. As recently as 2016, Bernie Sanders was saying that mass immigration is a Koch Brothers strategy for keeping wages low[1]. I think he was right. But the left has been cajoled away from this position over time because it had the potential to harm their corporate donors.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0

> I don't think that's quite right. I think over the last 10 years a lot of the anti-corporate energy of Occupy Wall Street has been funnelled - by means of the culture war - into "identity" issues that have little potential to harm corporate power or profits. I would argue that this did not originate on the right or left but was the result of a political class that's beholden to endless donations.

No disrespect, but that makes no sense.

This version of the Culture Wars have been with us for decades. Before the Trans Panic™ there was the Gay Panic. Abortion was a non-issue (even for Republicans) until they realized they could rally the troops around dead babies. And racism? That's been part of the very fabric of the US since the beginning.

Immigration has been well-documented in how waves of newcomers have been despised until a generation later when they're settled in and they can turn around and hate on the new crop (Irish, German, Italian, etc). Hating newcomers is a veritable tradition.

As to the donor class etc, yes, the Democratic Elites are looking after the elites and not the people (shocking!), but it doesn't mean rank and file Democrats are that way (note: I am not a party member).

The "both sides are the same" bit has traditionally had a fair amount of truth in that (the elites thing), but now that the GOP is the Party of Trump that can longer be said.

I don't buy this. Both parties have flaws. The Republicans under Trump don't understand economics, are willing to cut our benefits while still increasing the deficit, are willing to fire disproportionately veterans (who are disproportionately in federal jobs), are willing to let corrupt people walk free and avoid trial, are willing to crypto scam their own supporters, and are willing to make us a pariah state so we can keep supporting Israel.

And Democrats are nauseating about identity politics.

Voters get what they vote for, and they voted for this and now they are suffering. The mental calculus here has to change or it will just get worse

You’ve bought into a completely wrong take here. This is not at all what happened. The media kowtows to Trump and the GOP at every opportunity, and has helped create this nonsense CW you are parroting. Twitter is overrun with bots and full-on racism and Nazism and you’re saying Dems bowed to that? You have been fooled.

He meant the "formerly twitter crowd". In my interpretation, he means the outspoken social justice crowd that was trying to institute a McCarthy-esque purge of all that is racially/socially offensive.

Both your point and his can be correct