Gramsci developed the concept of cultural Hegemony in his Prison Notebooks, as a method of explaining why communism has yet to come to the west. This was expanded to include hegemonic masculinity in Raewyn Connell’s Ruling Class, Ruling Culture published in 1977. Similarly, Critical Race Theory was also influenced by Gramsci and was developed in 1976 by Derrick Albert Bell Jr for use in studying law. Eventually it became part of its own cultural movement in 1989 with the development of Intersectional Feminism by Kimberle Crenshaw.

At this point in the 90s, the transition into third wave feminism was occurring, which was considered more niche and more aligned with the emerging queer community instead of mainstream culture like 2nd wave feminism. Most of the black and queer intellectuals building this movement were sharing writings with other intellectuals, so the subculture wasn’t really filtering out into the general proletariat beyond their students, who were usually at least queer-ally liberals (this also popularized the right-wing perception of schools as marxist, which is laughable because post-marxism has no teeth). Big-name theorists were often former civil rights activists or black panthers living in the shadow of the black nationalist movements in the 60s-70s. Like Gramsci, they were looking for explanations of the successes and failures of their movements as Reagan/Bush started locking that shit down in the 80s. The New Right and the re-popularization of Evangelical Christianity basically set the stage for how this would manifest in the 2000s.

Rainbow Capitalism has been around for a very long time. But was typically in the underground because businesses participating in LGBT culture were often subject to public derision and frequent police raids. After the Stonewall riots, this open discrimination relaxed, especially for white gays/lesbians but not so much for other groups. LGBT people in the 90s coming from middle class or wealthy families attained unprecedented purchasing power, and capitalists are always up to fill a new market. The first TV commercial featuring a gay couple aired in 1994 around the same time homosexuality was being officially decriminalized in most western countries.

In the 90s, queer people were still considered niche and politically unimportant. And black people were still basically ignored politically for the same reason as they are now. They had media presence and political lip service, but the 90s was also the era of the War on Drugs and new police crackdowns on the “rise of youth crime”.

All of these interlinking parts came together with the rise of the mainstream internet after the Iraq War. The Tumblr vs. 4chan conflicts, as insignificant as we think they are now, really created the current pop cultural splits we see now. Tumblr feminism inherited the intersectional feminism of the 90s and started experimenting with it. As more queer people became exposed to the subculture, things like neopronouns, fanfic culture, and CWs proliferated rapidly and filtered into the hegemonic liberal culture. Some stuff was great, some good, some bad, and some just plain weird. But generally what came out of it is a recognition among liberals that queer people were actually more common than everyone thought, and with the internet, queer people talked a lot.

Post-gamergate, you can get more insight from hbomberguy’s Woke Brands video. Around this time period, black culture was becoming undeniably mainstream (it always was, but it was always denied up until black culture got popular on the internet). So as all these different groups have come together, things have accelerated for adbucks. Controversial and group-splitting opinions are the thing to use social media for because it raises user engagement more than anything else. Corporations want you to disagree with other proletarians because the dissonance keeps your eyes on screens and splits you into a convenient advertising demographic. When you react to people saying bizarre purely ideological and ungrounded claims, the goal of the platform you’re posting on is not for you both to come to an amicable conclusion, but to be analyzed for how these ideologies translate to consumer behavior. And the govt plays along with this because these marketing splits in the proletariat are quite useful for shepherding voting blocs.

So, to summarize, what people call idpol now is literally just corporate market segmentation via cybernetics.

There is good and bad idpol. Good (Marxist) idpol is simply the recognition that while the proletariat as a whole is alienated and exploited, certain subgroups within the proletariat – women, ethnic/sexual minorities, etc. – are ultra-exploited. It is natural for members of these subgroups to organize on the basis of their identity. This is nothing new, and has always been the modus operandi of communists: see, for instance, women’s organizations in the Soviet Union. The important thing is that there be solidarity between the various groups, and that they be explicitly united by a proletarian interest; this was the basic idea of Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition.

Bad (liberal) idpol ignores the class aspect altogether, and tries to pit various groups against each other. It is thus opportunistic, and a bourgeois infiltration of Marxist tactics. Liberal idpol tends to foster an illusory sense of vertical solidarity: i.e., it tries to convince Jane the working-class single mother that because she and Hilary Clinton are both women, they share a common interest. Obviously this is nonsense, and leads to the “more female camp guards!” mentality that you find so often among liberals.