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Months, maybe. No backpedaling was happening until Trump won again, and I'm still not convinced it's happening.
Don Lemon was on Maher’s podcast and argued that character’s like AOC hold the future of the Democratic Party in their hands. I’ve seen this sentiment echoed elsewhere from other well connected democrat-operatives within the media.
It galls me that someone would believe that the democrats lost because they ran with candidates that cynically pushed woke talking points and instead the party’s future will be saved by candidates that actually believe those same woke talking points.
Whilst cynicism is always an ugly trait when trying to win hearts and minds, it was actually a point in favour in comparison to genuinely promoting wokism - at least from the perspective of your average voter.
The steelman of their theory of the case is that people like AOC combine both economic leftism with the identity politics.
So it's more the idea that the other wing of the party uses idpol cynically to appear more left-wing because it's not economically populist enough("will breaking up the big banks end racism?") to win. AOC meanwhile will deliver on the bread and butter issues people care about while soothing the idpol wing of the Democrats.
This theory might have made sense for Hillary. But Biden did subscribe to everything bagel liberalism and failed in spite (or because) of his economic populism.
Ultimately I think it's an attempt by Democrats to have their cake and eat it too. They have no real way to untangle themselves from their identity politics. It's the belief system of too many educated, politically engaged liberals. Bernie bent to it because you can't run a campaign if the Voxs of the world are attacking you for being anti-immigrant because you think they lower blue-collar wages and all of the people who volunteer, who donate and call in all have the same politics.
So the theory is to simply bypass the problem: if Democrats provide healthcare, housing and jobs they won't have to choose and can just drag the working class along with them. The culture war is a "distraction", in the sense that their views should not be compromised on but that the opposing views are obviously not as important to their opponents as material conditions.
Obvious problems are that this is assuming that their cultural beliefs don't hurt their ability to deliver (@johnfabian has pointed out the issues in left-wing urbanism which simply needs to resolve its issue with things like endless vetos and crime to go anywhere). And that their very refusal to bend on these issues gives the lie to the idea that it's all just ephemera. If they won't bend despite the incentives to do so, why should their opponents?
It's some cargo cult attempt to recreate an FDR coalition in an age of identity politics with pseudo-Marxist handwaves that no one actually consistently holds to.
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She’s enough of a snake that when it comes time to embrace a different message she will not skip a beat.
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