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This already happened with 'racist', which was replaced with 'white supremacist' around 2021. Nazi is just the next word on the euphemism treadmill
Rather than "replaced," I see it more as "flattened & equated." In the 00s, when you called someone a White Supremacist, it meant something more than just being the type of "racist" who might laugh at some offensive joke or something. In the 10s - far before 2021, by my observation - White Supremacist became one of many "correct" terms to refer to the latter type of person.
This is because it around then that the whole "racism is prejudice plus power" definition broke out into the mainstream, which put forth that racism wasn't merely treating an individual unfairly on the basis of their race, it was being part of a structure that oppressed black people and other people of color (specifying whites and white-adjacents as not capable of being subject to racism). As such, all racism was declared as a part of White Supremacy, and thus some random 4 year old with no understanding of race or racial history who shows any distaste for anyone with dark skin is exactly as much of a White Supremacist as Nathan Bedford Forrest. And Forrest was exactly as racist as that 4 year old, no more, no less.
Around the same time, I saw the same thing happening with "sexism" and "misogyny." In the 00s and before, the latter term was understood to mean someone with a true, unambiguous antipathy for women as women, and "misandry" as the reverse. But because "sexism" was declared a part of being of the misogynistic patriarchy, it was deemed that some 4 year old saying "girls are icky" is exactly as much of a misogynist as Andrew Tate. And Tate is exactly as sexist as that 4 year old, no more, no less.
It's not without reason that people often peg the "Great Awokening" to ~2014. I don't know how the literal President of the United States can be an underappreciated contributor to social trends, but nevertheless--I think that President Obama's direct impact on the federal bureaucracy was to replace broadly egalitarian neoliberal political machinery with explicitly identitarian political machinery.
This article also has empirical data on the explosion of identitarian propaganda in the news media beginning with Obama's first term in office.
More specifically, Obama tried to run / reorganize the government like a Chicago political machine, without the experience in federal-level and federal-system politics to understand why a federation with the continental scale of the United States can't run on the model of an city scale political machine, identarian or not.
There's a... I don't want to say 'reputation,' and I don't have a series of studies to point at either, so I'll just say a [reputation] of rising politicians who go from thriving in lower-level politics to tripping at higher levels because they go from being big fish in small ponds to working in an ocean of interests that aren't so easily corralled. In a city like Chicago, you can capture the local judiciary easily enough that extorting corporations to donate to your city machine supporters as a settlement deal is not only feasible, but self-reinforcing. At the federal level, there are too many established judges across too many jurisdictions with too many Congressional interest hooks to get institutional capture in a mere administration. Without that capture, such an effort becomes a destabilizing, rather than reinforcing, effort for security political primacy. Similar dynamics of inexperience played out in other Obama pushes, such as trying to push / pass the Iranian JPCOA as a purely executive authority fait accompli without bipartisan buildup.
The Obama administration did lean into identarian politics, both privately and publicly via media allies. And it did so in part because that was how Obama could displace and supersede the Clinton wing of the party, which had been the more egalitarian neoliberal political machine that replaced the prior, labor-based political machine that had tension with the Clintons and was neutered following things like the anti-WTO riots.
But the identarian versus neoliberal system friction was mostly internal party politics. The broader national political friction came from the new, inexperienced wing trying to apply a political machine model to a scale where it couldn't work, because they didn't have the relative primacy a political machine needs to operate with such impunity. While Obama himself was popular, the Democratic machine had already taken the drubbing as early as his first election, and even had Clinton won in 2016 she would have ended up in the White House with both the House and the Senate in Republican hands.
...isn't this just the Peter Principle as applied to politics?
Not quite. Peter Principle is the 'raise to your level of incompetence.' This is more of an inexperience issue, which is not the same thing.
Even competent people need time to adjust to new contexts and surroundings. Their ability to do so rapidly is the proof of their competence, but during that period they still make mistakes as they recalibrate expectations.
The point I am trying to make is that Obama was simply new to the federal government. When he won the presidency, he was still a first-term senator. He hadn't gone through a re-election cycle as a Senator to get a sense of how Congress persons needed to stay in touch with their constitutents (possibly part of why he was taken by surprise by the post-Obamacare shellacking), or the dynamics of the presidency changing parties as seen from others in Congress (and thus what a defeated former ruling party could still do as the minority opposition), and he never had experience on the key committees. There were a host of relevant experiences he never had, not because of competence but because of time.
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2014 was the Michael Brown shooting where a criminal who resisted arrest by grabbing a policemans gun was transformed into a gentle giant backing away slowly saying 'hands up dont shoot'. Facts of the cases never mattered before but the unreality being canon is new.
Incidentally this was around the time Cops had a major network shift and stopped being "boys in blue chasing a black guy in a wife beater through picket fences". I can't definitively prove that this was a major factor in the great awokening but it sure seems related somehow.
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So probably backtrace to 2008 then. The backlash against Obama definitely had some racial undertones
The way I remember it, having been there and very leftist at the time, was a lot of the people around me saying we must vote for Obama because he is black and it's time to stop electing white men; that regardless of how one feels about him personally, the importance of electing a black man is paramount for other reasons.
If a primary movement has racial under and in this case overtones, it's not a surprise that the backlash does as well.
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