Feminist Carol Hanisch declared "the personal is political" (
pdf) and argued that there were no "personal solutions" for the things she considered problems, thus "personal therapy" could not solve them and what she needed was for the whole country to get "political therapy". She does so with a bit of commie flavoring saying "all women are workers" and that "women, blacks, and workers" need to stop blaming themselves for their sad situations, that "there is only collective action for a collective solution".
As an aside, this is part of why "personal responsibility" is "far right".
This morphed into (or maybe caused) radical feminism's belief that being a housewife is immoral: the personal is political, and your personal decision to live a family life is reinforcing the patriarchy and therefore your actions are hurting women as a whole. As a woman you have a duty to women in general to advance politics through your personal life. This was the end of feminism as "we just want women to be able to choose", though of course feminists still trot that out as their motte when they're equivocating over how feminism is unobjectionable.
This becomes everything is political. If everything is political then everything is advancing some political agenda, and if it isn't their politics then it is different (enemy) politics. So we get to the "if you're not actively for us then you're against us and an enemy". This is a double edged sword. The ideology can wring more out of useful idiots who believe it (who will work longer hours to advance the cause). Also the ideology can galvanize its useful idiots against normies (who aren't actively advancing the politics and are therefore defending evil politics). But in so doing you get that comic where "the left" shoves a guy in the center to "the right" and then gets mad at him for being on the right (which I can't find right now...).
This is also where you get Anita Sarkeesian "everything is sexist, everything is racist, everything is homophobic, and you have to point it all out." Or maybe not, it's a bit weird to actually say "if it's not homophilic then it's homophobic", though I can recall instances where people seem to truly believe that.
As an aside, there's a bit of irony when self-declared "anti-fascists" end up in the same place as fascists with the statement "all within the state... nothing outside the state." I'm not sure it's really horseshoe theory though, it's more like intentionally lying about the name, like when the most evil government laws have nice fluffy innocuous names.
Anyway, as a philosophical and ideological weapon it's the demand that all of your actions must advance their politics all of the time. It fits perfectly with propaganda, and it's a useful weapon against politics-free escapism. After all, if you aren't advancing their politics then you're advancing evil, and you wouldn't want your escapism to be evil, would you? Propagandists love it because the whole point is to constantly bombard people to make them feel isolated and alone, so they love having a weapon to argue that yes, escapism must advance the politics or it's evil and *must* be "fixed".
It's why we can't have nice things, it's why we have a culture war we don't want, it's why the activists are constantly trying to infiltrate everything, and why once they're there they compulsively try to shit all over everything. Because they are true believers in the ideology and the ideology says everything is political. It's also why grifters latch onto it, because there is a ready group of useful idiots that will give them money to advance the cause, to "do the work" because the goal isn't necessarily to do quality work, it's to make sure there's no escape, you are isolated and alone and only you think this is weird or wrong, you wouldn't be an evil person who is actively advancing evil politics would you?
