You thought Democrats already made being rude and obnoxious their party platform? Well, get ready for “dark woke” — the double-down no one asked for, least of all the easygoing centrists Democrats will have to win back in the midterms.
The New York Times introduced the term, previously confined to the web, to a wider audience last week in a strategy piece detailing how Democrats plan to “push back against Trump.” It’s “Dark Brandon” — then-President Biden’s antagonistic alter ego Democrats tried and failed to meme into existence during the 2024 race — replicated at scale. Party insiders are reportedly telling members to step “outside the bounds of political correctness” and “embrace a new form of combative rhetoric” with an eye toward future races.
Of course, this doesn’t mean embracing the politically inconvenient truths most voters yearn for — say, admitting a woman is a biological human female. Instead, “dark woke” is about being “crass,” “rude,” and even “swearing” as a “shortcut to authenticity.” Case in point: Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, calling her state’s disabled governor, Greg Abbott, “Governor Hot Wheels.”
Basically, the plan is to replicate what Democrats believe to be the entirety of Donald Trump’s political appeal — performative cruelty — by accepting the difficult but necessary choice to finally abandon the ostensible high road they’ve taken these past 10 years. It’s a basic hero story, the good guys learning to get their hands dirty to defeat the villain. But this self-flattering premise is packed with faulty assumptions, and it’s bound to fail before it even escapes its own echo chamber.
Democrats seem to believe the fairytale they tell about themselves. “When they go low, we go high,” Michelle Obama famously said in 2016, a slogan that has since defined the party’s collective internal monologue. In this formula, being “woke” is just basic human decency: caring about “equity,” human dignity, etc. — what good people do. In truth, however, there’s very little difference between “woke” and “dark woke.” Both require going on national television and calling me, you, and anyone else who thinks like we do Nazi-fascist-domestic-extremists. Last time I checked, that’s still pretty “rude,” and given that it’s a cynical lie, it’s certainly not taking the high road. Yet if you truly believe you’re the victim of your own moral backbone, then “dark woke” becomes a workable strategy.
“Republicans have essentially put Democrats in a respectability prison,” Bhavik Lathia, a Democrat communications strategist, explained to the Times.“There is an extreme imbalance in strategy that allows Republicans to say stuff that really grabs voters’ attention, where we’re stuck saying boring pablum.”
In truth, it’s the party’s own self-conception that limits them. Democrats created this “respectability prison,” where ideas like voter ID and border security become wildly unacceptable, in order to attack and delegitimize Republicans. They can’t pivot and adopt the policies of the “bad guys;” all they can do is dig in while tweaking the messaging strategy to appeal to what they think voters want to hear.
Although here, too, Democrats are wildly off-base. Their Avengers-style moral framework doesn’t stop at their self-conception but extends to their foes as well, preventing them from seeing that Trump and his voters have more complex motivations than pure malice. Voters respond to Trump not because they think he’s mean, rude, crass, or any of the other negative characteristics Democrats see in him. They respond because he speaks to genuine concerns that elite Democrats (and many Republicans) have ignored for decades. And he treats the harmful, often fabricated, issues favored by the swamp with the scorn they deserve. This isn’t “dark”-anything, it’s just telling the truth.
In other words, Trump’s crass persona doesn’t make him sound authentic; he sounds authentic because he isn’t filtering his naturally crass persona. And he’s doing it with what millions of people see as their interests in mind. Simply copying an “authentic” style without anything authentic to back it up is unlikely to pay dividends for Democrats. Most people won’t notice any difference between “woke” and “dark woke.” They’ll just hear some old scolding.
Dropping an extra F-bomb into already heightened left-wing rhetoric might fire up some blue-haired types, but it won’t do much to alleviate normal voters’ “exhaustion” with politics altogether. If you’re a centrist voter who likes Trump’s policies but not his style, you won’t be won over by similar talk from Democrats. And if you already love Trump, then further rudeness (at your expense, no less) won’t finally make you see the leftist light. Perhaps “dark woke” is really just about driving turnout among a disenchanted base, but even the far-left radicals likely won’t be moved. These true-believers want to see the guillotine return to politics, a final solution for racists and fascists. They want action and won’t be moved by a simple messaging strategy.
“Dark woke” represents a failing party’s desperate attempt to refuse to look in the mirror. If the Democrats won’t give up their moral fantasy, then all they have left is to double down.
Delusions of grandeur certainly go hand in hand with politics, but in this case, no messaging strategy can dig Democrats out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves. Yet they can dig in even deeper, and with midterms still over a year away, they have plenty of time to do it.
This is not a very difficult thought: on the contrary, it is obvious. The question then becomes: Why do so many people seem to take no notice of it when they claim to be offended by discrimination against people of any kind?
