‘Dark Woke’ is nothing new
Ever in need of new narratives to feed into the bottomless abyss that is American political analysis, TikTok spelunkers and X addicts have delivered a new concept to be immediately overused and driven into the ground: “Dark Woke.”
It’s woke, but dark. Somehow, things get lamer from there. “As liberals try to get their groove back, some party insiders say Democratic politicians have been encouraged to embrace a new form of combative rhetoric aimed at winning back voters who have responded to President Trump’s no-holds-barred version of politics,” writes Jack Crosbie in the New York Times. “It requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.” Crass… but discerning! Rude…but only to a point! It’s as though Crosbie realized how pathetic his subject was halfway through writing the article.
The idea of “Dark Woke” descends from “Dark MAGA,” a neologism popularized in 2022 by figures such as Madison Cawthorn (remember him?) to describe online pro-Trump sentiment, except with online memes that looked like 1980s horror-movie posters instead of 1980s new wave album covers. Born in the heady days of 9 percent annual Bidenflation, “Dark MAGA” reflected the belief that a midterm Red Wave was so certain that Donald Trump’s base didn’t need to resort to the boring routine of actually appealing to people and could instead skip to gloating about their victory while sharing sinister-looking Photoshops.
As the Red Wave became the Red Trickle, America got “Dark Brandon,” a left-wing caricature touting the triumphs of the obviously enfeebled Joe Biden. Dark Brandon manifested in a variety of ways: sometimes Biden was shown with glowing red eyes. Other times he had glowing yellow eyes.
All of this is to say that, if past “dark” political aesthetics are anything to go by, “Dark Woke” will have a rude encounter with reality sooner rather than later. But the most likely outcome is everybody gets bored and moves on before there is any reckoning at all. Because “Dark Woke” is fake. Nothing new is happening.
Trawl the #DarkWoke hashtag on social media and the most authentically dark thing one can find is from an anonymous Trump hater celebrating the death, from cancer, of Representative Andy Biggs’s daughter. When it comes to public figures, what distinguishes “Dark Woke” from all eras of left-wing politics that came before is that, apparently, it sometimes encourages politicians to use swearwords or be a tiny bit irreverent. Former vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz brags that “the Fox News crowd is all just bitching at me like crazy.” Representative Robert Garcia says he’ll put a “dick pic” on full display, then pulls out a photo of Elon Musk. The Democratic party’s official Twitter mocks Pete Hegseth as a drunkard.
So what is new, exactly? This concept could only appeal to those with total amnesia regarding American politics. All the way back in 2017, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand made headlines with the profanity-as-authenticity move by telling a conference “If we are not helping people, we should go the fuck home.” In 2019, Politico analyzed Beto O’Rourke’s disappointing presidential campaign by asking “Can the F-Bomb Save Beto?” calling the Texas Democrat’s choice of words “a pungent sign of the times.” In 2019, an analysis found public uses of “fuck” by politicians on Twitter went from four in 2014 to 579 in 2018 (“shit” was even more popular, going from 22 to 1,166).
How does one make a ‘dark’ version of an ideology whose guiding principle was ‘the more fanatical, the better’
This goes beyond profanity. In the summer of 2018, Representative Maxine Waters called for the public harassment of members of the Trump administration, bleating to a crowd: “If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.” A few months later, demonstrators chased Senator Ted Cruz from a restaurant while haranguing him for his support of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. And speaking of Kavanaugh, was there nothing “dark” about trying to ruin a man’s life with flimsy, evidence-free sexual assault allegations in order to block a Supreme Court nomination?
After the Dobbs Supreme Court ruling that Kavanaugh signed on to, a man upset over it flew from California to the justice’s Maryland home, planning to murder him before losing his nerve and turning himself in at the last moment. Actually finding Kavanaugh’s home was no great difficulty: his address had been posted all over the internet, along with that of every other conservative SCOTUS justice, by irate leftists. Countless people openly expressed dismay that Kavanaugh was not, in fact, violently killed. Did this not count as “Dark Woke?”
Anyone who hasn’t comprehensively deleted every memory of the past eight years should realize it is nonsense to create a “dark” version of woke. It has always been a dark ideology. Its entire strength comes from indulging dark impulses. It takes ugly behaviors – wanton public destruction, ganging up en masse on someone weaker, extorting apologies and then rejecting them anyway – and tells the perpetrators they are actually righteous crusaders. How does one make a “dark” version of an ideology whose guiding principle was already “the more fanatical, the better?”
The truth is that for the past ten years, nothing has changed in American politics. Pick any moment since 2015 and odds are all of the following will be true: Trump is the central figure of all political discussion; Trump is being uncouth, and causing people to be uncouth in response; Trump is making wild posts online that offend and surprise people but are also funny; Trump’s foes are comparing him to Hitler and his supporters to Nazis; some Democrat is a rising star in the party based on some kind of publicity stunt; the media believes Trump’s campaign/presidency is on the brink of collapse due to scandals/bad polling numbers/indictments; the collapse never actually comes; Lindsey Graham wants to bomb Iran.
All of this will be the same six months from now. It will be the same three years from now. The defining feature of the Trump era is not radical change. It is stasis.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2025 World edition.
