How do Democrats harness #DarkWoke?

The Guardian

30-01-2025

As Donald Trump stood in the Capitol Rotunda last week, blundering his way through his second oath of office, online liberals were preoccupied with debating another matter: who will be the first Democrat to call Republicans the R-word? Setting aside the question of whether they should a term widely considered an ableist slur, that very debate was revealing, for a number of reasons.
The former and now current president's narrow but nonetheless triumphant victory in November made clear that America's so-called 'wokeness movement' is in an advanced stage of decay. And if Trump's first week back in the White House serves as any indication, he intends to further accelerate the process.
During his inaugural address, he vowed to 'end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life'. The days to follow saw him make good on that pledge. He issued an executive order terminating 'illegal DEI' throughout federal agencies, revoked a Johnson-era anti-discrimination hiring rule, and threatened government workers with 'adverse consequences' if they don't snitch (in a Stasi-esque fashion) on colleagues who resist his purge.
Corporate America took notice and quickly followed suit. On Friday, Target announced it would roll back its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, joining other commercial giants like Walmart, McDonald's, Amazon, and Meta. This is not all too surprising; big business has nakedly, if not erotically, signaled its willingness to accommodate Trump since the day after the election. What's more curious is the lack of pushback from Democrats. Sure, MSNBC was sent into a tizzy; however, as noted by the National Review, an open letter promising to protect DEI from state-level Democratic lawmakers managed to garner a mere 39 signatures. For context, there are 7,386 state legislators in the US.
To borrow a term from Charlie Sykes, the 'clown with a flamethrower' took aim at wokeness and set it ablaze. Some will be overjoyed by this reality; many others will be devastated by its consequences. However, what's most interesting is how it seems an offshoot of the social movement has already emerged from the ashes.
On the morning of inauguration day, #DarkWoke began trending on Twitter/X. The hashtag – ostensibly a tongue-in-cheek reference to 'Dark Brandon' – emerged in reaction to an exchange between the Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the far-right influencer Chaya Raichik.
Over the weekend, Ocasio-Cortez posted an Instagram Reel in which she explained her lack of interest in attending any inaugural festivities. 'I don't celebrate rapists,' she says bluntly. Raichik, whose social media account @LibsofTikTok is widely recognized for proliferating the anti-LGBT 'groomer' moral panic, shared the video, declaring 'another person Trump should sue'.
The Congresswoman then retweeted Raichik, stating: 'Oh, are you triggered? Cry more.' The post accrued more than 17m views, and in the process it birthed both a meme and a debate about Democrats' approach to messaging for the next four years.
From 10,000 feet, #DarkWoke appears to be little more than an internet exercise of dirtbag left gallows humor. The most viral tweet associated with the hashtag reads 'my Grandma voted for Trump so i made sure she fell down the stairs.' Attached to the post is a – presumably – staged photo of an elderly white woman recoiling in pain.
Another example pairs an image of the Philadelphia Flyers' official mascot, Gritty, waving a Pride banner with the caption: 'When he bludgeons homophobes with that flag that's #DarkWoke.' One could dismiss the whole affair as black-pilled shitposting – aimless, nihilistic musings from a despairing online left. It would be a mistake for Democrats to come to this conclusion.
As Ezra Klein argued in an essay last fall, 'disinhibition is the engine of Trump's success. It is a strength. It is what makes him magnetic and compelling on a stage. It is what allows him to say things others would not say, to make arguments they would not make, to try strategies they would not try.' Disinhibition, Klein asserts, is Trump's primary trait as a person; he acts in front of a camera just as newly minted defense secretary Pete Hegseth does after a triple cocktail breakfast.
Over the course of the Trump era, the president has forcibly installed disinhibition as the primary trait of the Republican party. #DarkWoke is a demand for Democrats to embrace it too; it's a call for the party to fight the messaging war that actually exists, not the one they wish existed.
Should liberals start using slurs? No – and anyone who seriously entertains such a question has no business crafting comms strategy. It's clear that Democrats current approach to messaging, however, is broken – and party leaders have no conception of how to fix it.
At a Senate Democratic luncheon last week, Cory Booker attempted to walk his colleagues through strategies to reach voters in the modern media environment. According to reporting from CNN, the best model they could come up with was a video of Senator Mark Warner making a tuna melt. Yes, in the same week Bishop Mariann Budde enjoyed a 72-hour news cycle for summoning the courage to call Trump a bigot to his face, Democratic lawmakers decided the secret to electoral success is sandwich tutorial videos.
On a New York Times podcast earlier this month, MSNBC host Chris Hayes attempted to explain the fundamental asymmetry that exists between Democrats and Republicans with regard to the 'attentional ecosystem'. Democrats, Hayes argues, 'still believe that the type of attention you get is the most important thing. If your choice is between a lot of negative attention and no attention, go for no attention … the Trump side of the Republican Party believes that the volume, the sum total of attention, is the most important thing. And a lot of negative attention: not only fine – maybe great.'
The Democrats who have emerged as the most successful communicators in the last few years – Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, Senator Chris Murphy, Senator John Fetterman, and the aforementioned Ocasio-Cortez – are those who made a concerted effort to reject this conventional risk aversion. They curse, they go on Fox News, and they're extremely aggressive in calling out their conservative counterparts. They've renounced the long Democratic tradition of bringing not a knife to a gun fight but a butter knife to a bazooka fight. Their messaging reflects the urgency of this moment.
In response to the Trump administration's move to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, minority leader Chuck Schumer should not have waited hours upon hours to finally issue a marble-mouthed, oddly sexual statement from behind a podium. No, the most talented Democratic communicators should have been immediately deployed to nursing homes and pre-schools in their respective districts. They should have taken to Instagram Live and decried – with F-bombs aplenty – the utter inhumanity of throwing the future of Medicaid and Head Start into doubt.
Maga's approach to media strategy is shock and awe, overwhelming and all-consuming. It's border czar Tom Homan riding along with armed ICE agents with film crews in tow. It's cosplay, yes – but it's darkly captivating cosplay. Democrats cannot beat that with a counter-strategy as well thought-out and executed as the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
In Trump's America, disinhibition and transgression – not tuna melts – are the most powerful signifiers of authenticity. #DarkWoke is a plea for liberals to recognize this reality.
Peter Rothpletz is a freelance writer