(2025-01-30) Rothpletz How Do Democrats Harness Dark Woke

Peter Rothpletz: How do Democrats harness #DarkWoke? 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 use 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

To borrow a term from Charlie Sykes, the “clown with a flamethrower” took aim at wokeness and set it ablaze.

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... 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-LGBTQ+ “groomer” moral panic, shared the video, declaring “another person Trump should sue”.
The congresswoman then retweeted Raichik, stating: “Oh, are you triggered? Cry more.”

birthed both a meme and a debate about Democrats’ approach to messaging for the next four years.

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.

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.

*It’s clear that Democrats’ current approach to messaging, however, is broken – and party leaders have no conception of how to fix it.

The most successful Democratic communicators are those who have made a concerted effort to reject risk aversion.*

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 the 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 was sandwich tutorial videos.

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

In response to the Trump administration’s move to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans, the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, should not have waited hours upon hours to finally issue a marble-mouthed, oddly sexual statement from behind a podium.

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.