The progressive movement spent a decade building its identity on a specific claim: that it was kinder, more thoughtful, and more principled than the opposition. It called out cruelty. It modeled the behavior it wanted to see in the world. It wrote extensive documentation on what language was acceptable and what language was not. It did all of this while Donald Trump got elected twice, and a significant portion of the movement has concluded that the documentation was the problem.
“Dark Woke” is what Slate is calling the correction. The concept, per their February analysis that is circulating again this week, is a social covenant giving progressives permission to be as mean as conservatives, specifically by crossing the red lines that progressivism itself established. The Virginia attorney general won a primary after reportedly fantasizing about the death of MAGA-born children. The Democratic Party’s official X account accused Stephen Miller of being cuckolded. Kyle Kulinski posted AI images mocking JD Vance’s wife. Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner, whose tattoo resembles a white supremacist symbol, remains competitive partly on the logic that calling him a Nazi is Republican bad faith even though the tattoo does look like a Nazi symbol.
The theory behind Dark Woke is that modeling dignity in response to cruelty produced more cruelty. That being measured in response to extremism normalized extremism. So the prescription is: drop the pretense. Be as mean as they are. Win the way they win.
The problem is that this theory is the opposition’s argument, not the movement’s. The case against the right was always that cruelty as politics is bad, that it degrades the discourse, that it produces a public life nobody wants to live in. Dark Woke is the progressive movement agreeing that cruelty as politics is fine when your side is doing it. This is not a rebuttal to the right. It is a confession. The right’s argument was always that the left’s norms were never sincere. Dark Woke is proof.
The right is, by the way, genuinely delighted by this development. Nothing validates “they were always hypocrites” like publicly admitting to the hypocrisy.
When the correction to a movement that stood for decency is a movement that stands for being as indecent as the other side, what was the decency ever for?
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