For about five years the progressive movement built an elaborate architecture of language rules, speech codes, and behavioral norms that it described as accountability and its opponents described as censorship, and which accomplished the notable feat of producing a political environment in which the right grew more powerful while the left became very careful about what it said. That architecture is now being actively demolished by the people who built it, and they have named the demolition Dark Woke.
Slate defined Dark Woke in February as “a social covenant that allows for liberals to be extra mean to conservatives, by encouraging a style of animus that deliberately crosses the red lines previously established within the progressive orthodoxy.” The red lines previously established included not mocking people’s physical appearance, not using language designed to demean, and maintaining a certain temperature of political discourse that the left described as modeling better behavior and which turned out to model nothing at all. The new approach involves a Democratic Party X account accusing Stephen Miller of being cuckolded by Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth being mocked specifically for his drinking rather than his policies, and a Virginia attorney general who won his primary after fantasizing on camera about the death of MAGA-born children, which would have ended a political career in 2019 and in 2026 is described as “remaining competitive” and then winning.
The same energy produced Mamdani saying “Inshallah” on election night specifically because he knew what it would do to Breitbart, and the Maine Democratic Party nominating a Senate candidate with a Nazi tattoo who says it was a mistake, and three congressional primary challengers winning on platforms that the progressive movement’s old rules would have required to be more carefully worded. The old rules were careful. The old rules produced a 30-seat House majority loss in 2010 and a historic Senate defeat in 2014 and a presidency that ended with Joe Biden stepping aside because the party that had spent years policing its own language could not protect its own candidate.
Christopher Rufo, who built the anti-woke intellectual infrastructure and named the phenomenon so that the right could fight it, is now watching the thing he named shed the characteristics that made his framing work. His X post this week described the shift as moving “from ‘woke’ to Third-Worldism,” which is his new pejorative for the movement that has stopped caring about his pejoratives. When the movement stops caring about the name you gave it, the name has lost its power. Rufo’s framing is now primarily useful to the people he was trying to stop.
The original woke movement had rules. It cared about its reputation. Dark Woke has concluded that caring about your reputation in the opposition’s media is the thing that built the opposition’s media.
When the progressive movement stops following the rules it wrote because the rules stopped working, which movement actually needed the rules?
Sources
Slate: A New Version of Woke Is Coming. Conservatives Aren’t Going to Like It
The Intercept: Democrats Must Move Left or Become Irrelevant
Raw Story: AOC’s answer on running for president leaves political world speechless
