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It’s official — the cringiest Democratic phrase of 2025 is “dark woke.”
Brat Summer, indeed, is over. No need to hear aging pundits contemplating the nature of Brat and what it all might mean for a British pop star to casually endorse Kamala Harris. Brat, with its bright, irreverent greens, is last year’s aesthetic. Now it’s all about dark woke, which is, if the media coverage is to be believed, all about Democrats cursing.
“It’s an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing,” the New York Times recently reported. “And it requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.”
The rationale is simple: Donald Trump ended political civility as we know it, and it’s time to get tough and be “real.” Some Democrats, like Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett, can adopt the posture with success because it seems authentic enough; they have the natural charisma to capture imaginations. Crockett called Greg Abbott, the wheelchair-bound Republican governor of Texas, “Governor Hot Wheels” and famously clashed with Marjorie Taylor Green, trading insults on the House floor that included the phrase “bleach blonde bad-built butch body.” Crockett is now a liberal darling and even made an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel.
The general profanity from other Democrats — the growing number of “fucks” and “shits” on the campaign trail and in online messaging — is wearying. Trump doesn’t seem authentic just because he curses occasionally; he retains a certain amount of gravity, even as his popularity slides, because few voters doubt he is the same person onstage that he is when he’s at dinner. There is one Trump, and he is never scripted.
It’s fine, of course, to have scripts. Trump is a WWE Hall of Famer, and no Democrat should be expected to ape that act. The real trouble with dark woke is that it’s a plainly false, calibrated attempt at gritty authenticity. It doesn’t mean anything or stand for anything. It’s not as if Bernie Sanders, drawing tens of thousands of people to his rallies against oligarchy, ever needs to drop an F-bomb to get his audiences excited. They come out for Sanders because they believe in his politics and vision and know he’s been an honest broker on the political scene for more than 30 years.
Sanders, unlike Trump, does not lie with impunity. But what he does share with Trump is the sense that he is who he is, regardless of the context or even the era. Profanity can be a political asset if it’s clear that this is how you’d always talk — either in front of a crowd or at home with friends. But it’s awkward and alienating when politicians decide, suddenly, they must dispense with decorum to catch up to Trump or appear, somehow, more prole-like.
The Democrats might recover somewhat with working-class voters in the short-term because Trump’s return to power has been so destabilizing. Trump is, in the interim, solving some of the Democrats’ messaging problems. But anti-Trump politics, as we learned in the 2010s, will only get a party so far. Democrats will need to figure out how to compete and win in the rural states that have swung so hard to the GOP. Republicans will lock down control of the Senate for the foreseeable future unless Democrats can win again in states where their brand is deeply damaged.
Can dark woke get the Democrats a Senate seat back in Ohio? What about Montana? Will enough name-calling put the Democrats in the mix in Missouri? It’s unlikely. A tough-talking affect is just that: an affect. It can work for a few politicians, but it’s a loser as a serious strategy for breaking through. Winning House, Senate, or presidential elections will be about policy, culture, and image; Democrats will have to convince the bulk of Americans that they should be trusted to help them live more affordable lives. They’ll have to become a mass party again with a tent large enough to include the voters who believe they lost the plot a long time ago.
At best, dark woke is a cheap trick. It offers shock value and allows Democrats to think they can suddenly make the Joe Rogan and Theo Von fan bases trust them again. But those kinds of voters — young, male, and politically heterodox — aren’t hunting for garden-variety Democrats who belch out “fuck” and “damn” every once in a while. Two Democrats who did, for a brief period, win them over were never known for their profanities: the aforementioned Sanders and Andrew Yang, who ran for president in 2020 and is no longer a Democrat. Sanders had Medicare for all and free college; Yang backed universal basic income, along with decriminalizing drugs and data-privacy rights. Like Sanders, Yang never seemed too practiced, and he cultivated a following that was drawn to his earnestness. There was nothing to fake. It’s a lesson all the 2028 candidates should take to heart. Find out who you are and be that person.
