politics

The Fatal Flaw Of 'Dark Woke'

Mockery, not viciousness and mean-spiritedness, has proven far more effective in beating back autocracy

There was a time not too long ago – those alive in the summer of 2024 will recall – that the American political discourse revolved around Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance possibly knowing a couch in a biblical sense.

For a week or so, all political issues were subsumed by the viral social media meme about Vance, uh, loving a couch, if you know what I mean. It was all so stupid and undignified, so wildly unserious as to not seem real. In hindsight the Vance-couch meme seems more like a collective internet fever dream among millions of people with their brains hardwired into the ever-swinging cultural zeitgeist.

Every time you logged on, there they were, accounts big and small riffing ingeniously on Vance having some kind of sexual attraction to couches. This was deeply, terminally online shit, and it was glorious. It was one big stick of dynamite placed into the center of the attention economy, and when it blew – when it spread to every major platform – the right wing’s domination of that economy was, for a while, interrupted. Unaccustomed to being on the defensive, the right lashed out as one furious online entity: It screamed, “You can’t say that about JD Vance! It’s not true!”

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The invigorated left responded in one voice: “So what.” We had thrown off the shackles of decorum and truth and respectability politics that were long ago rejected by the American right and we had a little fun with some effective, goofy-ass messaging about the couch-curious Republican vice presidential nominee.

One night during the peak of the Vance-couch meme, my poor, old, mostly apolitical and extremely offline mom texted me to ask what was going on with all this JD Vance/couch stuff.

“Look mom,” I texted back, “when a man loves a couch, he wants to have special time with that couch. Private time.”

She replied with a frowning emoji and, thank god, we never talked about it again.

I think about this period of political optimism more than I should. It was a moment, as I wrote back in August – while Kamala Harris transitioned to the top of the Democratic Party ticket – that seemed to mark the end of anti-fascist forces cowering in constant fear of the Bad Man and his minions as they talked more and more like HGH-fueled supervillains with hair plugs and facelifts of varying quality. The fever had broken. We were mocking these guys endlessly, making fun of their pathetic, low-energy rallies, finally pointing out that they weren’t just deranged and ignorant and discriminatory, but weird, really fucking weird.

Their only response was to babble incoherently, brimming with impotent rage, hollering like children on the playground: I’m not weird, you’re weird. These little freaks were not so scary after all.

It was all so easy to execute. Why are you constantly talking about women’s fertility, you fucking weirdos? Why are you obsessed with menstrual cycles? Why can’t you stop talking about other people’s genitalia? Why are you losing your mind about kids reading books about gay folks? What is your deal with couches, JD? Leave the couches alone. They did nothing to you.

That all slipped away in the final few months of the 2024 election. The adults (well-paid consultants who have no real interest in winning elections) took over and urged everyone opposed to fascism to once again be afraid. The Harris campaign’s messaging changed drastically, mimicking that of Hillary Clinton’s doomed 2016 effort, and we got the message loud and clear.

We stopped laughing, stopped smiling, stopped dancing and having fun in the face of fascism, we stopped poking fun at the weird men, and we became afraid again. And they won.

The Woke Has Never Been Darker

We’ve seen some of that (mostly online) edge return in the past couple months in what has been labeled, for better or worse, the Dark Woke movement. If you can stop cringing long enough, consider Dark Woke a full embrace of the intolerant left meme – that thing where conservatives get hurt and worked up any time liberals push back with a little vitriol.

“What ever happened to the tolerant left,” they whine in bad faith.

Dark Woke says we’re mad and you’re bad and we want to make you feel bad about being bad. Dark Woke doesn’t run away from the “woke” label – a Civil Rights term weaponized by the right wing as an insult and a stand-in for various slurs – but instead says yes, I am woke because it’s good to be woke. If you don’t like that then fuck you. Sometimes Dark Woke involves downright harsh and mean spirited barbs aimed directly at the insecurities of prominent fascists like Marjorie Taylor Greene or wheelchair-bound Greg Abbott, who Jasmine Crockett once called "governor hot wheels."

It’s never easy for folks experimenting with this lefty edginess to be as freely and gleefully hurtful as their counterparts on the right, who can say anything about anyone at any time because they have the advantage of caring about nothing and no one. Nihilism is their shield. You can’t shame the shameless; you can’t force someone to feel bad when the whole point of their existence is to spread the suffering generated from within. The left, if it wants to right the wrongs of the American fascist movement and the country’s first dictator, can’t quite go all in on the nastiness unless they are to slide toward the nihilist mindset the far right so desperately wants them to embrace.

I don’t know if the Dark Woke thing is the answer to the American left’s messaging woes. Certainly it’s good to tell Americans who are horrified by today’s authoritarian takeover that there are activists and elected officials and regular folks who will fight back, not take the lame Third Way James Carville path of sitting back and doing nothing as entire branches of the U.S. government are stripped of their power, hoping increasing milk prices will destroy fascism once and for all (I’m paraphrasing; Carville’s plan is much stupider than this). Certainly the fascists in power need to know that they have vocal opponents who fully reject the fascist belief that democracy has run its course and they are inevitable.

Interrupting Republicans’ total domination of the attention economy is also a worthy goal of the Dark Woke folks among us. Using simple but caustic messaging to proclaim Republicans unfit and unworthy of ruling us is very much in line with what 2024’s “weird” attacks accomplished. Belittling conservative politicians and activists and grifty fascist influencers tells political normies that these people are unserious and illegitimate. This worked wonderfully on J.D. Vance after Silicon Valley techno-fascists picked him as Trump’s running mate: No one was going to take seriously a man who ached for the flesh of his couch.

The prospect of a Dark Woke tide in the political/cultural wars harkens back to a different time, decades ago in 2022, when liberals were smitten with the idea of Dark Brandon. Joe Biden, known as Brandon to a large swath of the broken-brained, right-wing news consuming population, had briefly toyed with the un-Democrat like concept of ignoring long-established norms and establishment sensibilities. The living embodiment of Washington’s toxic bipartisanship mused about taking executive action to improve the lives of working Americans and called Trump backers “semi-fascist.” It wasn’t quite true – there is no "semi" about it – but it was close enough for an establishment figure like Biden.

“They’re a threat to our very democracy,” Biden said in August 2022 after a half century of putting in a good-faith effort to negotiate with right-wing senators who had no intention of playing along with him. “They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace political violence. ... In this moment, those of you who love this country ... we must be stronger, more determined and more committed to saving America than the MAGA Republicans are to destroying America.”

I fell for it, and I hate that I did. I thought Biden, who made no real efforts to lure Republicans to his side during the 2020 presidential race, understood the moment and its stakes. I thought we had a president who grasped how important it was to be truthful with Americans about what they could lose if they slid back into the grips of the mad king playing golf in exile. Dark Brandon was a mirage.

Mockery, Not Violence

I once listened to Noam Chomsky tell a group of left-wing activists that they would never out-violence the right, which wants nothing more than to be challenged in a contest of who can be meaner and nastier. For many on the right, it is the reason for being: Recall the neo-nazi Charlottesville rally in 2017, when fascist groups practically begged anti-fascist protesters to meet them on the field of battle. They wanted a reason, and when they were given one – when a handful of anti-fascists confronted them physically – they unleashed a wave of violence that ended in multiple deaths and horrific injuries. They were primed for this because violence is their politics.

Chomsky told his small audience that no matter how angry they were, no matter what lengths they were willing to go, they would never truly defeat the right with harsh tactics. That, I think, is a fatal flaw imbedded within the idea of a Dark Woke movement. It is not in the left's DNA to be as malicious as the right; we shouldn't pretend otherwise just because we're pissed and flailing.

That leaves ridicule and mockery as the best options, strategic options, as so many pro-democracy activists in authoritarian states have discovered over the past few decades of western democratic erosion. Opponents of autocracy have deployed so-called dilemma actions that put right-wing regimes in uncomfortable positions, usually with tactics that outright mock those in power. There is no positive outcome for authoritarians when their opponents take this approach – staging mass kiss-ins, children throwing rotten fruit at symbols of authoritarianism – so they are left with only bad choices. It’s much easier to respond to force, to crush anyone who thinks they can be more violent than the madmen.

Skip to the nine minute mark to see how people used humor to beat back autocracy in Eastern Europe.

Alexander Navalny, the famed pro-democracy Russian dissident who was slowly murdered by Vladimir Putin’s regime, regularly laughed at Putin and his lackeys. Sometimes he laughed and joked about their stupidity during TV interviews before Putin took over or destroyed the nation’s independent media outlets; sometimes he laughed in their faces during show trials meant to bully Navalny and his many supporters. Navalny cracked ruthless jokes at Putin's expense in nearly all of his pro-democracy writing. The man had a good time fucking with the Bad Man.

"We all remember Alexander the Liberator and Yaroslav the Wise. Well, now we'll have Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner,” Navalny said shortly before he died in a Russian gulag, referring to the time Putin’s gestapo rubbed a poisonous nerve agent on Navalny’s underwear.

During his many court appearances, Navalny mocked the Putin-picked judges who reviewed Navalny’s many crimes against Dear Leader. Navalny once asked a judge through laughter to front him the money to pay fines issued by the court.

"Navalny laughed in the face of evil and never despaired,” the exiled Russian publication Meduza wrote after Navalny’s 2024 death.

That Navalny never lost his sense of humor in the face of despotic repression at the hands of the most outwardly evil man alive drove Putin insane. There’s a widespread belief that Putin and his higher ups decided to finally murder Navalny after one final public jab from the pro-democracy activist. Navalny during a court appearance shortly before he was found dead asked prison officers and a judge if they – like young people in Moscow – had had a “naked party” to celebrate Navalny’s capture and imprisonment. This was in reference to raucous ragers that had been condemned by the suddenly pious Putin, who had positioned himself as a defender of traditional Russian values and the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin was sending young people into the meat grinder that is the war against Ukraine and they were having a little fun before the grinder beckoned. Putin was livid.

Navalny never stopped laughing at Putin. To mock the tyrant requires as much – if not more – bravery than staring him down and threatening violent reprisals. It’s a lesson the Dark Woke movement – if that’s what it is – can learn from, and deploy against our own tyrant, a clown, a terribly unserious man, a living, breathing joke who does not deserve our respect, but rather our ridicule and derision.

We can’t be as mean as the right, nor should we want to. A pro-democracy movement that unchains itself from institutionalism and proper political etiquette is not one that must be vicious and unyielding in its insults. We don’t have to be assholes. But we can laugh at the assholes until they are reduced to pathetic nothings in the eyes of the public. We can make them lose their minds with a strategic smile and a hearty laugh, because nothing says fuck you like a good laugh.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.