DarkWoke: The Highest Stage of Liberalism

With liberalism's fall, can we find the light?

Since the historic election loss of Kamala Harris to Donald Trump last November, liberalism in the United States has been in crisis. The Democratic Party is less popular than it’s ever been and the Republican Party (arguably the other arm of liberalism) has trended more and more towards a kind of neofascism/neofeudalism and away from its once liberal values. The last four years saw the slow unmasking of liberalism before the eyes of the electorate. The presupposed beliefs of the “left wing” party in the United States - freedom, egalitarianism, decency, social progress, care for public health - were sacrificed on the alter of capital time and time again through border militarism, covid denialism, abandonment of trans people, and the genocide in Gaza. Harris in particular ran the most right wing campaign of any Democrat in my lifetime and paid the price via an electorate that did not get off the couch to support her. Not only that, but Trump made notable gains with the working class and black and brown voters. This has thrown liberalism into an identity crisis. A party that can only define itself in relation to its opposition has naturally followed the Republicans to the right at every opportunity. You can see this in Democrat Senate campaign ads, and you can see this in the collaborationist votes in Congress since the election.

Recent collaboration of Democrats with Trump

The identity crisis of liberalism has never been more apparent than in the disposition of the party’s most die-hard supporters. Enter the era of “DarkWoke”, a term coined recently on Twitter that speaks to the barrage of sentiment from Democrat ride-or-dies expressing glee and willing participation in the violence that Republicans will now inflict on anyone liberals feel was not sufficiently supportive of their candidate. From Democrat influencers, to DNC advisors, to politicians themselves, it seems this is the official position of the party post-election. No longer encumbered by the need to feign support for vulnerable people, Democrats have let the mask slip entirely. Instead of an ounce of introspection - the bare minimum that one should expect from a party or its supporters after a historic loss - or charting a path forward under the Trump admin, the #DarkWoke have been utterly preoccupied with punching at the left and cannibalizing the insufficiently grateful poor and suffering masses.

One wonders why Democrats pretended they opposed the worst excesses of the Republican Party if they are now jumping for joy for those same people to be hurt by the policies they were ostensibly against. The answer is simple: the Republicans have always been a disciplinary tool for the Democrats to wield against the more unruly sections of their base — there is no one thing that Republicans support that liberals truly oppose. Instead of offering a positive party program, the refrain from liberals has been “but Trump would be worse”. Now that Democrats have revealed they don’t know who they are or what they stand for, the last bastion for liberalism has been to revel in the pain and suffering that their opposition will inflict on the most vulnerable amongst us.

The truth is that the Democrat fandom does not actually stand in opposition to Republicans in the true sense of the word. They support politicians who vote with Republicans, drink with Republicans, wax poetic about the need for a “strong Republican party”. Their only dedication is to their hero worship of figureheads that represent their team, and to their own self-conception as the good guys. Democrat partisans would rather blame 75 million people than ever hold a single person in power responsible for their actions. The increasing embrace of fascistic rhetoric by this cohort is a result of these modern monarchists having no identity of their own. They seek to excuse their leaders, in a misplaced belief that the “adults in the room” are doing their best, because liberalism fundamentally believes more in the system then in the people. The dogged protectionism of failing institutions is by design. If partisans acknowledged the missteps of the ruling class, that would indict the very structures that the party embodies. If Democrat leadership aren’t actually good people then what does it say about their supporters? While the country trends towards a more reactionary fervor overall, the liberal wing of that fervor will inevitably embrace the very things they claimed to abhor. If leftists aren’t the real problem as they say, then they are forced to contend with the actual indictment of their party the left represents. The left - the true left - merely holds up a mirror that exposes liberalism for the empty, banal evil that it is. The left’s real commitment to the values that liberalism espouses but does not hold reveals a worldview that is ultimately “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

For socialists, this turn should be understood as proof that there is to be no collaboration with either party. There is no coalition to be made with those that would call ICE on their neighbors for voting the wrong way, while just a few years ago they decried “kids in cages”. The Democratic party, historically, has been a bulwark against true progress in this country. They have absorbed movements for liberation and promised that we could achieve those ends without upending the system itself. They have couped or sanctioned countries around the world with burgeoning socialist movements while crowing on and on about democracy. They have fully funded a militarized police while claiming to care about the marginalized who are beaten and imprisoned by them. While the Republicans are a blunt instrument, the Dems have always been more underhanded; shapeshifting to adopt the popular language of the progressive zeitgeist while serving to stymie the real demands being made.

During the civil rights movement, the party came in and adopted the demands that couldn’t be ignored, while throwing away some of the more radical and redistributive ones. During the period after Occupy Wall Street, with the rise of Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton famously said “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow — and I will if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, I will — would that end racism?”, directly placing discussions about class in an antagonistic relationship to discussions of race. Gone were the days of “Hope and Change”, of an optimistic liberalism that spoke to economic despair and gestured at all towards the cries of the people. The party went full force ahead with a class-free identity politics that implied you were racist if you didn’t see the value in having the first black gay war criminal in the Defense Department. Nancy Pelosi would kneel in Kente Cloth but refuse to work to pass any laws that would reduce the violence of the police. The Democrats gladly wielded this weapon at anyone who had the temerity to point out that their party program did not seek to materially benefit the working class. Liberalism at its core is an ideology that is about “personal freedom” but only insofar as that freedom does not limit capital. With capitalism in crisis, liberalism must restrict this personal freedom to serve its true master. And its slavish followers must contort themselves to fit the new mold their leaders have created for them.

Now that we are awakening from the long 2016, and liberalism is losing its stranglehold on society, the most ardent defenders of this status quo are seen rudderless. Their identity based attacks no longer hold water as they abandon key marginalized demographics. As they reach for meaning, they are finding solace in the suffering of the wily, undisciplined base that hasn’t fallen in line. Whatever comes as a result of this new administration, is something the voters deserve of course. This is the only way to reconcile their worldview with a rapidly changing political landscape. As one Twitter user says “liberalism has fallen. you are either a fascist or a socialist now. sorry those are your options.” Or more succinctly, it’s now - as ever - either socialism or barbarism. Partisan liberals have cast their lot with barbarism as their party maximizes collaborationism, leaving a vacuum that only socialists can fill.

While the #DarkWoke is a lost cause, there are still millions of people who really do believe in social progress, economic equality, and workplace democracy. There are millions that thirst for a real alternative to the Republican party and their Vichy Democrat counterparts. Our imperative is to find a way for our message to reach them, unmarred by the failure of liberalism and the party that represents it. There’s already an option for those who want to inflict pain on their neighbors, the Democrats are redundant in that sense. What this country needs is an alternative that boldly says “I will free you all”, and means it.