“When the great Tao is forgotten, goodness and piety appear. . . When there is no peace in the family, filial piety begins. When the country falls into chaos, patriotism is born.” -Lao Tzu
Wokeness was a manifestation of the loss of the Tao of Revolution. The skeletal remains of the liberatory project that gave rise to it. An exoskeleton restraining the transformational desires it claimed to embody.
Revolution represents the radical subjecthood of the masses, seizing the power to remake themselves and their world, maximizing freedom and solidarity. Any regime that confines that agency to a set of prescribed stances, gestures, linguistic formulas, and disingenuous pieties represents a surrender of our power to the powers that be and the tiny space in which they allow us to play out our dreams of emancipation..
In the blast zone of Trump’s second inauguration, hazmat-suited pundits rushed in to geiger-count the fallout and declare with Fukuyama/Fukushima glee the End of Resistance, Wokeness, and the Left. The infamous Vibe Shift. Projected on a dazed and shell-shocked populace, whose temporary loss of consciousness and direction was styled a collapse to the Right. Red-pilled, irradiated, and soon to mutate into Maga monstrosities.
Instead, from that still smoldering wreckage, something new is stirring. A specter is haunting Substack. Meming social media. Swarming the Swasticars. Supplanting autofiction with autonomy. The core meltdown and reabsorption of Wokeness back into the radical passions that birthed it. The Left unburdened by correctness or civility: DARK WOKE!
Americans have begun to take to the streets in a manner not seen since the 1970s, a mass movement undertaken not on behalf of a victimized Other, but in their own interest — and that of all those who share in it — to contest the oppression of a tyrannical state and the oligarchic class it serves. The virtual politics of performance is ceding to an IRL politics of enactment.
We who are Dark Woke share in this transformation:
We despise virtue signaling but prize virtue.
Reject identity politics but embrace our political identity.
We are post-Woke but fully conscious.
We have canceled cancel culture the better to cancel the culture that seeks the cancellation of the truths we know to be self-evident.
We abjure the warring factions of the ironic and the sincere and instead offer Conviction. An unshakable belief in our freedom-seeking selves and egalitarian code.
Ninja-pilled and Kronstadt-coded.
We begrudge no one their pronouns, but believe in verbs:
Get up. Stand up.
Fight the Power.
Dare to Struggle.
Dare to Win!