You might have already heard that there’s a new ideology on the block. In response to Donald Trump’s reelection as US president – and the wider withering of progressive, democratic politics across the world – people are calling for liberals to up their game and lower their tone. To wrest back power from right-wing politicians with no moral code, they argue, the left-leaning liberals need to learn to fight dirty as well. It’s time to go “dark woke”.

To be clear: no one seems capable of agreeing on what dark woke actually means, or able to give an indisputable example of “dark wokeism”. Some have pointed to AOC calling the new Republican government “rapists” and telling critics: “Oh, are you triggered? Cry more.” Others have cited the much-loved tradition of punching Nazis, or simply hitting right-wing ideologues with a brutal (and often deeply personal) insult.

Then, there’s another interpretation of dark wokeism that’s hard to ignore, which is basically the usual woke politics... but with slurs. On X, this has been characterised as a backlash against the “namby-pamby language policing that no one likes” in liberal politics. Hearing someone argue their right to call political opponents “the r-slur and f-slur”, you might be forgiven for thinking that dark woke isn’t actually a new brand of wokeness at all, but part of a broader pushback against wokeness itself. But here we are.

The underlying idea behind dark wokeism has been brewing for a while now. During the 2024 US election, Joe Biden’s campaign team briefly leaned into the Dark Brandon meme that characterised the 81-year-old Democratic nominee as a cooler, more “based” version of himself. Others stressed the need for a “liberal Joe Rogan” to counteract Trump’s highly successful, podcast-focused press strategy.

It isn’t just a trend for the terminally online, either. Echoing the dark woke discourse, the TikToker and self-proclaimed “Regina George liberal” Suzanne Lambert recently called for Democrats to “be meaner” in a televised interview with CBS. “You fight fire with equal exertion of force and I think that we need to do that,” she explained. “I want people to feel more comfortable fighting back, and I also want people to see other people fighting for them.”

This impulse to embrace a meaner style of politics makes sense. Trump’s approach to politics – just say anything, no matter how outrageous or incorrect – has propelled him to a second term in office, and inspired the rise of other polarising political figures worldwide. The tone of political conversations has changed, and liberals need to find some way to keep up. But is it even possible to be truly cruel as a liberal, the same way a conservative can?

There’s another meme that’s been doing the rounds on X recently, and that’s the moral circles heatmap. In case you haven’t seen it, it features two graphs that show the “moral circle” of conservatives and liberals, respectively – ie the things they really care about, from immediate family, all the way out to “all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks”. According to the study the image is based on, conservatives tend to care much more about family and friends, while liberals extend their care to people on other continents, plants, trees, and potential alien lifeforms. Of course this doesn’t come at the exclusion, as many of the memes suggest, of the people in their immediate orbit – it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that liberals don’t care about rocks more than their beloved relatives.

The point is, though, that liberals’ moral concern extends much further than their close circle. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, for a politics that’s supposedly based on empathy, understanding and equality. But these qualities also make it quite difficult to disregard another person’s feelings and throw them to the wolves with no restraint – in other words, to be mean. Should liberals discard these feelings in the name of political rivalry, and embrace a more aggressive, tribal politics? Do we really want to? I don’t know!

There is one type of person who will definitely benefit if dark wokeism picks up steam, though: the guy who just wants to harass and dox people with less reputational cost. In a way, we’ve already seen this play out in leftist circles, with the rise of the so-called dirtbag left. Time and time again, we’ve seen the ironic humour and authoritarian aesthetics of figures like Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova – of Red Scare – fall away to reveal a more sincere sympathy for conservative politics, to the delight of outright right-wingers like Trump and Steve Bannon. (Very cool!)

If left-wing liberals do manage to break free of their pesky tendency to be kind and embrace being mean, it’s worth remembering these mask-off moments for the dirtbag left, and using them to ask some critical questions of the new movement. Like, does that terminally online ‘liberal’ really believe in dark woke as a route to meaningful political change, or do they just want to say slurs on the internet?