Can the Democrats Escape the Shadow of Woke?
The Democratic Party still appears full of cackling liberal scolds fluent in DEI jargon, even though many would like to distance themselves from this image. Why do the Dems seem yoked to woke?
By Ryan Zickgraf
A common defense of Kamala Harris’s doomed 2024 campaign goes something like this: It’s not fair that she was written off as the queen of progressives when she ran her campaign as a Clinton-era moderate. “If what you want is a centrist campaign that’s quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed, and she just lost,” deadpanned comedian John Oliver in his election postmortem on Last Week Tonight.
But Harris’s campaign was not run in a vacuum. The media declared 2024 the Vibes Election, a referendum on the ambient feelings of the zeitgeist rather than substantive policy. The Dems and their surrogates believed this would favor Kamala due to Brat Summer and the manufactured narrative of “joy” surrounding her campaign. But it turns out, those vibes were vaguely woke. Harris kept repeating the line that she was “unburdened by what has been,” but the emptiness of her campaign left voters to fill the void with everything they remembered—and resented. Thus, no matter how carefully Harris moderated her message in her months-long sprint to the White House, the California senator couldn’t outrun the meme version of herself: a cackling liberal scold fluent in DEI jargon, and the personification of every HR Zoom training you’ve ever pretended to pay attention to.
Arguably, woke officially died with the Harris campaign, but even today, a large portion of the American electorate still believes Democrats at large want to defund the police, let children switch their genders at recess, and force them to disavow their white privilege. A recent poll from Unite the Country—a Democratic super PAC that exists to make Democrats look good—somehow managed to make them look even worse. Democrats are now seen as “out of touch,” “woke,” and “weak,” and their approval ratings have dipped below 35% among white men, Latino men, and working-class voters. For congressional Democrats, the numbers are even more abysmal: Less than one in five Democrats approve of the job their party is doing in Congress, according to a July Quinnipiac poll.
In reality, most elected officials—especially those somewhere other than Portland or Park Slope—aren’t cultural radicals, don’t speak woke, and often try to avoid these issues altogether, especially in the last year. But the party is yoked to a moral project it doesn’t entirely control, and worse, hasn’t figured out how to disown without provoking a civil war in its own ranks.
Take it from longtime Democratic Party ghoul James Carville, who said what “killed” the Democrats in November was a “sense of dishonor” among the electorate—funny considering he was once Bill Clinton’s right-hand man. But still, he’s on to something. The woke era, said Carville, stuck in people’s minds beyond its expiration date. “We got beyond it,” he said. “But the image stuck in people’s minds that the Democrats wanted to defund the police, wanted to empty prisons.”
The Influence of the Shadow Party
It’s the political story of the 2010s: While Trump single-handedly wrestled the Republicans into becoming the Party of MAGA, the language, instincts, and sensibilities of progressive elites gradually infiltrated the Democrats’ brand, culminating in a soft consensus. By the end of the first Trump term, national Democrats sounded like 27-year-old Brooklynites, liberal arts humanities faculty, or public relations at the ACLU.
Conservatives would have you believe that the shift was part of some authoritarian takeover, but it’s actually proof that the Democratic Party is incredibly weak, less guided by coalitions of real people and more like a brand managed by a loose marketing team and backed by syndicates of donors. Various structural reforms have dismantled the connective tissue between parties and their constituents. In 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision opened the floodgates for unlimited, undisclosed “dark money.” The Democrats initially condemned dark money groups, but by 2024 they became the party of it. State and local party machines, once closely tied to communities and neighborhoods, were eclipsed by donor networks and activist groups.
Since Democrats don’t actually want to govern, they became haunted by the spectre of the “Shadow Party.” That’s the term that John Judis and Ruy Teixeira coined in their book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, to describe what’s become, over the last several decades, the Democrats’ financial and philosophical base: Hollywood, Silicon Valley (though it was split in 2024), higher education, corporate media, and professional progressives. The latter work in activist non-profits, legal funds, foundations, PACs, and special interests—what I’d deem “Big Woke.” (In centrist Democrat circles, they’re being whispered about as The Groups like they’re talking about the mafia.)
These groups are disproportionately part of the liberal professional-managerial class, one that is richer, better educated, and way more online than the rest of the population, and cloistered in coastal metropolises. As Bill Bishop explained nearly 20 years ago in The Big Sort, Americans in the twenty-first century began concentrating themselves by lifestyle and worldview. For liberals, both physical and online clustering created an ultra-liberal laptop-toting monoculture in cities like New York City and Washington, D.C., where seemingly everyone has a graduate degree, listens to podcasts, and has worked for someone who used the term “Latinx” unironically until 2024. They “subsist within their own closed universes of discourse,” Judis and Teixeira wrote, with each “using the extremes of the other to deflect criticism of their own radicalism.” Their politics are less rooted in material struggle and more in cultural values, ideology, or vocabulary. They’re the type who care deeply about student loan forgiveness for PhDs but shrug when you bring up childcare subsidies for the working class.
Big Woke’s power is soft, but there’s a revolving door between them and the Democratic Party. Staffers bounce between activist NGOs, think tanks, communications firms, and Democratic campaigns—often swapping Slack channels but maintaining the same worldview. One month, they’re crafting messaging at a social justice nonprofit; the next, they’re running digital ads for a Senate race. Neera Tanden might as well be their patron saint. As the longtime head of the Center for American Progress (CAP), she ran the flagship think tank of the Democratic establishment. It’s the kind of group that loves identity but balks at organized leftism, publishing pieces on Disabled LGBTQI+ people while simultaneously trying to fire the unionized employees of CAP’s once-affiliated website, ThinkProgress, and replace them with scabs. Tanden herself floated between worlds with ease: advising Hillary Clinton, working in the Obama administration, then landing in the Biden White House after a failed nomination for a cabinet position. The Shadow Party systematically cast a long shadow that Democrats, all the way up to President Biden himself, had trouble casting off. Remember when Biden was once asked off the cuff how many genders there were, and he said, “At least three?”
The End of Big Woke?
The Democrats could do much more to combat this, but when no one knows what they truly stand for other than anti-Trumpness (what does defending democracy actually entail?), the default view is wokeness. It’s an environment that makes it hard for more idiosyncratic Democrats at the local, state, and even congressional levels to break through. A progressive NGO says “birthing people,” and a House Democrat from Ohio gets asked to defend it. An HBO series recasts a historical drama with modern racial and gender politics, and swing voters in Pennsylvania assume it’s all part of the progressive master plan.
Some rural or exurban Democrats have broken through—but it hasn’t been easy. Take Dan Osborn, the pipefitter-turned-Senate-candidate in Nebraska. Osborn, a former union leader, avoided the culture war altogether and almost pulled off a win against a Republican incumbent in a state where Democrats are usually as welcome as tofu at a football tailgate. He may fare better in a just-launched second Senate campaign against billionaire Cubs owner Pete Ricketts. Then there’s Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, who won in rural Washington by sounding more like a PTA mom than a podcast host. She didn’t campaign on dismantling systemic “isms” but spoke about fixing cars, owning a small business, and maybe not going bankrupt from a medical bill.
These are signs that the tides may finally be turning, and the Democrats may be able to move beyond ultra-liberalism. The professional-managerial class appears to be a somewhat endangered species thanks to the surge of AI and tightening capital, which has led to a mass exodus of white-collar workers through layoffs. Meanwhile, universities are being punished by the Trump administration, media outlets are hemorrhaging cash and audiences, the arts are begging for relevance, Hollywood is dying, and Silicon Valley pivoted to the right.
Big Woke may finally be asleep.
Ryan Zickgraf is a contributing writer at UnHerd and is a regular contributor to Jacobin Magazine and Compact. He writes from Harrisburg, PA.