Can the Democrats Escape the Shadow of Woke?
The Democratic Party still appears full of cackling liberal scolds fluent in DEI jargon, even though top Democrats themselves would like now to distance themselves from this image. Why do the Dems seem yoked to woke?
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.
