Liberal women have emerged as a strong, militant voting bloc in the last several years, and there are interesting psychological dynamics at work here that warrant further discussion.
There is a new ideology operating called “dark woke.” This term is a cynical and aggressive version of “woke”.
Originally, woke emerged in the 1930s but didn’t reach widespread use until the current period. It became associated with language policing, call-out culture, and institutional enforcement. Enforcement was vested in organizations with power, namely, schools, workplaces, media, and governments, all under the control of the Democratic Party.
Dark woke has the following characteristics. It touts moral certainty without humility, public shaming, cancellation, or social punishment, a belief that the ends justify the means, and treating opponents as enemies rather than as persuadable people. Dark woke is a psychological reaction to the failure of woke. Rather than putting up with the frustration created by the lack of progress of woke, liberal women have become a new kind of activist agent. These women turn their disillusionment into a willingness to sharpen their rhetoric and ramp up their militancy. Right-wing critics of dark woke accuse them of replacing liberalism with authoritarianism and persuasion with coercion.
Dark woke emerged because cultural conflict has become more moralized and personal, and social media rewards outrage and absolutism.
A large majority of Dark Woke women are white and middle-class, and they amount to about 20% of women. The primary age groups of these women are late Millennials (30-42) and early Gen Z (22-29). They are the most reliable Democratic bloc in the United States. This bloc never crosses party or ideological lines. Its activists believe that the right threatens women’s rights, gender equality, and workplace norms. They take politics personally.
The original objectives of feminism were equal opportunity, legal rights, and individual freedom. The new feminist mantra is safety and harm prevention, opposing unbalanced power, and blaming structures rather than individuals. This shift in ideology leads to identifying enemies and setting boundaries for exclusion and punishment.
Regarding their social points of view, these women face a later marriage or no marriage, higher education with debt, career pressure, unstable relationships, and men disengaging from them. These factors have led to status frustration, loss of patience, and political views shaped by insecurity.
Social media platforms reward strong points of view, call-outs over dialogue, and identity-based storytelling. Women who are talented at signalling and norm enforcement excel in this space. Liberal women have become the new cultural enforcers of progressive ideas.
Social and cultural trauma has contributed to this new behavior. Trump, Dobbs, the Me Too Movement, and COVID provided a mixture of assaults on progressive women. Self-defense has turned into full-blown hostility.
The public notices this change in women’s ideology because the activists have moved from empathy-centric to gatekeepers of a rigid ideology. To the right, they seem authoritarian. But within the group, they have set important boundaries that make their associates feel safe.
How do liberal men fit into this story?
As liberal women gained stature and influence over the past 10 years, they took power away from liberal men. For the first time in history, men were expected to defer to women on progressive ideology. In addition, they were looked at with suspicion with regard to gender issues and lost the ability to speak freely. The result was male withdrawal from the ideological battle and the development of a cynical attitude.
Dating app patterns show that liberal men have been pushed to moderation because highly ideological men are often penalized socially. They have responded by downplaying ideology and avoiding activist language. Men put personal stability above personal morality and seem confused when they interact with progressive women. What they see in women is emotional harm language, lived experience as authority, and norm enforcement. To men, the mismatch with their own attitudes suggests that silence is safer than engagement.
Men do not like double standards, selective enforcement, and status-driven moralism, but progressive women activate each of these issues. Men label the hypocrisy of free speech, pushing equity with exclusions, and one-dimensional empathy as illogical and unreasonable.
Progressive women see Trump as an existential threat, a bodily autonomy risk, and the driver of a scary cultural rollback. Liberal men have a different reaction. They see Trump as a chaos creator who creates institutional stress and seeks cultural absurdity.
The split between men and women on ideology appears larger than it is because men moved to the right, replacing moral signaling spaces with a more rational perspective. Their political motivation operates at a lower level than that of women, and they don’t share the same psychological motivation.
The psychological component of liberal women’s behavior is the sad part. Their all-out drive for their perfect ideology has placed limitations on their future happiness by disregarding the most important human support system, the family unit.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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You nailed the movement that captured my daughtes, who are millennials as well as several other women relatives and friends in my life. "Dark woke" fits them well. "This shift in ideology leads to identifying enemies and setting boundaries for exclusion and punishment."
My daughters have identified me as an ememy, set boundaries, eventually excluded (cancelled me) and then act like they are serving up valid punishment because I don't believe in their new ideologies.
So now I write articles about estrangement unraveling in my family, and so many others, resulting from this sector of "dark woke" women. 3 decades of more of a close relationship has been thrown out because of this mindset.
I didn't have a word for undersanding and naming what was happening, and now I do. I appreciate you writing this article.