Our political discourse has coarsened over the years, but Democrats are taking it to a whole new low. When I grew up, politicians didn’t swear in public. One of the things that shocked my parents and their friends the most about the Nixon tapes was all of the “expletive deleted” bits. The adults in my world weren’t prudes, but they (naively, perhaps) held American politicians to a higher standard.

Those days are definitely gone. Joe Biden famously said of Obamacare that it was a “big f*****g deal,” although it was clear he’d forgotten the microphones were listening. Biden had the same problem (forgetting the mic) when he called Peter Doocy a “stupid son of a b***h.”

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Usually, political obscenities are what one might call “heated utterances,” arising when people are stressed or angry in the moment. In 2010, when The Guardian leaped to Biden’s defense, it listed all sorts of instances in which angry politicians let loose:

Biden isn’t the first vice-president to resort to old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon expressions in the heat of the moment. Dick Cheney – never one to mince words – infamously told Democratic senator Patrick Leahy to “fuck yourself” on the floor of the US Senate in 2004. Even Cheney’s boss, George Bush, a more circumspect speaker, was once caught on video describing New York Times journalist Adam Clymer as a “major-league asshole“ in the 2000 election campaign.

Perhaps the most famous vice-presidential use of an earthy expression belongs to John Nance Garner, vice president under FDR, who once said: “The vice-presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss.” (The quote is usually watered down to “warm spit” in US publications.)

To his discredit, Trump, in off-the-cuff remarks, can also be crude, something USA Today reported with puritanically pursed lips:

In 2017, Trump attacked NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem, calling them "sons of bi-----." He referred to Haiti and African nations as sh--hole countries in 2018, according to multiple news organizations and at least one lawmaker in the meeting. At rallies and in formal speeches, he would often throw around words like “hell,” “damn” and “crap.”

I don’t like this kind of talk because I absorbed my parents’ values: Low language brings low a high political office. It’s disrespectful and unstatesmanlike.

But it seems that the Democrats, in pursuit of “dark woke,” are aggressively embracing linguistic debasement.

Oh, you haven’t heard of dark woke? The New York Times wrote a laughable article explaining that it’s the Democrats’ effort to counter their nicey-nice image, put on their big boy pants, and play real politics. (Apparently, they had forgotten the riots, antisemitism, violence, vandalism, law-breaking, etc.)

After reminiscing about the wonders of Kamala’s disastrous three-month campaign (good times with good vibes, according to the NYT), the article gets down to business:

It’s an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing. And it requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.

Online, it has a name: “Dark woke.”

“Republicans have essentially put Democrats in a respectability prison,” said Bhavik Lathia, a communications consultant and former digital director for the Wisconsin Democratic Party. “There is an extreme imbalance in strategy that allows Republicans to say stuff that really grabs voters’ attention, where we’re stuck saying boring pablum. I see this as a strategic shift within Democratic messaging — I’m a big fan of ‘dark woke.’”

The plan seems to be to ape toddlers, who get mommy’s attention by being deliberately rude and crude. It’s an incredibly immature form of emotional exhibitionism.

What it means in practice is that Democrats are no longer slipping into what the law calls “excited utterances,” reflecting core and truthful emotions. Instead, these are carefully calculated obscenities, intended to attract the public’s (they hope) admiring attention.

That’s how we get this rather stunning tweet from the House Democrats’ Ways and Means Committee, in response to Karoline Leavitt saying that the short-lived discussion Amazon was having about listing tariffs on its pages went beyond selling products and into “hostile...political action”:

We no longer live in the more polite world I remember from the early 1970s, a world in which people were disgusted to learn that a politician (whether liked or reviled) had a dirty mouth. We’ve also moved beyond foul-language peppering extemporaneous speech. This is a deliberate plan to debase political discourse. I don’t like it, and I hope ordinary, decent Americans won’t either.