Woke One Happened Because American Government Is Broken

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants voters to be open-minded about progressive candidates. Even those (like Francesca Hong) who played radical leapfrog with other online activists in the latter part of the last decade (cancel Thanksgiving?) and now regret the positions they took at the height of progressive cultural power.

“I have a local city councilman that has this saying that ‘Woke One was crazy,’” she told Jonathan Karl of ABC News. “And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”

She has a good case to make. Zohran Mamdani isn’t governing New York like a 2020-era police abolitionist. She, herself, is an accomplished legislator. If people ask for a mulligan in good faith, they should get one.

But her detractors first want to know where they can go to get their apologies: What exactly are you disavowing, and why did you avow it in the first place?

There’s something to the idea that progressives should offer voters more here than a shaking of the Etch-a-Sketch. But it has nothing to do with I told you sos. Over years of backlash, Republicans have deemed just about everything liberal about America “woke.” To say “Woke One was crazy,” without a fuller picture, will invite false right-wing triumphalism: If even AOC is disavowing Woke One, isn’t she admitting that Republicans were right about everything?

No, obviously they were not. Specificity helps clarify just what baggage progressives want to shake loose ahead of this and future elections.

AOC did go on to explain what she believes drove the lurch to the left. “[D]uring this time and during—especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window. We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns. And I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”

Bernie Sanders was more specific about what exactly he’d like progressive candidates to walk back. “No serious person that I know who is running for office, believes in quote unquote defunding the police [or] doing away with prisons,” he said recently, “Open borders? No. Most of us believe in comprehensive immigration reform, not opening up all the borders.”

Unlike AOC, Sanders also didn’t articulate a theory to explain why some of the candidates he supports took position he now describes as unserious.

Maybe that’s to come. Or maybe he doesn’t know the answer. If he and other progressives dwell on the question and decide to tell a story about what gave rise to Woke One, I hope they consider the origin story as I understand it. Whatever you think about Woke One, wherever you landed six or seven years ago, the root causes are structural, and smarter future politics will thus require structural reform.

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Woke One was a bunch of stuff wrapped into a cultural bundle:

1. “Cancellations.” Essentially viral pile-ons designed to pressure organizations to remove people, or change their operations, where the mechanism was something like a blacklist: Don’t do it, and your reputation in the progressive world will be ruined. When people Google you or your outfit, our allegations will be among the top hits. Sometimes, this was appropriate! The method isn’t illegitimate per se. But it is uncontrolled, and in the hothouse environment of the late 2010s, into 2020, a subset of exaggerators and liars and overzealous activists did whip up storms of outrage against people who didn’t really deserve it. Woke One came to be defined by that overreach.

2. Corporate partnership. This worked on a similar set of incentives, but to different ends. It was a form of political resistance, in which organized progressives (often loosely organized) wielded their economic clout to pressure big corporate actors like Disney to take positions on matters of public policy, usually to oppose discriminatory, state-level GOP legislation. When southern states enacted anti-abortion laws, companies like Disney would come under pressure to stop making movies and TV shows in those states.

3. Policy positions. This is the stuff that prompted AOC’s comments. It’s the one that dogs Democrats the most, because some of the people who were active in the online movement publicly lodged support for ideas like defunding the police and prison abolition, only to run for Congress many years later and see it thrown in their faces.

4. Performative discourse norms: This is DEI trainings; land acknowledgements; privilege scolding; riot apologetics etc, along with the shaming of people who didn’t partake.

I think that basically covers it. To be generous to antiwoke critics, the most open-minded of them would say their main concern pertains to excesses, not fighting for justice per se. Not “Me Too,” but “Believe Women”—the idea that men accused of sexual misconduct should be presumed guilty by their communities and in the court of public opinion. Not “Black Lives Matter” but defund and abolish. These ideas were bad on the merits and politically harmful.

The big woke rethink AOC kicked off concedes both points, but politics is doing most of the work. Whatever’s in their hearts, Democrats want to win elections; progressives want to be viable in more places. But it should probably be the other way around.

As conventional as the new wisdom has become, it’s very hard to detect the political cost of Woke One in election results. Democrats actually did pretty well during Peak Woke! They won the 2018 midterms in a landslide. During the 2020 campaign, liberals were certain that the George Floyd protests would hurt Joe Biden, and maybe even get Trump re-elected, but there’s just no evidence that they had any impact on the race.

I think we’ve been mind-tricked by the fact that social-media companies and their algorithms were fairly bought-in to Woke One, then swung hard against it, making it feel like there was a huge, organic backlash that hurt Democrats. But Democratic officials in general,