On Sunday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made two striking remarks that seem related. First, she barely demurred when ABC News asked whether she aspired to run for president. “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” she eventually said. Second, she tried to laugh off stances that progressives in her wing of the Democratic Party had taken in the preceding years: “‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she said, echoing a comment that one of her allies had made about the heyday of ideas such as “defund the police.” Ocasio-Cortez represents an extremely liberal congressional district in New York City. The fact that she is declining to defend—and indeed wishing to move past—these positions shows how radioactive they have become. If only things were so easy.
Over the past decade, Democratic politics have been reshaped by an ideology centered on systemic oppression and the radical policies ostensibly needed to correct it. The most common name for it is “wokeness,” which attained its cultural apogee in 2020—after the murder of George Floyd brought millions of people out to the streets to protest police killings of Black people.
The established institutions of the meritocratic elite were swept over by the movement’s force: Members of Congress were photographed taking a knee while wearing African-inspired kente cloth. Companies rolled out diversity, equity, and inclusion action plans and donated huge sums to Black Lives Matter and other racial-justice causes. Universities denounced themselves as complicit in systemic racism. Staffers at news outlets revolted against colleagues they deemed counterrevolutionary, and nonprofit leaders and corporate executives treated the books of the anti-racism gurus Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo as revelatory.
[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The other way the ‘super woke’ left discriminates]
The Democratic Party, ever more dominated by the college-educated, absorbed these influences and let itself be perceived as the party of causes such as rejecting law enforcement, abolishing ICE, and queering gender.
Years after this collective effervescence passed, many ideas that once seemed weighty look flimsy. Cities that cut police spending reversed course after murders spiked. Elite universities built up large DEI bureaucracies to manage every oppression—yet embarrassed themselves in their inability to address campus anti-Semitism after the Israel-Gaza war began. But most members of the party’s elite apparently hope that the ideas from the period will simply recede from public consciousness, mostly through silence, without their needing to repudiate “Woke 1.”
Some, however, have pursued other strategies, such as retconning: For example, Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor, remade herself as a leftist during her unsuccessful 2020 Democratic presidential campaign by, among other things, advocating for decriminalizing illegal border crossing. In 2024, she tried to revert to the center by prosecuting repeat offenders and restricting asylum, all while insisting: “My values have not changed.” Now Ocasio-Cortez is previewing a third strategy: laughing at past excesses.
All of these avoidance strategies could fail. Woke 1 may be over, but progressives have not given up their attempt to take over the Democratic Party apparatus. Candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America—who have proved ascendant in primary elections this year—still take radical positions. One DSA-aligned candidate who is expected to be elected to Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier, is a prison abolitionist who cannot bring herself to say that murderers should go to jail. The front-runner for the Democratic nomination for governor in Wisconsin is Francesca Hong, a DSA-connected candidate who once criticized Thanksgiving for its colonialist associations.
Although the DSA itself emphasizes economic policies, such as universal rent control and zero-cost health care, its national platform does not shy away from endorsing proposals widely seen as excesses of Woke 1, including paying reparations to descendants of slaves, “fully abolishing the police and prison system,” and granting amnesty to all immigrants regardless of status, along with an end to all visa caps and quotas. The rhetorical focus has shifted, but the support for old, unpopular ideas remains.
[Rogé Karma: Democrats finally realize it isn’t 2016 anymore]
Even if Democratic-primary voters were not endorsing DSA candidates, Woke 1 would still be menacing Democrats running for office, for a simple reason: Republicans will never let voters forget this. Republicans have presented themselves as the party of the common man against the party of the faculty lounge. Even as Donald Trump has, in so many respects, inverted what it means to be a Republican, anti-wokeness has worked to unify the party and has now become a core tenet of GOP dogma.
By many accounts, the most effective campaign advertisement of the 2024 presidential election had the tagline “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Since that election, Democrats have broadly understood that public opinion is against them on many culture-war issues, particularly when it comes to sex-segregated sports. But only a few, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom and Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, have criticized trans women’s participation in women’s athletics. (Moulton, who is running in a Senate primary, has since walked back his remarks.) Most of their fellow Democrats seem to be waiting for the issue to blow over. Republicans have no reason to allow that.
Ideas never die, but they can go dormant. The unwillingness to extirpate wokeness now may result in its resurgence later. The silence of conventional Democrats and the ascent of the DSA could make the party’s 2028 presidential-primary contest resemble the 2020 one. Then, candidates of all stripes competed to out-left one another, committing themselves to positions that caused their party electoral trouble for years. Should Ocasio-Cortez become the Democratic candidate for president, she may experience that painful lesson firsthand.
The post The Democrats Can’t Just Laugh Off ‘Woke 1’ appeared first on The Atlantic.
