Just a few years ago it was common for people on the left to deny that there was any such thing as cancel culture on the left. The standard line for a number of years was the Republicans were seizing on a handful of incidents at college campuses and blowing them up into an ideology that didn't really exist.
There were similar denials about Critical Race Theory, which the media uniformly told us was an academic viewpoint only taught in law schools and definitely not something that was being pushed into high schools. Meanwhile, identity politics and DEI were showing up everywhere.
There were also denials that gender extremism was making its way into elementary schools, but this didn't stop the Left from being outraged when Florida banned teaching these topics to second graders.
There's an obvious pattern here. The Left aggressively pushes their woke views on everyone and then denies that any such views exist or are widespread until such time as it becomes obvious and undeniable.
But it really does seem that wokeness has hit a wall recently. You can see it in polling, which shows most Americans do not support boys on girls' sports teams or men in women's prisons, despite the Leftist mantra that trans women are women.
Word that people aren't buying what the Left has been selling must have finally penetrated with some people because a couple weeks ago AOC herself shrugged off what she called "woke 1."
“‘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.
AOC's comments are clearly strategic in nature. The election of Mayor Mamdani showed that far-left candidates can win big elections so long as they focus on economics and affordability and not on cultural issues. She's just lining herself up with what works and jettisoning what hasn't.
Today the NY Times has a good opinion piece asking AOC and others abandoning woke 1 what exactly they regret about it.
When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, quoting a political ally, recently suggested to ABC News, with a laugh and a smile, that “Woke 1 was crazy,” she became the most prominent progressive figure distancing herself, whether subtly or overtly, from what is known as wokeism — from the stringent positions on race, policing, gender, identity, social justice and language that constituted progressive orthodoxy over the past decade or so...
It’s a noteworthy evolution, especially for anyone who was around to witness the die-on-this-hill dogmatism of the peak woke era — say, circa summer 2020...
If you can dismiss it so casually now — all the defunding and abolishing, the BIPOCing and Latinxing, the canceling and decentering and my truthing — how much of it did you truly believe at the time? How much was conviction, how much was a pose, how much was groupthink, how much was fear?...
When the formerly woke look back on that time, for example, what specifically do they now regard as crazy or cringey or silly? Do they regret particular beliefs, or just the provocative ways they expressed them? Have they decided that some of their previous positions were impractical or wrong, or just too electorally risky to state in public?...
Ocasio-Cortez and the others have every right to seek out a new framework and message, to change their minds, if that is indeed what is happening. But before a Woke 2 takes over, let the proponents of its predecessor explain how and why they’re moving on.
It's nice to see someone at the NY Times asking this question but I don't think they'll get much of an answer. AOC doesn't want to rule out anything she might want to return to in the near future.
Wokeness isn't gone, it's just being suppressed by the common sense of the majority of voters, first on the right and now even on the center left. But the fact that woke is currently in remission isn't the same as saying we've been cured. Like cancer, it can hide somewhere in the body, waiting until the patient weakens before it returns in force.
Wokeness will never go away, at least not in our lifetimes. All we can do is keep an eye on it and call attention to any sign of its return.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.
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