When I tried to appeal, the manager, a black man, shrugged and said, “I’m not offended, but … this is just the way things are now.” He didn’t expand on what he meant by the word “this” — because wokeness was the great force animating culture and politics in the decade roughly between 2013 and 2023. Most progressives couldn’t or wouldn’t even name it back then. But they lived by it. And had word spread about my verbal misstep, I could have been ruined.

So it was infuriating to hear Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez try to laugh off — giggle off, really — what she now calls the “Woke One” era and pretend it was all a Covid fever dream.

On ABC’s This Week on Sunday, Jonathan Karl asked AOC about Francesca Hong, the Democratic Socialists of America activist running for governor of Wisconsin. In 2020, Hong tweeted that she backed “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police,” and that “police exist to uphold white supremacy.” Hong has also called for canceling Thanksgiving: “Should have done this in 1621. If it takes a worldwide pandemic for us to realize we should stop celebrating colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed indigenous folx and women, so be it.” AOC chuckled in response and reached for a line she’d picked up from a New York City councilman: “Woke One was crazy.”

Sorry, but this non-admission-slash-admission is incredibly weak tea. Though woke has now been largely quarantined to Bluesky, indie coffee shops flying the Pride Progress flag, and experimental theater companies, it wasn’t always this way. 

More from this author

The Me Decade — 50 years later

By Ryan Zickgraf

For a decade, a highly online horde of academics, journalists, techies, and activists operated like America’s unelected HR regime — a petty administrative state with a mob of reactive nerds attached. They were authoritarian, coercive, and sustained by the threat that anyone who failed to master an ever-expanding vocabulary could be publicly humiliated, professionally ruined, or expelled from polite society. Latinx one year, Latine the next: choose the wrong suffix, and HR might open a case file.

Ironically, the AOCs of the world wanted to abolish the uniformed police, even as they behaved like a secret police defending the tenets of hyper-progressivism. Were you a white guy wearing a sombrero on Halloween? You’re guilty of a hate crime. A scientist wearing a shirt covered in cartoon women? Made to weep on camera. Wait, you’re not putting your pronouns in your email bio — what kind of an asshole are you? 

Careers were destroyed, reputations vaporized, and institutions bullied into submission, often over transgressions so slight that nobody outside the movement’s tribunal could explain what crime had actually occurred. 

Worst of all, for those of us on the Left: Woke One was politically disastrous. It handed MAGA a decade of free material and discredited the Bernie-era proposition that universalist class politics could be popular politics. 

Woke One offered a stark binary choice: identity politics or fascism. The writer Sam Kriss has described the function of the thing better than anyone: wokeness gave the ruling class a way to justify its position without ever mentioning the wage relation, swapping exploitation for “a vast mishmash of various forms of prejudice, hatred, and exclusion, which could be embodied in entirely ordinary words, hand gestures, or sometimes large and inert rocks.”

The Left is now confronting the specter of woke, but not because of a true internal reckoning; it’s only because the movement’s political candidates are getting cross-examined by the news media in this year’s elections about the things they said and did not that long ago. 

Facing such scrutiny, Hong went on a podcast and produced one of the great non-sentences of the cycle: “My views have only become stronger in that I’m serious about public safety and I will not abolish the police.” Stronger! She has grown so radical she now supports the police. Give her another two years, and she will become a police chief herself.

At the height of the madness, Cea Weaver, who today serves as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rental-housing czar, posted that “private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy.” Doorstepped earlier this year by the New York Post about her mother’s $1.4 million mansion in Nashville, Weaver burst into tears. She has since said that she regrets “some” of it. 

Somewhere in there is a lesson about what it feels like to become a stranger’s content, one the movement she helped build could once have explained to her at length, and for free. Darializa Avila Chevalier, who knocked off five-term incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat with Mamdani’s backing, had a whole deleted account’s worth: abolish the police, prisons and borders, and seize the landlords. Mamdani said he hadn’t seen the posts before endorsing her, and that her views had evolved.

He’d know. In June 2020, he tweeted that the NYPD is “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety”; that November, two days after winning his Assembly seat, he posted: “Queer liberation means defund the police.” Then he ran for mayor on rent and buses and childcare, apologized for the language, and called himself “a candidate who is not fixed in time.” To quote Kamala Harris, who stumbled on her own woke-era statements: You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

AOC is now trying to explain the woke era away as a symptom of something like Covid cabin fever. You see, lockdown opened the Overton window, in AOC’s telling, and suddenly the Left entertained “any and every policy” that might improve society. Those debates were “quite fruitful,” she said, but candidates would not use the same rhetoric now. Voters should judge Hong by what she says today: she will not abolish the police; what was once “aspirational” is no longer primary — Thanksgiving is actually Hong’s favorite holiday!

Call it the Lockdown Alibi, and expect a great deal more of it between now and November. We were all a bit odd during Covid. I made sourdough bread; other people wanted to abolish the carceral state — different strokes, right? 

Suggested reading

Woke 2.0 is here

By Valerie Stivers

But forgiveness usually follows an admission of guilt. What the new DSA-adjacent generation of Democrats wants instead is amnesty without a full accounting for wokeness, its irrationalities and its cruelties. It isn’t clear what “Woke One” includes, which ideas have been abandoned, or why. Is it police and prison abolition? Abolishing borders? The claim that homeownership is white supremacy? Can you at least admit that land acknowledgments make you sound ridiculous? Or that Ibram X. Kendi is Miss Rachel for people with humanities degrees?

This, of course, doesn’t mean every cause associated with Woke One was wrong, or that its critics have been vindicated in everything. The anti-woke Right has produced its own identitarian grotesqueries, and its answer to racial essentialism was apparently to dust off the calipers from the 19th century.

But admission of some guilt on the Left would be nice. Instead, we have gone, in six years, from woke doesn’t exist — it’s just basic decency to: of course it existed, and it was crazy, and also it was 2020, and also can we talk about your high grocery bill? We went straight from denial to nostalgia, skipping the bit where anyone apologizes. 

In 2016, the writer Lauren Duca published a viral Teen Vogue essay arguing that Donald Trump was gaslighting America — training us to distrust our own memory of what he’d said the week before. By that logic, large swaths of the Left have also been gaslighting America for years. It’s now time to say the obvious thing: there was a woke movement, it had a program, they were in it, and it lost. Take it slowly if you need to. 

I know how hard some words are to get out.