There is a difference between changing your mind and shifting your tactics, between evolving in your views and abandoning them because they’ve become unpopular or politically perilous.
When Rep. 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. Ideas once upheld in doctrinaire terms, with dissenters dismissed as lazy (do the work) or inhumane (you literally don’t want me to exist), are now treated as an embarrassing phase, the gawky formative years of cultural and political progressivism.
James Talarico, the Texas Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat, has admitted that “there are some statements that I’ve made that I certainly regret,” and that some of his old comments may now seem “cringey.” (All this when a journalist asked him about his past assertion that God is “nonbinary,” a claim Talarico now says was “intentionally provocative.”) Some commentators on the left have joined in the revisionism, acknowledging, for example, that cancel culture may have occasionally gone too far and that, yes, elements of the woke agenda may appear silly in hindsight.
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 Woke 1 was really crazy, then Ocasio-Cortez, who called for abolishing prisons and adopted terms such as “menstruating person,” was a resident in good standing of the asylum.)
So, before that time goes further down the memory hole, discarded as just one of so many vibe shifts, I have one question for the formerly woke:
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?
If you did believe it, jettisoning it now should take something more than a sheepish grin. If you didn’t believe it and yet declared it with such passion, with such pretensions to moral clarity, with such disdain for contrary perspectives, then the least you can do now is acknowledge that dissonance. You should explain the shift, not just explain it away.
Some writers and thinkers have admitted that they supported certain progressive verities — or didn’t push back against them — because they felt cowed by their audiences, or because they feared for their careers. My hope is for a modicum of such intellectual accountability from the political class, too, just enough grace to blush.
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?
To expect intellectual accountability from politicians may be foolish, I know, and parties and movements are allowed and expected to evolve. The right, for instance, went from Barry Goldwater and the Reagan Revolution to Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, to George W. Bush and compassionate conservatism, to the Tea Party and then to MAGA, with consistencies as well as discontinuities along the way. Not every politician must explicitly disavow what came before.
But when political leaders reject not just an old ideology, but their own old ideology, one they embodied and upheld, the price of elision should be higher.
In her interview, Ocasio-Cortez attributes the excesses of the woke era in part to the pressures of pandemic restrictions, saying that “of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.” But that’s just a canny restatement of her shift, not an explanation for it. Would Ocasio-Cortez not use the same rhetoric today because she no longer buys it — or because she can no longer sell it?
I’ve long had concerns about the motivations and incentives inherent in culture war arguments. Culture wars are not primarily about debating issues, but about picking a side, joining a team. And the trouble with joining a team is that, inevitably, some teammates go further than you might want to go yourself. They stake out positions with which you may disagree or formulate tenets on topics about which you may know little. But you don’t want the other side to prevail, of course, so you go along, stridently upholding your team’s various positions and hunting down apostates. At a certain point, you’re no longer considering the issues; instead, you’re defending turf.
Politicians on the pro-President Donald Trump right have gone through their own version of this dance, whether excusing every corrupt and authoritarian impulse of their leader or leavening their public devotion with dutiful — and meaningless — off-the-record misgivings. Are they true believers or just fearful ones, legitimate loyalists or craven opportunists? The Trumpian right may evolve into an even more pernicious version of itself, or someday, too, its current enablers and supporters may smile and say MAGA just went a little crazy for a while. If they do, I can’t imagine the formerly woke letting them off so easily.
In her interview, Ocasio-Cortez said she has not “ruled out” a run for the presidency in 2028 — and it is easy to link her revised ideological positions to that ambition. This is a “time of renewal” for the Democratic Party, Ocasio-Cortez said, explaining that “we are focused on everything from your healthcare to your grocery bill.” She called the party a “big tent” and affirmed that “our priority is the working class.”
When the congresswoman, who is a member of the New York City chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, was asked about DSA calls to defund the Pentagon, abolish the police and the Senate and establish public ownership of essential industries, she replied that “people are less interested in these academic debates, and they’re more interested in how we’re going to bring their bills down and make sure that they can afford to see a doctor.” (That snub of academia is especially deft for a left that purports to respect science and expertise, and for a movement that propelled “intersectionality” and “white fragility” into the vernacular.)
So, is this a Woke 2, focused on economic challenges for the working class, on affordability and healthcare, and leaving identitarian politics behind? It may well prove a more electorally palatable iteration, one that makes sense if the DSA-inflected Democratic Party aspires to national power. Whereas Woke 1 was accelerated by Trump’s initial rise to the presidency, his return to the White House made clear its political shortcomings.
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.
They should do the work.
