The progressive left has discovered a useful new feature for old political positions. Version numbers. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently repeated a New York City councilman’s line that “Woke 1 was crazy” while arguing that candidates should be judged on what they are saying now. The phrase has since become its own political product. On Sunday, the New York Post highlighted Joe Rogan’s complaint that Democrats cannot simply label the old era Woke 1.0 and move on without explaining which positions they now reject and why. For a movement that once insisted language carries enormous moral weight, this is a wonderfully efficient rebrand.
The underlying exchange is not in dispute. On ABC’s “This Week” earlier this month, Ocasio-Cortez was asked about past rhetoric from Wisconsin Democrat Francesca Hong and about her own previous support for defunding the police. Fox News and Breitbart both reported the answer. Ocasio-Cortez quoted the phrase “Woke 1 was crazy” and said candidates should be assessed by what they say now. She also said the pandemic period opened the door to entertaining a wide range of policies and that rhetoric from lockdown is not rhetoric she would use today. That is a real evolution in presentation, even if it is less clear how much underlying policy has changed.
That uncertainty is the target. Politicians are allowed to change their minds. They should change their minds when experience, evidence or voters persuade them. The strange part is acting as if attaching a software label to a political period completes the explanation. Woke 1 suggests there was a Woke 2, perhaps a patch note, maybe a quiet bug fix. It turns a serious question about judgment into branding. The public is left to infer which parts were temporary rhetoric, which parts remain principles and which parts everyone has mutually agreed not to bring up at Thanksgiving.
The criticism is not coming only from conservatives. The Guardian has run multiple pieces arguing over the phrase from the left, including one that objected to liberals dismissing the protest politics of 2020 and another that asked what progressives actually did wrong. That disagreement matters because it shows the rebrand has not settled anything. Some progressives see the period as containing excesses worth acknowledging. Others see the very framing as conceding too much to a right-wing caricature. Meanwhile, the people trying to win elections would understandably prefer a phrase short enough to fit into an interview segment.
Rogan’s complaint, stripped of the profanity, is simple. Name the change. If defunding the police was wrong, say why. If it was only the slogan that was wrong, say what policy remains. If some candidates held positions that no longer represent them, explain what changed. That standard should not be controversial. It is also much less convenient than saying the old version was crazy and asking voters to install the update.
Ocasio-Cortez’s actual answer was more nuanced than the meme. She referred to the extraordinary conditions of the Covid shutdown period and said rhetoric changes. That is fair context. The country was in a strange place, unemployment surged and political possibilities expanded quickly. But context is not the same as accounting. A leader who helped define a movement’s public language cannot make the record disappear by explaining that the moment was unusual. The useful question is which ideas survived the moment and which did not.
This is where Too Woke earns its keep. The joke is not that social justice concerns vanished or that every demand from 2020 was ridiculous. The joke is that a political culture famous for elaborate terminology has now created terminology for the phase when its terminology became politically inconvenient. There is something almost admirable about the efficiency. The left spent years asking institutions to examine their past statements in detail. Now some of its most prominent figures are learning that voters can ask for the same exercise.
There is also a difference between admitting a bad slogan and abandoning the concern underneath it. That is exactly why specificity matters. A politician can believe policing needs reform while rejecting “defund the police.” A politician can defend racial equality while deciding that some institutional DEI programs became counterproductive. Those are coherent positions. What makes the current Woke 1 shorthand funny is that it tries to compress all of those distinctions into a version label. The label is useful precisely because it is vague enough to let different listeners imagine that the speaker has rejected whichever part they personally disliked.
Progressives should be unusually familiar with the demand for an accounting. This is a political culture that has spent years parsing old statements, asking institutions to acknowledge harms and insisting that changed behavior requires more than a quiet update to the website. That standard does not become unreasonable when it points inward. If a movement wants credit for evolving, it can show the work. The answer may be persuasive. It may even reveal that critics exaggerated what the movement believed in the first place. But the exercise has to involve more than declaring the old build unstable and moving everybody to the new release.
The best defense of AOC’s answer is also the reason the shorthand is unnecessary. She did provide context. She said the pandemic changed the political environment and that today’s rhetoric is different. That is an argument adults can evaluate. It invites the next question instead of pretending there is no next question. Which positions changed? Which language changed? Which goals remain? A movement confident in its evolution should want that conversation, because otherwise its opponents get to define Woke 1 for it, usually by stuffing every unpopular idea from a five-year period into the same box.
If Woke 1 was crazy, which specific beliefs were the bugs, which were the features and what exactly changed before voters were asked to download the next version?
Sources
New York Post: Joe Rogan says Dems ‘full of s-‘ if they won’t specify which ‘Woke 1.0’ stances went too far
Fox News: Joe Rogan warns Democrats they must admit how woke policies failed
Fox News: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shrugs off past ‘defund the police’ comments, joking ‘Woke 1 was crazy’
The Guardian: By disparaging 2020 protests as ‘Woke 1’, liberals are following the rightwing’s lead
The Guardian: Here is the news from the US: Woke 1.0 is over. But what did progressives do wrong?
