By Nick Catoggio
Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Last month Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff made news at a
confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, the president’s choice to be director of
national intelligence. Normally senators use their allotted time to probe
nominees on policy, but Ossoff had something more clever in mind.
“Who won the 2020 election?” he asked.
Stripped of political context, that’s a question that a
perspicacious 5-year-old could answer. But for a Republican official whose
career depends on Donald Trump’s favor, it’s the equivalent of the riddle of
the Sphinx—except in this case you die if you give the right answer, not the
wrong one.
So Clayton refused, dodging demands for a response for
two minutes. Ossoff wanted to show that the nominee couldn’t be trusted to
stand up to the president if Trump ordered him to behave unethically, and he
succeeded.
In hindsight, though, there may have been an answer
available to Clayton that would have disarmed the senator. He could have
shrugged, chuckled, and simply said, “2020 was crazy, man.”
That’s essentially what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did
last weekend when she was asked about Francesca Hong.
Hong is the frontrunner in today’s Wisconsin Democratic
gubernatorial primary. A progressive, she’s come to national attention for some
of her social media musings during the pandemic. Along with the usual “defund the police” claptrap, she once proposed, uh, canceling Thanksgiving. Which isn’t the only American
holiday that rubs her the wrong way, it turns out.
She began backtracking (sort of?) as the primary approached, but feeling
ambivalent—at best—about Thanksgiving is unimpeachable evidence of the weird,
alienating cultural preferences for which adversarial leftists are known and
loathed. What do you make of sentiments like the ones Hong expressed, ABC News
anchor Jonathan Karl asked Ocasio-Cortez?
“I have a local city councilman that has this saying:
Woke 1 was crazy,” she replied with a laugh amid a longer answer about the
disorientation of the COVID era having led some Democrats to consider
implausibly radical solutions to social problems.
My first thought upon hearing that was to focus on the
number. “Calling it ‘Woke 1’ is like calling it ‘World War One’ in 1930,” as National
Review’s Dan McLaughlin put it. If the original was crazy by their
own admission, why are progressives planning a sequel?
Shouldn’t they wait a decade or two before proceeding to
the inevitable “real wokeness has never been tried” revival?
My second thought was that a shrug and a laugh ain’t
gonna cut it here.
Woke 2?
The most one can say of Ocasio-Cortez’s evolution on Woke
1 is that it’s more considered than Hong’s sudden, opportunistic,
election-driven awakening about Thanksgiving. Compare AOC’s speeches to the Democratic National Convention in 2020 and in
2024, and you’ll find that she was already pivoting away (somewhat) from
the leftist cultural cant she embraced earlier in her career
and toward economic populism before Trump was reelected.
Sooner than many progressives, she seems to have grasped
that socialism’s growth potential lies in kitchen-table issues, not in making America safer for criminals. And so there’s
an element of calculation in her glib mirth about the woke era: Her laughter
aims to reassure the median voter that she now shares their belief that the
project was comically absurd.
But it’s a flimsy reckoning. “Ocasio-Cortez’s implication
is that that ‘crazy’ moment was something that happened to her and her
ideological compatriots—like an earthquake or an invasion from the sea—rather
than something that was contrived, dispersed, and enforced by her and
her ideological compatriots,” Charles Cooke writes at National Review. Indeed.
“Woke 1 was crazy” is a millennial version of politicians’ notoriously weaselly
habit of saying “mistakes were made” rather than forthrightly admitting an
error.
Which mistakes, specifically? Who made them?
Laughing it off is also AOC’s way of minimizing the
pernicious excesses of that era by treating them as harmlessly goofy while
conveniently sparing herself from having to confront the progressives who
supported them—many of whom still support them now, no doubt, and would resent
being told by her that they’d been “excessive.” That’s the real problem here:
Having succumbed to Woke 1, there’s no principled (as opposed to electoral)
reason to think Ocasio-Cortez and “normie” Democrats like Kamala Harris wouldn’t
succumb to it again rather than risk challenging left-wing activists over its
resurgence.
In 2020 Democratic leaders lacked the clarity or the
fortitude to reject an ideological mania that ranged from utopian idiocy about
abolishing prisons to apologias for rioting after George Floyd’s murder to
neo-McCarthyite cancellation campaigns aimed at ruining people professionally
for holding the wrong beliefs about, say, transgenderism. Even now, they’re so
unsure of their own willingness and ability to tamp down another wave of it
that they’re implicitly holding out the possibility of “Woke 2.” (Harris is
racing to embrace some of the left’s newer terrible ideas to get a
leg up in the 2028 primary.) Why would I trust them to govern going forward,
even if they’re now vaguely kinda sorta repentant?
I don’t trust Todd Blanche to manage the Justice
Department despite the feeble remorse he pretended to feel about midwifing the
president’s “cash for MAGA criminals” slush fund. I wouldn’t trust any
Republican with power who supported Trump’s coup plot in 2020 even if he or she
now claimed to be contrite. Repentance is cheap in politics; character, as
demonstrated by terrible judgment, is destiny. If your reaction to the Woke 1
era is to laugh it off and muse that neo-McCarthyism was crazy, man,
you’ve told us something important about your own character.
Also: Why the past tense? Not since 2020 has Woke 1
looked as lively as it does right now thanks to Ocasio-Cortez’s friends at the Democratic Socialists of America, who’ve beaten
the center-left in numerous primaries this year.
Two weeks ago, the national co-chair of the organization affirmed
that it hopes to abolish borders and prisons someday and aims to defund the
Pentagon if it’s ever in a position to do so. Newbie DSA candidates like Darializa
Avila Chevalier who are running in safe blue districts continue to hold
radical positions about, for instance, ending all
deportations. Francesca Hong’s change of heart about the joys of
Thanksgiving might plausibly be understood less as a matter of genuine
conversion than as a concession to the fact that she’s running in a 50-50 state
that Trump won in 2024.
Declaring that “Woke 1 was crazy” amounts to false
advertising in context, reassuring swing voters that DSAers have abandoned
cultural radicalism when many have done no such thing.
But even if you’re willing to concede AOC’s point and
allow that progressives have moved on to some substantively different form of
wokeness (“Woke 2,” I suppose), it’s old wine in new bottles. “The mistakes of
‘Woke 1’—people expressing very strongly held, very simplistic opinions about
complicated issues based on peer pressure and superficial memes without
bothering to learn anything about the topic at hand—just continue today on new
subjects rather than policing,” Matt
Yglesias observed. Ask the far-left pro-trans California lawmaker who got chased out of an LGBT rally for not denouncing Israel’s
operations in Gaza quickly enough about that.
Or ask Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel,
who doesn’t feel safe attending her party’s convention this
year and is begging the state’s Democratic nominee for Senate to stop making AIPAC the villain behind every political problem.
I doubt he will—but maybe, sometime circa 2032, Nessel will have the
consolation of watching Sen. Abdul El-Sayed reflect on this moment and say,
with a giggle, “Woke 2 was crazy.”
And it will be crazy, for the same reason Woke 1
was crazy and the same reason right-wing postliberalism is crazy crazy crazy.
They’re all expressions of populism, and populism is almost unfailingly
paranoid, demagogic, mobbish, and stupidly reductionist in how it tries to
solve problems. As one of my editors said this morning, whatever you think of
Woke 1 bugaboos like Drag Queen Story Hour, they surely did less damage to
America than having actual Marxists in Congress setting policy will.
What’s interesting to me is that a socialist luminary
like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is willing to say “Woke 1 was crazy” yet
virtually no right-wingers are willing to concede the same point about the past
populist excesses of their own movement.
Why?
Permission.
I think it’s largely a matter of “permission.” The left
has received a degree of permission to distance itself, sincerely or otherwise,
from toxic aspects of its preferred form of populism that the right simply
hasn’t.
That sense of permission derives from events. In 2024
Democrats lost to an unbalanced convicted felon three years after he
tried to overthrow the government, in part because many of the nonwhite
working-class voters on whom they depend preferred Trump’s law-and-order
message to Joe Biden’s open-borders policy. Losing to a proto-fascist is a
strong democratic signal that it’s time to tone it down a bit about abolishing
police and prisons and angrily insisting that trans women are women.
Lingering high inflation and the affordability crisis also contributed to the left’s sense of permission to pivot
away (somewhat) from cultural radicalism. A noun, a verb, and “AIPAC” might
work in a Democratic primary, but I expect El-Sayed will spend most of his time
this fall pushing the same message every other candidate in his party will,
that reducing the cost of living is the left’s—and America’s—most urgent
priority. Sure, they might concede, abolishing prisons is still important, but
it’s just not at the top of the agenda right now.
Check back with them in 2090 or so.
Besides, frustrations over electoral failures since 2016
may have left progressives sufficiently hungry for success that they’re now
willing to strategically retreat from certain outré beliefs to a degree that
the right is not. Right-wing populism triumphed nationally, after all; why
would Trumpists moderate when radicalism has been such a success? Bernie
Sanders supporters don’t have the luxury of that logic. If the DSA wants to
take over the Democratic Party, or at least force the party’s leadership to take
its concerns more seriously, it needs to expand its power in Congress.
If that means dialing it down a bit about taxpayer-funded gender-reassignment surgeries for federal
prisoners, some are now desperate enough for power to do that. Woke 1
was crazy, y’all.
There’s no widespread right-wing counterpart to that
attitude—yet—because its version of Woke 1 never ended.
The GOP’s equivalent of Woke 1 is Trumpism, and
Republicans are still firmly in the grip of it. Certain shrilly dogmatic
postliberals may have reached the point where they’re willing
to say Trumpism was crazy, but we’re years away from that sentiment
going mainstream on the right, assuming it ever does. To say it now would be to
undermine the leader of the party, a difficulty that AOC and other
pseudo-critics of wokeness on the left don’t face. It’s one thing to disparage
a style of populist politics in the abstract, as she has, but to disparage it
when it’s embodied in a person feels like treachery.
Especially when that person operates as supreme
authority and arbiter of a discrete moral system. Trump’s most cynically
brilliant demagogic feat was preserving his political viability in 2024 by
convincing the right after 2020 that he hadn’t actually lost. That made it
impossible for Republican politicians to reflect, à la Ocasio-Cortez, that Trumpism
had been “crazy” lest doing so be seen as immorally validating the legitimacy
of Democrats’ victory. The right can’t learn lessons from election results the
way the left has because it’s been programmed to interpret all defeats (or at least
ones in which the president’s prestige is at stake) as the product of cheating.
Populist Republicans who believe they’re incapable of
losing fairly conducted elections simply have no reason to reflect on their
excesses. What excesses?
To see that blind spot at work, consider what happened
yesterday. In the morning, the president signed an executive order that
recommends splitting multi-dose vaccines like the measles, mumps, and rubella
shot into separate injections, presumably to reduce the risk of
autism (which, by the way, isn’t caused by vaccination). Won’t that make things
unusually complicated and expensive for families, forcing them to visit the
doctor three times instead of once? Trump had no
answer. Is there even a valid health reason to split the shots up? There
is, he said, because the multi-dose shot can be “quite lethal”—before admitting that his only evidence is "some people that
say it is that way.”
Later the same day, Sen. Rand Paul released text messages
recovered from a government phone that Anthony Fauci used during the pandemic.
One series from January 2021 showed Fauci conferring with other science
bureaucrats about a theoretical miscarriage risk that the COVID mRNA vaccine
might pose to pregnant women, which he didn’t reveal at the time. Within
hours, right-wing influencers were circulating data suggesting that the shot
had caused no less than 82
percent of women injected during their first trimester of pregnancy to
miscarry. The outrage online was apocalyptic. Fauci must pay.
But the CDC hadn’t yet recommended the vaccine for
pregnant women in January 2021. That didn’t come until April of that year, after trial data confirmed
there was no health risk from the shot during pregnancy. (There was, however, a
risk from contracting severe COVID, which the shot was designed to prevent.)
And the “82 percent” figure comes from a study that was debunked
years ago, and which the tiniest bit of common sense would reveal couldn’t
possibly be true. If women were miscarrying by the millions in the months after
the shot hit the market, public awareness of it would not be limited to obscure
Twitter threads in 2026.
Paranoid, demagogic, mobbish, and stupidly reductionist
in addressing the problem of autism: This is the sort of populist policymaking
you get from a movement that’s never had to reckon with its own excesses.
Ocasio-Cortez’s version of “mistakes were made” is lame but still healthier
than what’s on offer from the modern right.
There is a world, I think, in which Republican
politicians might eventually concede that the Trump era involved a degree of,
shall we say, “overreach.” The words “Trumpism was crazy” will never be uttered
for fear of impugning the great man’s legacy, but you can imagine a scenario in
which Democrats win everything in 2028 and, come 2032, the GOP nominee is
forced to explain what he or she would do differently to avoid the sort of
beating that Trumpism led to four years earlier.
Perhaps, with Trump long gone from politics by then,
fictions about flawless populist politics being sabotaged by Democratic
election-rigging will no longer be needed to hand-hold Republican voters. “We
probably should have reined in the open bribery a little,” the nominee might
say of our current era. Or “we should think carefully next time before turning
the Justice Department into mafia enforcers for presidential vendettas.” Or “we
might not want the White House claiming and then abusing virtually every constitutional
power that Congress has.” Stuff like that.
But I doubt it. Barring a very surprising turn away from
postliberalism by Republicans, critiques of Trumpism will almost certainly zero
in on the Iran war and the cost of living rather than the various fascist
excrescences the president has left on the constitutional order. To receive
permission to reckon in a productive way with its civic and cultural errors,
the right needed the Trump era to have been less electorally successful than it
was and needed a waaaaay better—that is, more introspective and less
power-hungry—caliber of conservative in its leadership class. That ship sailed
long ago. Mistakes were made.
