By Noah Rothman
Thursday, September 17, 2026
The mood was light on the set of ABC’s This Week one
Sunday in August as co-anchor Jonathan Karl bantered with his guest,
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Suddenly, it seemed, the phenomenon of
“wokeness” could be marveled at as little more than an imprudent episode.
“I have a local city councilman that has this saying,”
said AOC with a laugh, “‘Woke 1 was crazy.’” Karl laughed, too. With that,
left-of-center Americans had all the permission they needed to repudiate the
mania that had once gripped them. And some did, albeit through gritted teeth.
“Woke 1” wasn’t just excessive, the Los Angeles Times
columnist Robin Abcarian wrote. It was petty and spiteful. Even if the charge
of wokeness “has been weaponized by the right to the point of absurdity,” she
groused, it should not be hard to admit that “people’s careers were destroyed
over perceived ideological and verbal transgressions.”
Abcarian cited the novelist Francine Prose, who made a
similar point in The Guardian. The woke era’s “inflexible and frequently
impractical” codes of conduct and the way they were imposed on individuals and
institutions were regrettable, Prose conceded. But right-wingers deserve
censure, too. They cynically turned “woke” into a term of derision designed to
“mock and discredit anyone who supports racial justice, economic equality,” and
“universal health care.”
If some on the left were annoyed at AOC for the admission
that woke was crazy, they were downright furious at the right for, well,
noticing the left’s predicament. Progressives may be grudgingly distancing
themselves from “their most excessive past stances,” The Atlantic
observed, but “Republicans have no intention of letting voters forget.” As
though that’s dirty pool.
Why should anyone forget the craziness we are now
allowed to acknowledge? Perhaps wokeness’s diehards think the backlash against
their philosophy is unfair. Maybe those on the left now denouncing wokeness are
only going through the motions. Aside from a few examples, we aren’t hearing a
lot of regret from the participants in that prolonged moral panic. So how can
anyone call woke a thing of the past, as AOC implied? Perhaps she and her
compatriots believe that true wokeness has never been tried.
If the activist class acknowledges only that their
methods were flawed but insists that their motives were pure, we’re likely to
see the phenomenon return in a more bitter, aggrieved, and, ultimately,
vindictive form.
***
Even though it was a movement in which she took a
starring role, Ocasio-Cortez tried to blame everyone else for the excesses of
wokeness.
You see, “during Covid, there was a huge opening of the
Overton window,” she explained to Karl — as if she hadn’t used her own muscle
to open it. When there was no stigma associated with it, AOC eagerly cast
herself as an avatar of wokeness. She joined her fellow radicals in calling for
the abolition of federal immigration enforcement, the erasure of offensive
American holidays, and “prison abolition” — all long before lockdown.
But the New York Democrat was only racing to the front of
a parade already in procession. Well before the pandemic, the voters with whom
Ocasio-Cortez tried to ingratiate herself booed Bernie Sanders when he endorsed
the civil rights movement’s approach to dealing with “white supremacists.”
It wasn’t a Covid-induced aberration for American
colleges to devote the end of the last decade to anathematizing conservative
speech. After all, how could students be expected to control themselves once
they’ve come into contact with bigotry, which of course constitutes the bulk of
conservative speech?
And it wasn’t Covid that compelled the New York Times and
the Washington Post to publish op-eds lamenting the racism and sexism
that tainted, of all things, the Apollo 11 moon landing. To search in vain for
a “woman or person of color” in NASA’s Apollo-era archives undermines that
achievement, the Post piece suggested. “If we do not acknowledge the
gender bias of the early space program, it becomes difficult to move past it,”
said a writer in the Times. Such sentiments were organic and indigenous
to the left. Some advocates of this outlook described it as “woke” even then.
Others called it by an older name: “social justice.”
We are, of course, not talking about the kind of social
justice that Pope Leo XIII espoused in the encyclical Rerum Novarum. The
activist left’s version of social justice isn’t even the sort envisioned by its
foremost proponent, the philosopher John Rawls. Rawlsian thought prescribes a
“veil of ignorance” behind which the maximally enlightened distributors of
society’s goods must operate. The modern left rejected the veil.
The activists did not seek perfectly neutral justice,
which they regarded as neither possible nor desirable. They wanted retributive
justice: a balancing of the karmic scales and the righting of history’s
greatest wrongs. But how could any society engineer a cosmic comeuppance like
that if those who are empowered to rewrite the social contract don’t know whom
they’re helping or whom they’re punishing? True justice cannot be blind, as
Ibram X. Kendi declared in his hit 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist:
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.”
The theory of collective, identity-based justice favored
by far-left activists was incompatible with the Constitution’s protections for
individual rights and its promotion of equality before the law. Sometimes,
social justice advocates themselves admitted as much.
“By insisting on a narrow reading of the First
Amendment,” the American Civil Liberties Union “provides free legal support to
hate-based causes,” wrote K-Sue Park, a critical race studies fellow at UCLA’s
law school, in a 2017 New York Times op-ed. The ACLU promotes a
“colorblind logic” that has “never secured real freedom or even safety for
all.” Park wasn’t alone in denouncing what Ian Haney López, of the University
of California, Berkeley, called “reactionary colorblindness,” which “has become
a favored tool among racial demagogues.” As Justin Coles of Fordham’s Graduate
School of Education put it, “colorblindness is in fact deeply harmful and
violent.”
The colleges that followed the guidance outlined in
Barack Obama’s April 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter committed a similar sin. The
letter exhorted colleges and universities to adjudicate claims of sexual
impropriety on campus and apply only a “preponderance of evidence” standard to
adduce guilt. As a result, accused students were denied counsel, deprived of
access to evidence against them, and made to testify against themselves in
campus star chambers amid investigations into demonstrably consensual sexual
encounters and nonsensical claims of sexual harassment. Anyone who objected to
this assault on the Bill of Rights, as did former Education Secretary Betsy
DeVos, was accused of sweeping “sexual violence under the rug” or even of “an
all-out attack on survivors.”
Within this milieu, adherence to the tenets of social
justice became a competitive enterprise. Instigators, agitators, and true
believers alike made a spectacle of their devotion to their philosophy’s values
and policy prescriptions. In the process, they cultivated a peculiar fragility
among their disciples. The mid-2010s advent of the “microaggression” fits this
pattern. The young and liberal were taught to develop a reflexive sensitivity
to almost imperceptible slights or remarks that weren’t remotely intended as
such, including anodyne expressions of American patriotism.
As the University of California system explained in 2015,
the itsy-bitsy indiscretions that students and faculty alike were advised to
avoid included promoting the idea that, in America, “everyone can succeed.”
That would lend credence to the notion that the U.S. was a meritocracy and not
a society defined by structural racism and impermeable social strata. Nor could
you call the United States a “melting pot” when demographic distinctions in
America are, of course, immutable and determinative. It wasn’t acceptable to
say that “race and gender play no part in hiring decisions” or “I believe the
most qualified person should get the job.” Asserting an absence of bigotry is a
false endeavor, since it is impossible to avoid internalizing bigotry in a
nation as prejudiced as the United States.
There was an element of crushing fatalism to all this.
Indeed, for some on the left, that was its appeal. By the end of the last
decade, social justice activism had become a hair shirt. And as wokeness
continued to evolve from a political program into a totalistic theory of social
organization that emphasized strict adherence to a code of public morality, the
self-flagellation encouraged by social justice activism became even more
pronounced.
***
Early in this decade, John McWhorter, Columbia
University’s iconoclastic professor of linguistics, identified the trappings of
religiosity that festooned wokeness. The practice of wokeness, he argued, was
absurd by design. Its excesses constitute deliberate tests of faith. By
insisting ever more stridently on their preferred irrationality, he contended,
social justice activists deepen their fellow devotees’ convictions. After all,
everyone has already sunk a lot of cognitive costs into this project, so
illogic serves as a testament of fealty. “They are, in this, medievals with
lattes,” McWhorter wrote.
The essayist Andrew Sullivan agreed. Wokeness, with its
prescription for the equitable redistribution of both economic and social
goods, “does everything a religion should,” he wrote. “You cannot argue
logically with a religion — which is why you cannot really argue with
social-justice activists either.”
The novelist Michael Crichton didn’t have quite as dim a
view of faith as McWhorter’s, but as he saw it, the left-wing environmentalist
activism of the late 1990s and early 2000s was a “remapping” of Judeo-Christian
theological precepts onto the modern political landscape.
To me, wokeness in its early iteration looked less like a
faith and more like puritanism, which, as the historian Perry Miller wrote,
“was not merely a religious creed and a theology” but “also a program for
society.” But whether the movement functioned as a secular faith or not, its
accoutrements were aesthetically religious. What’s more, wokeness was
liturgical in ways that were perfectly compatible with the Western tradition.
In a 2020 spectacle for the benefit of local activists
and reporters, police officers in North Carolina washed the feet of black
religious leaders in a conscious act of Christian humility designed to “end
racism.”
The woke years were a time when kneeling to convey both
defiance and submission became all the rage. Police captains, big-city mayors,
the Democratic House caucus, and even Joe Biden himself knelt alongside
activists in the streets in what some likened to the civil rights movement’s
appeals to spirituality and faith.
Political performance artists replicated George Floyd’s
final moments as one might follow the Stations of the Cross. House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi thanked him for “sacrificing your life for justice.” Los
Angeles Sentinel contributor Maulana Karenga deemed him one of the few
who’ve “offered their lives in various ways to the sacred cause.” Some went
even further than that. “Jesus was arrested for having the audacity to speak
out in spaces the authorities of the day wanted to control,” U.S. Catholic
contributor Patrick Saint-Jean wrote. Likewise, Floyd’s “primary crime was
being a Black body in a white space.”
Those were explicit attempts by the woke-adjacent to
appropriate the moral authority of the Western canon. And yet, the broader
movement’s religiosity was not purely opportunistic. There was real sincerity
in the left’s appeals to a transcendent moral arbiter. The activists themselves
might not even have realized how completely they caricatured the faithful, but
their liturgy would have looked familiar to earlier generations of Americans.
Sure, the woke obsessed over the sin of “cultural
appropriation” in fusionist cuisine and resolved to eat bugs rather than hasten
the climatic eschaton. But in that, they also forswore earthly pleasures in
deference to what they saw as a higher moral calling. Yes, they exhorted their
compatriots to “do the work,” a labor that could never be finished and that
consisted primarily of submitting themselves to torturous struggle sessions.
The charitable, however, might see in that the practice of abnegation and self-denial
in the misguided but honest pursuit of enlightenment.
The woke left’s conflict entrepreneurs made a pastime of
identifying racism’s legacy in everyday activities like handicrafts, gardening,
bird-watching, and sports. That was, more or less, a manifestation of the
timeless American habit of divining temptations to wickedness and deviancy in
the banal.
“The knitting community is racist,” declared a (white)
Scottish knitted-clothing designer, hailing efforts by people of color in that
community “to try and educate white knitters” and end the “abuse.” A New
York Times contributor tsk-tsked that the “jogging craze” was a phenomenon
in which “Black people have not only been excluded” but “relentlessly depicted
as a threat to legitimate, white joggers.” GreenAmerica.org contended that
tilling your own soil in America carelessly mishandles the memory of the
“forced labor of German prisoners of war and Japanese internees.” A Washington
Post report, “The Racist Legacy Many Birds Carry,” quoted one ornithologist
lamenting that “Western ornithology, and natural exploration in general, was
often tied to a colonialist mind-set of conquering” and exploitation.
Similarly, left-wing activists discovered in this period
that unlimited pours for young men and women at, for example, holiday parties
might have socially destabilizing consequence s. Reducing the risk of
“unprofessional behavior” is why the Vox media outlet “cut down on the
drinks” at its 2017 soirée. In this, the new crusaders had only stumbled upon a
bit of ancient conservative wisdom.
Well before Covid, woke activists sought to drive sex out
of art and entertainment. “It’s becoming a little finicky,” the actor Will
Ferrell said in 2019 of the market for ribald comedic scripts. “Sex is
disappearing from the big screen, and it’s making movies less pleasurable,” the
Washington Post’s film critic, Ann Hornaday, wrote that same year. The
market for the romantic frisson hadn’t disappeared, as Amazon Studios chief
Jennifer Salke confessed. It’s just that “the movie business” left that market
“by the side of the road.” Why? Because the industry itself was full of the
same people whose sexual moralism compelled colleges and even states to try to
formalize the mysterious process of courtship with the language and strictures
of contracts — an initiative that the opinion writer Ezra Klein approvingly
speculated would cause college-age men to “feel a cold spike of fear when they
begin a sexual encounter.”
In this, we see woke 1 as a relatively bourgeois
expression of America’s age-old moral hang-ups. In fact, God-fearing Americans
of the 17th, 18th, and even early 19th centuries would see shades of themselves
in wokester asceticism.
Although it was a collectivist movement from the start,
woke 1 emphasized individual agency to a pathological degree. Even unconscious
thoughts were talked about as though they could have some material impact on
the world. Call it the power of prayer for the secular set.
***
If wokeness is evolving into something new enough to be
called woke 2, the movement’s religiosity is getting deleted in the update.
Alongside the pantomimed piety, woke 1 also incubated a
strain of thought that was hostile toward all things Western. The author Bruce
Bawer chronicled the rise of identitarian studies in academic departments
devoted to opposing “Western cultural imperialism.” Activists bent on
“decolonizing” the college syllabus banished the likes of Hume, Descartes,
Plato, and Kant in a campaign aimed at “de-centering” Western intellectual
history. “We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” the Black
Lives Matter organization declared in 2020 in language that was adopted
verbatim by the United Federation of Teachers later that year. Few summarized
the activists’ objectives more succinctly than Chandran Nair in his 2021 essay
in Time: “A better world cannot be forged without unmasking and
dismantling the global superstructure that perpetuates white, Western
dominance.”
The social justice movement had incorporated the
20th-century left’s veneration of non-Western cultures as an expression of its
activists’ disdain for Eurocentrism. For a time, this imperative coexisted
alongside a pageant of Judeo-Christian symbolism. That was not to last.
Many of wokeness’s most devoted adherents have spent the
better part of this decade gravitating toward Palestinianism, which is not the
same thing as being pro-Palestinian. As a doctrine, Palestinianism has been a
central feature of anti-Western radicalism for over half a century. The Soviet
Union first popularized a theory of “Zionology,” which posited that Israel was
an “anti-human” entity, to quote the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, typified
by militant chauvinism, racism, and neocolonialism. Moscow’s agitation was
picked up by the militant leftists in orbit around Cuba in the second half of
the 20th century, some of whom evolved from Marxian “focoist” guerrillas into
pan-Arab nationalist militants and, after the 1979 revolution in Iran,
unreconstructed Islamists.
For the extremists, Palestinianism served as a
comprehensive rejection of Western modes. The activism currently in fashion on
the far left bears many of the hallmarks of the radical movements of the 1970s.
Correspondingly, the second draft of wokeness seems
destined to dispense with its gestures toward Western religious traditions.
Indeed, its adherents reserve special contempt for all things Western:
holidays, cultural expressions, moral codes. But the movement’s loudest voices
seem most offended by liberalism, the theory of social organization that
emerged out of the Enlightenment and on which most Western governments are
founded.
The socialist movement overtaking the left, for example,
proposes doing away with the Senate and the Supreme Court as conceived in the
Constitution, and with them the separation of powers that has preserved liberty
and stability in America for generations. Its leading lights flirt openly with
the exotic allure of Maoism. At the center of it all is what one Democratic
Socialist of America national committee member, Cliff Connolly, confessed was
his movement’s “hatred of the Constitution.”
The sexual politics that were once so central to the
movement’s self-conception are far more muted than they were at the end of the
last decade. So, too, is the self-seriousness that characterized woke 1. The
scions of socialism today are jocular and winsome, and, in many cases,
sophomoric. Supporters of the movement freely confess that they like the
“social” aspect of socialism. It seems fun.
Some will regard that as an improvement on wokeness’s
penchant for humorlessness, but the movement’s new carefree attitude is nothing
to admire. If woke 1 believed in individual agency to such an extent that it
prescribed dwelling constantly on the world’s injustices, as if that could have
a cumulative and ameliorating effect, woke 2 argues that individual agency is a
myth.
The system is arrayed against you; the obstacles
before you are insurmountable. Only a profound societal disruption will deliver
us all into the sunlit uplands of history. Wokeness is more happy-go-lucky
than it once was, but only because its members are now imbued with
revolutionary messianism. When the old order has been swept away, the state
will take care of everything. Why worry?
The new wokeness is a modern form of a very old
radicalism. Its excesses are thus likely to be familiar.
It has fetishized violence, for example, particularly
against what it construes as the symbols of the dominant American political
culture: its statues, its courthouses, its law enforcement officers. It is
hostile toward Western conventions, particularly the religious and capitalistic
varieties, just as the anarchists of the early 20th century were. Its virtues
are those articulated by the Iranian revolutionary thinker Jalal Al-e-Ahmad in
his radical tome Westoxification. The Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati
summarized the book’s thesis as opposition to “world imperialism, including
multinational corporations and cultural imperialism, racism, class
exploitation, class oppression, [and] class inequality,” among other social
ills allegedly cultivated and exported by the West.
New Woke is a more exclusive club and therefore likely to
be a smaller one. But it will not be commensurately less menacing.
In abjuring woke 1, AOC ignited a backlash among her
fellow socialists. The Democratic Socialists of America’s Maoist “Liberation
Caucus” denounced their deviationist comrade as an “opportunist.” One of her
detractors was the Brooklyn-based writer Andre Gee, who wrote in The
Guardian that Ocasio-Cortez’s treachery “exemplifies the hopelessness of
electing progressive candidates” beholden to the tyranny of “centrist
consensus” over “radical policies.” Not to be outdone, the militant left-wing
essayist Natasha Lennard attacked AOC’s “liberal cowardice” as the sort that
throttles nascent “rebellions” in their cribs. “There was nothing ‘crazy’ about
more than 20 million people taking to the streets in righteous, militant
protests against a racist, necropolitical order,” she wrote. Ocasio-Cortez’s
counterrevolutionary remarks are a betrayal of “the uprisings’ militant
challenge to racial capitalism.”
While woke 1 was, on the margins, infatuated with the
foreign, it sought influence by appealing to the Western tradition and its
highest ideals. Woke 2 has no use for the West, its systems, or those who would
work within them to advance incrementalist political objectives — even someone
as radical as AOC.
Still, she was right, of course. The first version of
wokeness was crazy. It was fanatical, obsessive, apocalyptic,
belligerent, and predatory. But underneath it all, its enthusiasts behaved as
though there was at least something about the West that was worth
preserving. Woke 2 disagrees.
