{"id":1006487,"date":"2026-08-17T12:57:44","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T12:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1006487\/"},"modified":"2026-08-17T12:57:44","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T12:57:44","slug":"why-woke-1-was-so-crazy-and-what-progressives-should-do-about-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/1006487\/","title":{"rendered":"Why \u201cWoke 1\u201d was so \u201ccrazy,\u201d and what progressives should do about it."},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up for the Slatest<\/a> to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.<\/p>\n

I need to acknowledge up front that it is unwise for anybody\u2014including me\u2014to deduce any comprehensive conclusions about the Democratic Party and where it\u2019s headed from Wisconsin\u2019s gubernatorial primary last week. That was a really weird race, and it only got weirder as Election Day drew nearer. The front-runner was Francesca Hong, a State Assemblywoman and DSA member who, according to the scant few surveys conducted, held a dominant lead over the moderate candidates in the field. Hong maintained that momentum throughout the spring and summer, as several establishment hands dropped out. The party searched far and wide to find a conventional Democrat to coalesce around, but the right person never surfaced. Then, in a last-ditch effort to fend off Hong\u2019s insurgency, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who had previously suspended his campaign, reentered the race less than a month before polls opened. This looked like a humiliation ritual to me: Crowley wasn\u2019t polling competitively even when he was actively campaigning, and it seemed unlikely that his brand could be rehabilitated with such little time left.<\/p>\n

But then Crowley\u00a0\u2026 won. Sure, Hong massively underperformed her benchmarks\u2014posting an abysmal 7-point margin of victory even in the cobalt-blue Dane County\u2014and, yes, we must note that Crowley eked out a razor-thin plurality. There are plenty of ways to account for this upset, from polling errors to the musical chairs at the ballot box to Hong\u2019s failure to spend basically any money on TV ads. But, really, much of the postmortem has focused on Hong\u2019s association with what we\u2019re now all calling \u201cWoke\u00a01.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to articulate exactly what Woke\u00a01 is or, I suppose, was. But like pornography, you know it when you see it. Here are a few examples that come to mind. Woke\u00a01 is a podcaster in Brooklyn listing their Twitter location as \u201cunceded Lenape territory.\u201d Woke\u00a01 is a colleague at a public-relations firm starting a GoFundMe to escape a \u201ctoxic roommate situation.\u201d Woke\u00a01 is a 5,000-word article probing the crisis of bi erasure, a 34-year-old YouTuber canceled for dating a 25-year-old TikTokker, or perhaps a \u201cgay immigrant Muslim furry romance<\/a>\u201d pitched as a weapon to resist Donald Trump. If you were to ask me, I might describe Woke\u00a01 as a highly codified set of language principles that participants in left-wing causes were expected to internalize and wield with fluency because if they didn\u2019t, they risked punishment, ostracization, or harassment. But even that doesn\u2019t really get to the heart of the matter. I think when we derisively say Woke\u00a01 now, what we are gesturing at is the shudderingly visceral feeling of the whole thing\u2014the distinct haughty tang, the way-too-online insularity, and, most important, the telos that amounted to little more than inflicting guilt and experiencing guilt, in perpetuity. It was difficult to determine what that guilt could ever produce. After all, Lenape territory remains unceded, no matter how many times it is acknowledged.<\/p>\n

This is the stench that hampered Hong\u2019s campaign. I wrote about all of this<\/a> earlier this month, when it seemed she would be the nominee for Wisconsin\u2019s governorship, but to quickly bring you up to speed: In 2020\u2014the pinnacle of wokeness, when you could say just about anything and be taken seriously\u2014Hong posted a good-natured but prototypically annoying tweet. The subject was Thanksgiving. Hong insisted that we ought to \u201ccancel\u201d the holiday because it celebrates \u201ccolonialism\u201d that \u201ckilled Indigenous folx and women.\u201d (As for what the x affixed to the word folk is supposed to mean, I still don\u2019t know\u2014and neither do you.)<\/p>\n

Like a lot of people in circa-2020 left-wing activism, Hong was correct on the merits. The genocide of Native Americans does, indeed, heinously clash with the new-world facade imagined by the Thanksgiving tradition. But if we\u2019re being honest, that wasn\u2019t the argument she was making in her tweet. Instead, she was asking Americans to embrace the ascetic, self-flagellating, and eternally anxious lifestyle of Woke 1. Did ordinary people really want to interrogate Thanksgiving like this? Especially knowing full well that all that interrogation could ever reveal was a bottomless shame that nobody\u2014and certainly not themselves\u2014could atone for? The answer to that question was no, which seems obvious now. But there was, indeed, a brief aperture of time in the pressure cooker of 2020 when it all seemed possible.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Luke Winkie
\n There\u2019s One Simple Word the Left Needs to Start Saying if It Wants to Win
\n Read More<\/b>\n <\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing: Looking back, I do understand the utopian vision that captivated Hong and her fellow partisans. I think we all liked the idea of wreathing the long days of COVID with the possibility of rebirth. But you know what happened afterward. Trump got reelected on a tide of score-settling revanchism. Woke culture, at least in its original incarnation, was summarily defeated. Its most extreme positions\u2014like prison abolition and police defunding\u2014did not challenge conventions or prompt change; instead, they were easily reforged into right-wing cudgels. We sifted through the rubble, and it was clear to just about everyone that the left needed to retool to get its point across. But Hong didn\u2019t get that memo and has lost her primary, and frankly, that\u2019s for the best.<\/p>\n

A number of prominent leftists have started to back away from the tenets of Woke\u00a01 in the blistering clarity of Hong\u2019s defeat. The most prominent among them is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who, during an appearance on ABC on Aug.\u00a09, was asked about Hong\u2019s Thanksgiving comments. In her response, she quoted a post made by New York City Councilman Chi Oss\u00e9, who himself had made some overheated posts in the early 2020s and recently corrected the record with \u201cWoke 1 was crazyyyy<\/a>,\u201d a phrase AOC deployed on TV as well.<\/p>\n

A lot of dyed-in-the-wool activists were turned off by the flippancy of AOC\u2019s riposte, and even with my own recent grappling over the problematic emotional landscape of the movement, I can understand why. The apotheosis of Woke 1 was triggered by the brutal murder of George Floyd by a police officer. Characterizing the outrage that followed as a strategic error feels a little mercenary.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n <\/p>\n

    Dear (Juris)Prudence: Who Cooks Up the Supreme Court\u2019s BS Originalist Ideas, Anyway?
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  2. \n <\/p>\n

    An Extremist Won This Week in Wisconsin. It\u2019s Probably Not the One You\u2019ve Read About.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n

  3. \n
    \n This Content is Available for Slate Plus members only<\/p>\n

    It\u2019s Obvious Now Why \u201cWoke 1\u201d Failed. I Have an Idea for How Progressives Can Be Less Annoying Next Time.
    \n <\/a>\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    But with respect to those concerns, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s exactly what Ocasio-Cortez was saying. The underlying injustices animating wokeness are real, and the opposition to them is righteous. But the challenge, for AOC and anyone else dreaming up Woke\u00a02, is to bring the cause to scale\u2014for the folks, rather than the folx. Is there room for a positive wokeness? One that does not commit so much time and energy to go-nowhere debates? I am far from the first person to make this point, but one of the great failures of Woke 1 was how insistent it was to remind everyone of their sins, ancestral or otherwise. How, by existing on that unceded Lenape territory, they are living cruelly and thoughtlessly. But ordinary Americans do not like to think of themselves as unforgivably bigoted, because\u2014generally speaking\u2014ordinary Americans think that being bigoted is bad. And there is untapped power in that consensus. Perhaps, someday in the future, the spirit of 2020 will be revived with a new galvanizing philosophy: Most of our fellow citizens might actually be good people.<\/p>\n

    Because the American people are angry. That\u2019s the great irony of the Woke Reckoning; in many ways, the Democratic electorate is fully radicalized, perhaps more so than ever. The wine moms will happily endorse mass tribunals for aberrant Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents; they want to see the oligarchy toppled and the data centers razed to the ground. Entrenched institutions of U.S. statecraft\u2014like our Israel policy\u2014are suddenly, miraculously up for debate. Wokeness can still reign, but if it does, it will be an earthier wokeness. A more practical, forward-looking wokeness. A more joyful wokeness. Maybe you could call it a tea party wokeness, purged of pedants and scolds. A better world is still possible, so long as we\u2019re not too annoying about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1006488,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[76379,11338,7033,90,712,50,345,67,132,68,1398],"class_list":["post-1006487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","category-us","tag-2026-midterms","tag-alexandria-ocasio-cortez","tag-democrats","tag-elections","tag-internet","tag-news","tag-social-media","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-wisconsin"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117110968771646577","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1006487"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006487\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1006488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1006487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1006487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1006487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}