Wokesters Without Borders

By Abe Greenwald

Last week, I wrote about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s assessment that “Woke 1 was crazy.” While many on the right are angered by her lighthearted dismissal of what was a massively destructive and violent force in American life, my concerns mainly lie elsewhere. It’s counterproductive to relitigate the last war when the next one is already upon us. 

As I wrote, “The particular craziness that AOC laughs off has led the country directly to something worse.” Woke 2 is unleashing a Communist-Islamist fury. It’s wokeness boiled down to its darkest, most illiberal essences: compulsion and bigotry. My point was that Woke 2 is evil, and evil is more persuasive than crazy is.

But there’s another important contrast between Woke 1 and Woke 2 that only struck me after I had finished writing that day’s newsletter. Woke 1, for all its horrors, expressed maximalist and deformed versions of very American sentiments. Its obsession with “black lives” and “white privilege” was tied to America’s undying remorse over the country’s original sin of slavery. The call to defund the police can be seen as a twisted strain of our exceptional anti-authoritarianism. And the unbridled gender madness was a debauched declaration of individual liberty.

Woke 2 is foreign in every respect. The Democratic Socialists of America aren’t talking about tearing down statues. They have plans to raze or replace the basic architecture of American governance, including the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the presidency. They want to abolish capitalism and private property. They eschew individual liberty for class consciousness. There is no meaningful or legitimate precedent in American history for this kind of movement. It is overtly Soviet and Maoist (note Hasan Piker’s Zhongshan suit).

The Islamists changed the focus of left identity politics and centered it on the longstanding grievance of the Middle East’s Muslims: from black Americans to Palestinians in Gaza, and from white Americans to Jews worldwide. Instead of America’s original sin of slavery, Woke 2 is obsessed with what it casts as Israel’s original sin of existing. As a result, it’s given rise to a surge of primitive and violent anti-Semitism that has no antecedent in American history. The model—the stated aspiration—is Palestinian intifada. 

So it’s not just that Woke 2 is wholly foreign in its motivations and aims. It’s that Woke 2 is establishing an American beachhead for this country’s historical and ideological foreign enemies. And its endgame is a science-fictional America that’s been conquered by the millenarian forces of Communism and Jihad.

To be clear, I don’t think for a moment that homegrown Gen Z Marxists and Islamists will finally achieve what their stronger, more committed forbears couldn’t. Their dreams will remain science-fictional. These movements are seeded with failure, especially in an American context. They’re antithetical to our understanding of human flourishing, and we should expect to see a large majority of the country reject them. But, like the ruined regimes that they’re trying to import, they can do a tremendous amount of damage before they’re defeated. Which is why I’d rather focus on the fight before us than roam the battlefields of Woke War I. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.