Welcome to Woke 2

By Abe Greenwald

When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told ABC News’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday, “Woke 1 was crazyyyy,” what she really meant was that the first wave of wokeness, which arose in 2020, failed to achieve its chief aims. It didn’t take long for Americans to sour on DEI, defunding the police, and transgender for all. AOC, however, championed—and presumably still favors—the whole crazyyyy Woke 1 agenda. But she’s learned that it’s not wise to say so. Perhaps Francesca Hong now understands this as well. 

Of course, Woke 1 was crazy. Even though it fizzled out, the particular craziness that AOC laughs off has led the country directly to something worse. And we don’t yet know to what extent the country will reject it. 

As I wrote in the summer of 2020, wokeness wasn’t just an isolated convulsion that would leave the stage with the pandemic; it was a revolution. And revolutions, I noted, are notoriously prone to internal power struggles. Many who were alarmed by the revolution, therefore, hoped that it would be undone from within. I warned at the time, however, that we shouldn’t be reassured by the prospect of the revolution’s self-destruction but concerned about who might take its reins. Six years later, I’d like nothing more than to have been embarrassingly wrong. 

I wrote:

Those of us who stand opposed to the revolution and its aims harbor the hope that the revolutionaries will “eat each other alive” or that their mixed motivations, outlandish ideas, and repellent actions will ultimately blow up the movement from within. But such internal dynamics can serve to refine, not kill off, revolutions. Revolutionary France was a perpetual and bloody power struggle between parties such as the Hébertists, Thermidoreans, and Jacobins. Such competition ensured that, in the long run, the fiercest elements came out on top. The same can be said of the battles between the Mensheviks, the Left SR, and the Bolsheviks of Russia. The Cultural Revolution was itself a sustained effort to wrench and secure control of the Chinese Communist Party. And in all these cases, important nonrevolutionary fellow travelers found reason to make common cause and go along with the winners at any given moment. Judging from history (and the present), it is unlikely that the revolution will self-destruct.

It’s now clear that the fiercest elements have indeed come out on top. The revolution is no longer dominated by the ideas of featherweight academics such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. All that redemptive white fragility and anti-racism and intersectionality was sundered in a flash after October 7, 2023. A few bestselling authors didn’t stand a chance against the Marxist-jihadist alliance that swooped in with its genocidal chants and terrorist regalia. Woke 2, if we’re going to call it that, is in the hands of Communists and Islamists.   

The word “crazy” is inadequate to the moment—when New York City’s mayor doxes thousands of innocent people; when someone who worked in a former al-Qaeda front group is a Democratic congressional nominee in New Jersey; when leading candidates around the country belong to a political party that wants to abolish national borders, the Senate, the presidency, and Israel; when CEOs are gunned down on the streets, and when elected Democrats stage run-ins with Jews in the West Bank.

Yes, that’s the other part of my warning that has also come to pass. The non-revolutionary Democratic establishment has thrown in with the leaders of Woke 2. They’ll flock to the revolution’s winners, whoever they may be. Having distanced themselves from defunding the police, pronoun enforcement, and “gender-affirming care,” they now rail against Jewish money, Jewish influence, and the Jewish state. 

AOC is denouncing Woke 1 because crazy really is a political loser. But evil? Evil’s got legs. 

Abe Greenwald is the executive editor of COMMENTARY.