Democratic congresswoman and maybe-soon presidential hopeful Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made headlines, launched think-pieces, by referring to “Woke 1” as having been “crazy.” By Woke 1, she meant things like posting about how (American) Thanksgiving was problematic and should be cancelled. Long-2010s progressivism, in other words. In the United States, as I understand it, Woke 1 has somewhat receded due to a mix of changing trends and Trumpian suppression. (Two not-unrelated phenomena; the man did win the popular vote.) In Toronto at least, Woke 1 lives on. In both the U.S. and Canada, however, it has been at the very least joined by something else.

For reasons I will explain, I felt compelled to post, “Is woke 2 when instead of saying white people (as in woke 1) someone says Jews?” The rhetorical question resonated, perhaps because I have picked up on something. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Woke, going by common parlance in the year 2026, is left illiberalism. (That’s as much terminological throat-clearing as you’re getting in this article.) Since the pandemic, it has had its own aesthetic, but it began to emerge in the aftermath of the 2008 recession. You can’t put exact dates to things like this, to cultural-political movements, except when you kinda-sorta can. Woke 2 began on Oct. 7, 2023. That vestiges or more-than-vestiges remain of the 1.0 version doesn’t change that. Nor do the hints that were absolutely there of what was to come. This is, in part, subtext becoming text.

Woke 1 was diffuse and fickle. It hopped from one current-thing to the next, each one breathlessly declared the only issue that could possibly matter, then abandoned for the next shiny new form of marginalization. Black people, Indigenous ones, women, trans people. It was subjective, more about self-presentation than identity. If your social media bio and y’all usage—and self-presentation, if any of this was happening in person—affected an underdog, punching-up, smol bean stance, nobody was fact-checking what your deal was. You could be a white guy with a trust fund, but if you wore thrifted clothes and eschewed capitalization in your posts, who would know?

Woke 1 was a hand-wringing, throat-clearing, privilege-disclaiming extravaganza. It was think-pieces about why Friends was actually very problematic towards name-which-group. It was going online to say that someone’s remark had been ableist, thereby demonstrating their blind spot towards the disabled, only to learn that the better language usage was people with disabilities and also “blind spot” is maybe problematic as well. As with correctives generally, the things it was correcting were real—casual bigotry and callousness, definitely real—but a mark just kept getting overshot, and in ways ultimately detrimental to the ostensible aims.

In The Perils of “Privilege,” my 2017 book offering something of a........

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