The American commentariat has lived inside a state of suspended animation for at least a decade. To them, it is 2014, 2016, or 2020 or somehow all three at once — and wokeness is the only subject worth talking about. Democratic strategist James Carville has nothing to do but appear on TV so he can say, for the hundredth time, that his party is now too woke. In August, CNN wanted to know if Democrats are trying to “shrug off” peak woke to win over skeptical voters. After all, Francesca Hong disavowed a few social-media posts, including a quip about canceling Thanksgiving, before she lost the Democratic primary for governor in Wisconsin. Asked about Hong’s posts in an interview, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez quoted City Councilman Chi Ossé, joking, “I have a local city councilman that has this saying: ‘Woke 1 was crazy.’” People should say what they believe, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said in the middle of the news cycle, but “what you believe can change and develop,” which is why he no longer wants to defund the police.

Pundits and consultants are only too eager to keep the conversation alive. Their careers depend on the formulas they’re selling, and “woke” is a useful antagonist. According to strategist Kaivan Shroff, jokes about “woke 1” give progressives permission “to admit that some of the politics of 2020 and the pandemic era went too far.” What politics? Which policies? Shroff doesn’t elaborate. Adam Jentleson, an operative who once worked for Senator John Fetterman, criticized the party in an interview with The New Yorker. Democrats hurt themselves — and the country — by deciding “to collectively plant our flag on the fringiest examples,” like trans rights, he said. At The Atlantic, Idrees Kahloon disdainfully recalls Nancy Pelosi in kente cloth, DEI initiatives on campus, and newsroom revolts “against colleagues they deemed counterrevolutionary.” He added, “Republicans will never let voters forget this.”

That may be true. The Trump administration stakes much of its reputation with voters on culture-war battles, but that tactic is riskier than today’s conversation can explain. While they target trans athletes, grocery prices are rising, and households are struggling to keep children fed. The discourse around woke 1, or peak woke, or whatever people call it, has become so divorced from material reality that it obscures far more than it clarifies. Woke is censorship, or trans rights, or defunding the police, except when it’s something else, like Me Too or basic empathy. As deployed by its critics, the definitions are blurring. Sometimes it’s a proxy for generic liberal politics; sometimes it’s a more pointed........

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