For a while, it seemed reasonable to wonder whether our society had reached peak woke. But what if wokeness comes in waves, and the next one is a riptide? In “The Future of Woke,” the cover story of the new issue of National Review, Noah Rothman sizes up the threat.

“Woke 1 was crazy.” So declared Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a Sunday show this summer, setting off something of a reckoning on the left, but also anger. Republicans should never let anyone forget what it was like. Noah writes:

Why should anyone forget the craziness we are now allowed to acknowledge? Perhaps wokeness’s diehards think the backlash against their philosophy is unfair. Maybe those on the left now denouncing wokeness are only going through the motions. Aside from a few examples, we aren’t hearing a lot of regret from the participants in that prolonged moral panic. So how can anyone call woke a thing of the past, as AOC implied? Perhaps she and her compatriots believe that true wokeness has never been tried. If the activist class acknowledges only that their methods were flawed but insists that their motives were pure, we’re likely to see the phenomenon return in a more bitter, aggrieved, and, ultimately, vindictive form.

Why should anyone forget the craziness we are now allowed to........

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