August has brought us a referendum on “Woke 1” – a term that reductively brands 2020’s social justice movement – as prominent liberal voices reflect on that time period with disappointing hindsight. During a recent appearance on ABC’s This Week, when asked about 2020-era demands to abolish prisons and police, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US congresswoman from New York, abandoned her previous support of the “defund the police” movement, and instead joked: “Woke 1 was crazyyyyy.”

Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist, implied that the still-resounding calls for municipalities to reduce police budgets and to divert aid to poor communities were worth advocating for during the 2020 uprising, but are now “crazyyyyy”. In 2020, she noted that “a lot of people cannot fathom what an abolitionist America looks like. Tell them it looks like a suburb. Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to fund youth, health, housing more than they fund police.” But she has since backtracked on that idea.

On 9 August, she told This Week co-host Jonathan Karl: “We all share the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible [but] rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.” Days later, Zohran Mamdani, the progressive New York mayor, echoed her sentiment by surmising: “Sometimes, what you believe can change and develop.” But their reversing course on abolition isn’t development; it’s a devolution.

The backlash to Ocasio-Cortez’s comments was widespread from leftists who felt as if her disavowal of the abolition and “defund the police” movements was an attempt to appease the Democratic establishment at their expense. Others, however, agreed with the assertion that “Woke 1” was defined by overly rigid radicalism, much of which occurred on social media, as with Chi Ossé’s 2021 post on Twitter declaring that “a cis white........

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