When ABC News asked New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about a fellow Democrat who years ago had proposed abolishing prisons, abolishing the police and abolishing Thanksgiving, she replied with a dismissive phrase that she attributed to a city councilman she knew: “Woke 1 was crazy,” AOC said. Half the country was indignant: not the half who’d perpetrated woke, with their safe spaces and their Covid masks and their land acknowledgments, but the half who’d been made to grovel under it. They weren’t going to let AOC off the hook. They wanted to see her grovel in return.

But that is never the way gifted politicians offload a discredited stance, and Ocasio-Cortez is a gifted politician. In 2018, when she was working as a bartender and no one had ever heard of the Democratic Socialists of America, she used their help to topple one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington. Now in 2026, when the entire progressive establishment is quaking in fear at the Democratic Socialists of America, she is tacking away from them and winning the affections of centrists.

That ought to be enough for the enemies of woke. Take the win, man!

There is, however, a contrary argument. It is that, far from repudiating woke, AOC is keeping mum, consolidating Woke 1’s triumphs and laying the groundwork for Woke 2. In some ways, woke is still with us. Gender reassignment and federal DEI departments are gone as long as Republicans hold the White House. But a lot of woke has endured, if only through inertia and vested interest. The fad for unisex bathrooms has........

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