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The political pendulum swings, and some people are getting caught up in its momentum. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been reasonably criticized for her giggly embrace of attacks on “Woke 1” — a made-up era of US politics some commentators are now demanding “accountability” for.

The “Woke 1” framing suggests that the United States was briefly ruled by the left. This fantasy erases MAGA from a moment in history when they controlled the levers of government and terrorized their opponents and those they had scapegoated for a moment of national crisis. In 2020, we saw armed protests against COVID mitigations, attacks on health care workers, the mass amplification of conspiracy theories, Trump’s “LIBERATE” tweets, escalating election denial, and the political trajectory that produced an attempted coup on January 6.

It’s true that 2020 was a year of extremes. Experiencing organized abandonment, being pent up at home to ponder the situation, and living much of our political lives in contentious digital spaces contributed to some rather intense pronouncements and actions. This was true on the right and the left. For many Americans, the murder of George Floyd was a flashpoint — one that demanded a reckoning. Calls for reimagining the social order, including abolishing the police, gained traction. And while some were envisioning a world without rampant state violence, where people’s identities were respected and their basic needs met, others were embracing very different forms of radicalization.

Historically, pandemics have been followed by increased social unrest and political upheaval. Many of us hoped this particular rupture might function as a portal, as Arundhati Roy suggested, opening the way for a leftward shift. For a time, this seemed possible.

I have my political disappointments about that period, but they are not about the things many pundits are seizing upon now, as they demand “accountability” for the social repercussions some people endured for racial insensitivity, transphobia, ableism, misogyny, or sex pest behavior — or for toothless corporate policies and mollifying gestures from Democrats that no one on the left asked for.

When the Left Distances Itself From Black Lives Matter, Far Right Policies Win

But whatever missteps people on the left made during that period — for example, some of us may have been too quick to dismiss potential allies we deemed insufficiently radical — our politics did not become the governing politics of the United States. The left did not take power. In fact, many of us lent our momentum to the Biden campaign as a moral compromise to end the Trump regime. The country was not remade according to abolitionist, socialist, or movement demands. Nor did the left lose two elections to a fascist. The Democrats did.

What failed to regain sufficient public support to hold off fascism was the neoliberal status quo. And today, Democrats are still fighting to keep their party’s politics in the center — a position from which they will either continue to lose, or win and then lose, because they ultimately have nothing transformative to........

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