“Woke 1 was crazy,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told ABC News anchor Jonathan Karl with a laugh on Sunday. Her statement, as offhanded as it seemed, lit a political firestorm.
Ocasio-Cortez was discussing past political statements made by Francesca Hong, a democratic socialist candidate who lost Wisconsin’s Democratic gubernatorial primary race on Tuesday night.
“I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now,” Ocasio-Cortez said, referencing Hong’s previous support for defunding the police.
Karl then asked Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, if she was going to run for president in 2028, and the 36-year-old said she hadn’t ruled it out.
Between 2019, when she was first elected to represent parts of the Bronx and Queens, and 2026, Ocasio-Cortez has established a reputation as being on the progressive end of the Democratic Party. Through the years she has at times supported defunding the police, abolishing ICE, giving reparations to black Americans and decriminalizing prostitution.
“I think AOC would love to start repositioning herself as a commonsense progressive instead of a radical progressive, because I think she’s got a lot of baggage,” Matt Whitlock, senior vice president at CRC Advisors and former deputy chief of staff for Sen. Orrin Hatch, told the Deseret News on Wednesday.
Several polls and prediction markets show Ocasio-Cortez as one of the leading contenders if she decides to run in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.
The internet takes a walk down ‘Woke 1’ memory lane
A clip of Ocasio-Cortez’s ABC interview has wracked up around 7 million views on X in the past several days and has prompted some recollection as to what “Woke 1″ is.
Roughly defined by the internet as progressive politics between 2015 and 2023, Woke 1 encompasses cancel culture, the transgender movement, land acknowledgements, statue removals, building re-namings, a focus on racial issues, arguments for prison abolition, corporate activism, incorporating drag into events with children and more.
With the spread of Woke 1 came serious consequences for those with opposing opinions.
Catholic Bishop Robert Barron commented on Ocasio-Cortez’s dismissal of Woke 1. “One of the bitterest fruits of Wokeism was the cancel culture that resulted in armies of people losing jobs, reputations and careers because they didn’t correspond to the reigning orthodoxy,” he wrote.
“I happen to know several people whose lives were devastated by Woke crusaders. But now it’s just ‘ha-ha, wasn’t that crazy.’ No, it was brutal and inhumane,” he said.
Billy Binion, a reporter for Reason Magazine, added on X, “Are we really just going to forget that Woke 1 was a mob mentality that temporarily ruined multiple people’s lives? I’m all for giving people the grace to change their minds, but if AOC really believes it was ‘crazy,’ she should explain why she helped lead the charge.”
Others have pointed to Woke 1’s influence on academia.
In an X post on Tuesday, Greg Lukianoff, the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, wrote, “It was a disaster for academic freedom, free speech and higher education’s credibility. It also helped destroy trust in facts, because people stopped believing that our supposed referees would scrutinize claims that fit their own ideology as aggressively as claims from the other side.”
Lukianoff referenced The Atlantic’s September lead story, which detailed political and DEI issues at Bates College in the early 2020s.
Is ‘Woke 1′ actually over?
“I don’t think it ended,” Whitlock told the Deseret News, referencing how Maine’s Democratic Party state convention kicked off with a land acknowledgement last month.
Whitlock also referenced the handful of democratic socialist candidates who have won Democratic primaries across the country. Those candidates “still embrace woke ideas like defunding the police, abolishing law enforcement, etc.,” Whitlock said.
“I think Woke 1 is still very much going. Democrats are trying to shove it in a closet, hoping people are less aware of it, even as it continues to be the primary animator of the Democratic Party,” he said.
If Ocasio-Cortez is no longer operating under Woke 1 politics, her supporters should expect to see the policies she supports change, Jesse Arm, the vice president of external affairs at The Manhattan Institute, said during Monday’s episode of CNN NewsNight.
“If Woke 1 was crazy, which priors did you hold during Woke 1 that you no longer subscribe to?” Arm asked. “Do you believe that children should not be able to have sex change operations anymore? Do you believe that biological men should not be able to participate in women’s sports? Do you disavow defunding the police? Not prosecuting repeat offenders? The border policies of the first Biden administration?”
Does the right face a similar reckoning?
The Deseret News asked Whitlock whether he believes the Republican Party faces similar political reckoning for events in the same time period, including the Jan. 6 Capitol riots and 2020 presidential election denial.
“I think what’s hard for Democrats who want to continue to get political juice out of the Jan. 6 issue is that President Trump went into exile for a period of time after it, came back and decisively won a presidential election,” he said.
What has also helped the GOP, Whitlock continued, is that the Republican party has “very effectively shifted in the last few years in terms of how we talk about working class voters and our policies.”
“It’s been an interesting shift where you see the Democratic base much more focused on higher income, largely white, college-educated voters, whereas the 2024 Trump coalition was much more focused on non-college educated, and more diverse voters than we’ve seen in the past,” Whitlock said.
He added, “It just doesn’t seem like voters are holding (J6 and election denial) against Republicans as much as they appear to be holding DSA policy positions against Democrats.”
Whitlock predicted this is the case due to former President Joe Biden’s policy focus during his presidential administration.
“A lot of the policy ideas Joe Biden pitched during his term were exactly what Bernie Sanders, AOC and the DSA had been pitching for several years,” Whitlock said. “Democrats used all their political capital on very woke climate alarmism policies that drove up 40-year-high inflation and didn’t really help anybody.”