AOC says ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’ but Democrats still owe voters an explanation
"Woke 1 was crazy."
New York Democrat Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently borrowed the phrase from New York City Councilman Chi Ossé to describe the politics of 2020. "Woke 1" gives Democrats a convenient way to put ideas such as defunding the police and abolishing prisons in the past. That was then. This is now. There’s a psychological term for this kind of separation: compartmentalization.
Consider how compartmentalization works in ordinary life. A married man can have a wife and children at home and a girlfriend on the side, keeping the two lives separate enough that he rarely confronts the contradiction. Compartmentalization allows us to separate conflicting parts of our lives rather than reconcile them.
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That appears to be what Democrats are trying to do with 2020. There is the Democratic Party of 2020, when progressive ideas that once sat outside the mainstream suddenly gained influence. Then there is the Democratic Party of 2026, talking about affordability, economic populism and winning back voters who recoiled from the cultural politics of the past several years. "Woke 1" puts a neat dividing line between them. Changing your mind requires confronting what you once believed. Compartmentalization doesn’t.
Many political beliefs in 2020 became tests of character. They didn’t just say what you believed. They said what kind of person you were. If people you dismissed six years ago turned out to have a point, you have more to reconsider than a policy. Maybe you were too certain. Maybe you mistook disagreement for prejudice.
Or you can call the whole thing Woke 1.
Except 2020 didn’t simply happen to the Democratic Party. Politicians embraced ideas, activists pushed them, and institutions decided which arguments deserved a hearing and which could be dismissed. People who challenged the prevailing views sometimes paid a price for it. Calling all of this "Woke 1" makes those choices sound like the product of a strange moment everyone has since outgrown.
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If Democrats now reject positions they embraced or tolerated in 2020, voters can reasonably expect an explanation. The key question is whether Democrats changed their minds or discovered that voters had.
There is nothing shameful about changing your mind. Real change requires connecting what you believed then with what you believe now and acknowledging where you got it wrong. Without that reckoning, voters are left to wonder whether the beliefs changed or the incentives did.
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Democrats can compartmentalize 2020. Voters don’t have to.
A candidate may regard a six-year-old position as ancient history, but an opponent can revive it with an old interview, campaign questionnaire or social media post. "That was then" invites an obvious response: Yes, but that was you.
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Democrats aren’t unique in doing this. Every political party finds ways to distance itself from positions that become inconvenient. But 2020 poses a particular problem because so many political beliefs became tied to moral identity. Giving up a position can feel like admitting something about yourself, not just admitting that a policy was wrong.
There is a way out. Democrats could acknowledge that 2020 drew attention to genuine problems while also producing bad ideas. They could concede that some rhetoric went too far and that some people were treated unfairly for challenging the prevailing consensus. That doesn’t require abandoning concern about racism, police misconduct or inequality. It requires admitting that you can feel morally certain and still be wrong.
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The familiar Democratic argument is about whether the party should move left or toward the center. "Woke 1" raises a more interesting question: Before Democrats decide where they are going, can they explain what they now think about where they have been?
"Woke 1 was crazy" sounds like a confession. But it isn’t quite one. A confession names what you got wrong. Compartmentalization puts it somewhere you no longer have to look.