In August of this year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York representative and member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), was asked during a nationally televised interview about her previous stances on social justice, abolishing ICE, and defunding the police. Laughing, she responded,
I have a local city councilman that has this saying: “Woke 1 was crazy” … Especially during COVID, I think that the doors were open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place. And I think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful… And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that, you know, during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.
The councilmember she referenced is her fellow DSA member Chi Ossé, who back in May had an exchange with a Twitter user who reminded him that in 2021 he had stated: “A cis white man should not be the next speaker of the Council.” In response, Ossé tweeted: “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.” People on all parts of the political spectrum reacted immediately. Some to the left of AOC reacted with horror, and those to her right with smug “I told you so” condescension about “past excesses” (as The Atlantic put it). The fact that one of the most prominent left Democrats in America seemed to agree that the left had gone a little too far fed the centrist and right-wing media for weeks.
The implication, of course, was that the Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of 2020 had produced a frenzy during which many well-meaning people were led astray. Now, however, with her sights set on a potential run for president in 2028, AOC is trying to frame her politics as serious and mature, not radical and scary.
Only a day after her comments aired, New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, also a DSA member, was asked how he felt about her disparagement of “Woke 1” in light of his own previous support for abolishing the police. This included social media posts from 2020, in which he correctly referred to the New York Police Department as “racist,” “a major threat to public safety,” and “wicked & corrupt.” Predictably, Mamdani, now the boss of the NYPD, echoed AOC’s disavowal, saying:
Sometimes what you believe in can change. I know there are some for whom they still believe in that. I’ve made it very clear I do not believe in defunding the police, and that to me, delivering critical public safety also looks like working with our police department alongside many other partners.
Together, these statements serve to delegitimize the demands of the BLM movement sparked in 2020 by the violent police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. But was the demand to abolish law enforcement really that crazy?
The implication, of course, was that the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020 had produced a frenzy during which many well-meaning people were led astray. Now, however, with her sights set on a potential run for president in 2028, AOC is trying to frame her politics as serious and mature, not radical and scary.
While these “progressive” Democrats are busy poo-pooing the “extreme” ideas of abolition and justice that drove “Woke 1,” Donald Trump’s regime is cracking down on those fighting back against worsening conditions. It is not just a shift in position, as they try to frame it, but a betrayal of the well-intentioned voters who elected them to wave away their demands as “crazy” at a time when repression against activists, immigrants, queer people, and oppressed minorities escalates nationwide; or when a court in Texas hands out decades-long sentences for distributing anarchist zines or simply being at protests. It is an implicit endorsement of the violence, racism, and repression that is destroying not just the movement, but the fabric of an already torn society.
Watching these DSA-elected politicians walk back their previous positions on abolition is only the latest example of how any involvement with the Democratic Party is not only ineffective in building a workers’ movement, but actually harms class consciousness and mass organization, while ceding political ground to our class enemies.
What is woke?
The term “woke” is a hundred-year-old African American English word for people awakened to racial injustice. In a famous early usage, Blues legend Lead Belly urged listeners to “stay woke” in a 1938 recording about the Scottsboro Boys. “Woke” was widely popularized by the 2014 Black Lives Matter movement and taken up again in 2020 during the George Floyd Rebellion. During that time its colloquial definition expanded to include being aware of other systemic injustices, such as oppression of other marginalized identities along the lines of gender or sexual identity.
While there is no real consensus on the meaning of “Woke 1,” it roughly covers the period 2014–21, encompassing the first two waves of the BLM movement. Social-justice language was at its peak in mainstream culture, and the BLM and MeToo movements contributed to the “awakening” of people across the country. Amid these heightened struggles against racist and sexist systems of oppression, among the most popular demands of this period were calls to abolish the police and ICE. These bold slogans sent centrists and right-wingers into a panic, but when a Minneapolis police station was burned to the ground by protesters in the early days of the 2020 George Floyd Rebellion, polls showed that a majority of Americans approved of the action.
During this period, elected officials and non-profit organizations were quick to enter and attempt to co-opt the BLM movement in pursuit of their own ends, while doing everything they could to defang it. This co-optation sometimes produced ridiculous scenes. Nothing better exemplifies the Democrats’ response than the now-infamous photo of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and other legislators taking a knee in kente-cloth stoles. It was widely and justly mocked as a hollow and performative publicity stunt that was strikingly out of touch with the moment.
Trump and the MAGA movement seek to further entrench the worst aspects of capitalism, from white supremacy and gender oppression to endless war and unchecked exploitation. “Woke” is their codeword for anyone who opposes their project.
Thanks to the intervention of these Democrats, the results of this period were not at all in line with the movement’s demands for abolition and liberation. Police budgets were not reduced, but increased across the nation. Instead, symbolic actions such as municipalities painting rainbow crosswalks and the NFL adding “END RACISM” to the end zones of stadiums (overwhelmingly owned by Trump-supporting billionaires) were offered as wins for representation and awareness, with comparatively little material advancement.
Meanwhile, by 2021, the right had become increasingly agitated about what they described as “wokeness,” which to them meant any attempt to advance civil rights or social justice. Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, introduced the Stop WOKE Act (Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act), which tried to restrict schools and businesses from discussing critical race theory, misogyny, and systemic oppression (the act was recently struck down in a federal appeals court).
Soon, anti-woke became an ideology in itself, an attempt by the right to rebrand their bigotry as their own resistance movement, despite the left having little material power for them to resist against. Right-wing podcaster Ben Shapiro held live events to discuss “how wokeness is destroying America.” Right-wing political commentator Tucker Carlson railed against green M&Ms. Possibly dead Republican senator Mitch McConnell warned that corporations should stop listening to calls for equity in order to avoid becoming a “woke parallel government.” An op-ed in the Santa Barbara Independent praised the now definitely dead far-right podcaster Charlie Kirk for “going into the lion’s den of woke” while on his college campus tours.
The anti-woke right says they are serving a patriotic ideology that will deliver America from the specters of Black and Indigenous history; diversity, equity, and inclusion; trans rights; homosexuality; and women choosing what to do with their own bodies. The anti-woke losers, in fighting this campaign, have attempted and in many cases succeeded in redefining “woke” by turning it into a pejorative that is synonymous with the demise of everything good and white and conservative about America.
For AOC, Mamdani, and Ossé to accept the framing of woke that is being pushed by the right is not only cringe, but also a dangerous doublecross of the movement and of the broad left.
Ossé recently went on NPR’s Code Switch to talk about his “Woke 1 was crazy” tweet. He said he hopes Woke 2, the era we are apparently now in, will be more “productive” and less about virtue-signaling:
I found that in Woke 1, there was a lot of “culture war” stuff, like McDonald’s doing a Black Lives Matter thing, and then reverting back to being a right-leaning company . . . I think we need to be a bit more focused and honed in on what will actually uplift and serve us.
Ossé’s point about corporate culture-washing is valid, but it can’t be separated from the political aim of his messaging. In his view, Woke 2 is progressive politicians winning electoral seats by distancing themselves from that “extreme” era, and instead putting forth politics that are more palatable to centrist Democrats.
As Arwa Mahdawi writes at the Guardian,
Was some of the earnest discourse from the time cringe? Absolutely! But just take a minute and look around, why don’t you? The president of the US is monetizing his position in an unprecedented way. Pregnant women are dying preventable deaths because they can’t get access to safe abortions, and immigrants are being snatched off the street by masked thugs. Freedom of speech is under attack, and you can get deported for talking about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Getting upset right now about Woke 1 is crazyyyy.
Why is MAGA attacking woke?
In their efforts to shore up profits and resist the decline of the United States’s unipolar imperialism, Trump and the MAGA movement seek to further entrench the worst aspects of capitalism, from white supremacy and gender oppression to endless war and unchecked exploitation. “Woke” is their codeword for anyone who opposes their project.
As Trump becomes increasingly untethered from bourgeois laws and norms, many in the ruling class are publicly embracing anti-democratic and authoritarian visions of the future. They increasingly share a diagnosis of America’s problems: the woke mob is becoming too influential in our institutions.
For AOC, Mamdani, and Ossé to accept the framing of woke that is being pushed by the right is not only cringe, but also a dangerous doublecross of the movement and of the broad left.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, for example, almost had an aneurysm on air after a Fox News anchor played a clip of AOC talking about “Woke 1.” Miller ranted for almost five minutes about how woke policies resulted in a “historic increase in murders”— a claim he couldn’t back up with any actual evidence.
Last month, US defense secretary Pete Hegseth stated that the military is “no longer the woke department or the weak department.” He singled out groups he doesn’t want in the military, including transgender people, overweight people, and people with beards. “The ideological clowns are out,” he said. “The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top. Diversity is not our strength. Unity is our strength.”
In a speech to a joint session of Congress last year, Trump took direct aim at diversity, equity, and inclusion policies (DEI), saying hiring and promotion practices should be based on merit, not race and gender. “We’ve ended the tyranny of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion policies all across the entire federal government, and indeed the private sector and our military,” he said. “And our country will be ‘woke’ no longer.”
The reactionary backlash against wokeness has already led to restrictions of race-related content in education across the country, as hundreds of conservative-led legislative efforts have restricted programs, classes, and trainings that touch on race and DEI.
Woke is a threat to MAGA because they are outnumbered: a majority of people in the US consistently support progressive politics (for example, even in red states, abortion rights are strongly supported). MAGA correctly see movements for human liberation as their natural enemies. By vilifying and pathologizing the left, the right seeks to divide and conquer — and liberals and leftists who try to distance themselves from woke enable them.
The elite capture of woke after 2020
During the 2020 uprising, while the right stood with law enforcement and called for more police violence against protestors, Democrats called for peaceful protests. In doing so, they rhetorically divided the movement into good and bad sections: those engaged in strictly legal, state-sanctioned protest versus those engaged in more militant, disruptive, and often illegal protest. The myth of the “outside agitator” was propped up as an excuse for law enforcement to crack down on protests that got too rowdy for their tastes.
In his book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics and Everything Else, author Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò details what happens when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the disadvantaged many toward their own narrower interests and aims. In this case, “elite capture” describes how political movements and demands can be hijacked by the ruling class.
Reformist socialists like those in the DSA have historically betrayed internationalism and anti-oppression politics in pursuit of popularity and electability. This is due to a structural pitfall built into the electoral tactic.
During and after the 2020 uprising, symbolic identity politics were performed and offensive institutions were rebranded to pacify and deradicalize the movement without enacting significant material reforms. More bodycams and implicit-bias training gave police a sheen of accountability, while their budgets were actually increased. Megacorporations like McDonald’s and Target ostentatiously supported Black Lives Matter and Pride, only to quietly reverse course as soon as the tide shifted to anti-wokeness during the second Trump administration.
Elite capture was not exclusively deployed against the anti-police movement in 2020. It was also used to blunt the last few decades of queer-rights struggle. Táíwò cites the aptly titled Buzzfeed essay “You Wanted Same-Sex Marriage? Now You Have Pete Buttigieg.” Writer Shannon Keating illustrates the gradual trajectory of mainstream queer politics away from the radicalism of the 1969 Stonewall riots and the confrontational organizing of New York’s AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) toward assimilationist goals of being represented by, and treated like, Democratic politicians such as Buttigieg — ”telegenic, monogamous, white, financially secure, and vocally Christian.”
As Táíwò writes,
In the absence of the right kind of checks or constraints, the subgroup of people with power over and access to the resources used to describe, define, and create political realities — in other words, the elites — will capture the group’s values, forcing people to coordinate on a narrower social project that disproportionately represents elite interests.
In the case of queer rights, this narrower struggle imposed on the movement by the ruling class is strikingly clear. The focus is limited to questions about whether Target should sell Pride merch, instead of radical queer demands and struggle in the streets.
Adapting to reaction
So if we can’t look to mainstream liberals to defend woke, surely we can turn to democratic socialists, right?
Unfortunately, no. Reformist socialists like those in the DSA have historically betrayed internationalism and anti-oppression politics in pursuit of popularity and electability. This is due to a structural pitfall built into the electoral tactic. If the goal is to win office to manage the bourgeois state better — especially in non-revolutionary conditions, when mass consciousness is so mixed — the pressure to adapt to reaction (to borrow phrasing from Leon Trotsky) will be irresistible.
In Lenin’s words, “Reformist tactics are the least likely to secure real reforms.”
Socialists chasing votes are always tempted to cater to the present state of consciousness, rather than trying to advance it. This is what Marxists call “tailism” — blindly following popular opinion or even lagging behind the politics of the masses, instead of actively leading them.
The task of communists is to raise consciousness, increase working-class organization and political activity, and coalesce a militant mass movement capable of fighting the right, the ruling class, and their state.
As Trotsky wrote,
The general Marxist thesis, ‘Social reforms are only the by-products of the revolutionary struggle,’ has in the epoch of the decline of capitalism the most immediate and burning importance. The capitalists are able to cede something to the workers only if they are threatened with the danger of losing everything.
Or, in Lenin’s words, “Reformist tactics are the least likely to secure real reforms.”
How AOC disavowed woke
The most current and visible examples of this tendency are, of course, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani, the two most popular DSA electeds. When AOC was elected to the House of Representatives in 2018, The New Yorker characterized her as “the embodiment of anti-corporate politics.” People were excited by her platform: Medicare for All, a $15 minimum wage, the Green New Deal, and abolishing ICE.
In office, AOC has consistently voted to fund the US military, the Department of Homeland Security (which oversees ICE), and the Israeli occupation. In 2024, she endorsed Joe Biden for president before switching to Kamala Harris when he backed out of the race. She infamously covered for her party’s complicity in the Gaza genocide by claiming at the Democratic Convention that Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.” She has stopped endorsing progressive Democrats running against Democrat incumbents. Disavowing BLM and demands to defund the police or ICE, she’s sought to assimilate to the Democratic Party establishment and gain support for a potential 2028 White House run. Her rightward trajectory, however unwittingly, plays into the MAGA framework of anti-wokeness.
From abolition to jail construction
In 2020, years before his election as mayor, Mamdani said of the NYPD, “There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked and corrupt. Defund it. Dismantle it.” Yet in office, he has disavowed defunding the police, retained Eric Adams’ iron-fisted Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch (also a staunch Zionist), and is building four new jails in New York.
When pressed by the media, Mamdani has evaded questions on and even apologized for his past stances, stating that those views are “clearly out of step” with his current view of policing and his administration’s policies. Mamdani’s go-to in response to these questions is to reiterate his script that “police are critical to creating public safety across the city,” and “rank-and-file” cops need to be unburdened of “playing the role of mental-health professionals,” which will allow them to “focus on the jobs that they signed up for.” In August 2026, he explained his realignment:
I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police, that I will not be defunding the police, and that to me, delivering critical public safety also looks like working with our police department, alongside many other partners, and we’ve seen over the first seven months of this administration what that can look like when we’re talking about the fewest murders on record in NYC, the fewest shooting incidents on record in NYC, and that to me is how we measure a lot of our public safety.
In addition to falsely conflating public safety with a strong police force, Mamdani mentions working alongside “other partners.” When socialists limit their horizons to being better managers of the bourgeois state, they must partner with all manner of opponents of socialism.
That’s one explanation for why Mamdani met with Trump the day before the president’s friend Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations. In that meeting, Mamdani implored Trump to end ICE operations in New York City, and Trump said he hopes Mamdani is a successful mayor.
Abandoning “socialist” Democrats like AOC, Mamdani, and whoever comes next is an essential step in building a truly socialist movement. They mislead the working class and oppressed, hinder our movement, and confuse the public about what socialism means.
A few weeks later, on October 8th, ICE shot a 28-year-old Dominican man in his car while his 5-year-old child was in the backseat. The ensuing protests against ICE were rowdy, and led by many of the activists who helped to get Mamdani elected, including members of the DSA. The NYPD’s Special Response Group (SRG), was deployed to crack down on the protests, resulting in some brutal arrests outside the hospital where the victim was being treated.
Rather than upholding his campaign promise to disband the SRG, Mamdani has required the NYPD to get his permission before utilizing the unit meaning that their deployment against anti-ICE and anti-Netanyahu protests was expressly approved by him.
Once in office, both Mamdani and AOC have capitulated to the current political climate and to the Republican and Democratic parties responsible for it. This is not because of some special moral failure on their part, but because the strategy of electoralism has a built-in moderating effect on candidates, elected officials, organizers, and voters. The strategy is never to advance class consciousness nor to lead a revolutionary movement.
The dead end of democratic socialism (or, everyone needs to get more woke immediately)
If these are the most radical woke leftists in the Democratic Party, as both the right and left claim, it’s clear there is no path forward through this party. We can’t defund the police, abolish ICE, or overthrow capitalism unless we fight both the Democrats and the Republicans, including their leftmost representatives.
Instead of just accepting the idea that woke 1 was “crazyyyy,” we need to think about what that means. There was nothing crazy about the burning of that police station after George Floyd’s murder. There was nothing crazy about 25 million people taking to the streets in militant protest against racist police terror.
Abandoning “socialist” Democrats like AOC, Mamdani, and whoever comes next is an essential step in building a truly socialist movement. They mislead the working class and oppressed, hinder our movement, and confuse the public about what socialism means. Socialism is workers controlling the means of production, not just “when the government does stuff,” or as Mamdani recently stated, having “whatever you need to live a dignified life.”
The Democratic Party is an irredeemably undemocratic party that cannot be reformed, utilized, or taken over by the working class and oppressed. On the contrary, it remains an impediment to working-class consciousness and organization, not in spite of, but due to the growth of a so-called socialist wing within it. The Democrats’ historic role as “the graveyard of social movements” has not changed. Their role is to absorb and neutralize discontent by rerouting it into an arena controlled by capital, where it can do no harm.
Identifying and aligning with the Democratic Party, as the DSA does, has a clearly negative effect on class consciousness and organizing. Why did many deny or excuse the caging of immigrant children or the record number of deportations under Barack Obama and Biden? Why did many ignore Tara Reade’s allegations of sexual assault against Biden, even as the media discussed similar cases against Trump? Why did mass protests dry up during the Biden presidency — at least until the genocide in Gaza ramped up after October 7? Examples abound, from the struggles for abortion rights and marriage equality to the mass movement for immigrant workers’ rights, of direct and indirect, and wholly negative, influence by the Democrats.
Marxists point to class struggle as the motor force of history. Class struggle is primarily advanced through strikes, protests, occupations, and uprisings, and the organizational forms required to cohere the class to take such actions — like trade unions, tenants’ unions, workers’ councils, and revolutionary parties.
Specifically this means mass, independent, militant, working-class action. Independent means class-independent — independent of the big and petty bourgeoisies. It means not sharing organizations with them, not offering them an ounce of support, and not taking money from them, as does the Democratic Party and the NGO-industrial complex that surrounds it.
When these left Democrats say that woke 1 was “crazyyyy,” and that hopefully the second wave of woke wherein we elect democratic socialists will be better, it’s clear that they are accepting the pejorative framing of woke put forth by MAGA and deriding the mass movements that have advanced class consciousness over the last decade. It is up to us to defend woke — the genuine rise in consciousness around oppression and class — as the result of mass struggle, and not allow democratic socialists or MAGA co-opt or deradicalize movements that can get us closer to true liberation and an end to capitalism.
