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There are political concessions, there are ideological retreats and then there is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explaining the recent history of American progressivism with the immortal phrase: “Woke 1 was crazy.”
The New York congresswoman used the line, which she attributed to New York City Councilman Chi Ossé, during an appearance on ABC’s This Week on Sunday. She was defending Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong against scrutiny of Hong’s earlier support for ideas including abolishing police and prisons. Ocasio-Cortez’s argument was that politicians should be judged by what they believe now, rather than frozen forever in the ideological amber of 2020.
Fair enough.
But “Woke 1 was crazy” is almost too perfect.
It reduces one of the strangest periods in recent American political life—the fights over defunding police, abolishing prisons, DEI, gender, language and the suddenly urgent ideological significance of almost everything—to something resembling an early software release. There was Woke 1 and, apparently, it had bugs. Presumably, we are now using a later version.
And Donald Trump can reasonably claim some credit for the update.
Trump’s Culture War Won a Strange Victory
Trump plainly remade the Republican Party. The GOP of George W. Bush spoke about compassionate conservatism, free trade and spreading democracy abroad. Trump built a coalition around borders, trade, nationalism and an increasingly aggressive revolt against the institutions and cultural language associated with the progressive left.
His second administration has turned that revolt into government policy, issuing executive actions aimed at eliminating federal DEI programs and what the White House describes as “gender ideology.”
None of this is surprising and it has been diagnosed almost ad nauseam, but it is pretty shocking to hear an echo of it all from AOC, whose political rise was inseparable from the progressive moment she can now describe, with remarkable casualness, as “crazy.”
After Trump’s 2024 victory, Democrats began arguing over whether the party had become associated with cultural positions outside the American mainstream. AP VoteCast found 54 percent of voters believed support for transgender rights in government and society had gone too far, while Republicans spent roughly $215 million on transgender-related advertising during the campaign.
The Democratic National Committee’s election review later pointed toward candidates who stressed prices and the economy rather than identity politics, particularly in examining Democratic losses among Latino voters.
And now one of the politicians most closely associated with the progressive generation elected during Trump’s first presidency is talking about “Woke 1” in the past tense.
The Party Trump Created in Opposition to Himself
The stranger part of Trump’s political legacy may be what happened on the other side of his right-facing aisle. Although the President did not persuade Democrats to become Republicans (far from it), he helped create the conditions in which they began policing their own excesses.
The first Trump presidency produced an enormous progressive counterreaction. The resistance, the activist language, the institutional enthusiasm for DEI, the criminal-justice arguments of 2020 and a Democratic coalition increasingly comfortable treating cultural questions as moral tests. Trump was the accelerant—and opposition to him became a political identity in its own right.
Then came the backlash to the backlash.
Republicans discovered that some of the language and positions flourishing in progressive institutions were far easier to campaign against than Trump himself was to defend. The original impulse behind much of what became known as “wokeness” was hardly absurd—pay closer attention to discrimination, question entrenched inequalities, broaden who gets heard and represented.
The trouble came when those instincts hardened into ideological tests, linguistic policing and policy demands that many voters found detached from everyday life. “Woke” then became an absurdly broad category, sometimes stretched beyond usefulness, but politically it worked because voters understood the caricature it was pointing toward—and because, at its most extreme, the caricature had begun to resemble something real.
And this is where AOC’s line matters.
“Woke 1 was crazy” is an admission, however joking, that the caricature had acquired enough truth to require differentiation. The progressive left is now distinguishing between versions of itself—the politics it still wants to defend and the politics it would prefer voters treat as an expired beta test.
Trump therefore reshaped Democrats in a particularly Trumpian way. He provoked them leftward, weaponized the resulting excesses and then forced parts of the party to retreat from them. The party that organized itself around defeating him has also spent years adapting to the electorate he helped create.
Maybe Trump Is Getting Too Much Credit
There is an obvious objection.
Parties change after they lose elections, and Democrats hardly needed Trump to learn that ideas like abolishing police were unlikely to command a durable national majority. “Woke” also became so elastic on the right that it often blurred meaningful distinctions.
AOC herself complicates the thesis because she remains unmistakably progressive. “Woke 1 was crazy” was a joke about excess, not a surrender.
Still, political power can be measured by what your opponents feel compelled to explain away. Democrats are now distinguishing between the progressive ideas they still defend and the cultural politics they would rather leave attached to 2020…and that is why AOC’s line lands. Trump did not convert the left, but he did change the terms on which the left now has to explain itself.
“Woke 1 was crazy” is such a revealing line. Political eras rarely end with a formal surrender; more often, their champions simply begin referring to them in the past tense.
Trump remade the Republican Party by conquest, sure, but his victory over “wokeness” may be stranger still. The vocabulary of the backlash has made its way into the mouth of AOC.
No white flag. Just a version update.
