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Notes -
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
There can be no reconciliation without truth. This is a phrase that comes up in indigenous affairs, and advocates for indigenous peoples use it to mean that there cannot be a reconciliation between indigenous populations and the states that oppressed them without there first being a truth-telling and a serious reckoning with what was actually done. I believe that it applies here. "Woke 1 was crazy"; OK, which parts were crazy? Who said them? Who believed them? Will there be a reckoning? Will the people who pushed crazy ideas be kept away from any levers of power, institutional or otherwise? Or, instead, is the Democrat machinery trying to put out a message of "whoopsie daisy, we went a bit far there sowwy" until the next time they can go for the big prize? Based on how little has come back on the architects of the COVID response, I think the answer will be just "whoopsie daisy, sorry, vote for us again please".
Given that there's still an active fight over men playing in the WNBA, the DSA seems to have a lot of influence within the Democrats, and I'd estimate not even 10% of the downstream cultural impacts of "Woke 1" have receded from the high-water mark of ~2022, I don't think anyone has won. To look at some concrete policy examples: Canada and several US states still allow abortions with no gestational limit (i.e. "full-term abortions") and the UK has decriminalized full-term abortions; trans self-id remains the law of the land in e.g. large parts of North and South America, Ireland, Western Europe, Australia, and Scandinavia; land acknowledgements are common enough that Wikipedia documents them as present in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and parts of the US; and the concept that a nation should enforce its borders and deport people who violate them still remains controversial. Software has eaten and now runs the world, and the world of software is still as hard-line progressive as it was in 2022, both in the open-source world and in the halls of the major tech companies. Wikipedia, the world's reference to large parts of reality, remains staunchly progressive; and the cultural bias in the software world will absolutely tilt AI developers' sense of whether a model is "biased", and so when LLMs replace Wikipedia as the default person's answer to questions, it will also put a progressive tilt through the world's understanding of itself.
There's no "won" to assign to any "we", not yet. The vibes are shifting, and most of that shift has been through (and because of) Trump's second term, but IMHO he's got a good chance to flub the midterms after making a mess of Iran, and any shift in electoral performance will be read as a bellweather. Even if he performs well in the midterms and is succeeded by a Republican, I wouldn't say there's any "win" to call until there's evidence of a sustained and durable cultural shift. What became "Woke 1.0" was latent in the culture for some time before it erupted, reactivating people who were sympathetic to the "politically correct" era of culture but mixing their memes with the Tumblr generation, as the latter graduated from being "just kids on college campuses". That generation built on groundwork laid in the 60s, where the left was able to push a lot, make a lot of counter-cultural headway, and when the high water rolled back they somehow landed college professorships and dodged pretty much any serious consequence.
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