Woke 1 Was Anti-Populist, and Not in the Good Way

By demanding the purification of the individual and branding broad swathes of the public as oppressor classes, 'Woke 1' besmirched the average Americans who Democrats once championed.

Dear readers,

When I think about the biggest mistakes of “Woke 1” — the period of peak left-liberal derangement around identity issues lasting roughly 2018 to 2021 — that did the most damage to the political appeal of Democrats and liberals, I think about how the obsession with “oppressors” and “the oppressed” somehow made it okay for prominent people to vilify ordinary people. Sometimes the rationale for these attacks was a perceived -ism; sometimes, powerful people had somehow twisted reality around in such a way that they felt oppressed by non-prominent strangers.

To take two examples:

• In January 2019, a confrontation between a Native American activist and a group of boys from Covington Catholic High School went viral. In the ensuing news cycle, which lasted several days, a lot of journalists jumped to unwarranted and unfair conclusions about the boys’ behavior, but the oddest thing to me is that their behavior was considered a matter of national concern in the first place. This was the logic of Woke 1: the boys were wearing MAGA hats, and thus they represented an extension of Donald Trump and a powerful oppressor class whose behavior was newsworthy, rather than simply some random minors. In a piece that was hardly an outlier, Jonathan Capehart wrote an entire column for the Washington Post about why he didn’t like the look on a 16-year-old’s face. “Ask just about anyone who is not straight, white and male what they see in that smirk and you’ll most likely open up a world of hurt,” wrote Capehart, a middle-aged columnist with a Pulitzer Prize, in regards to Nicholas Sandmann, then a high school junior. Capehart then quoted a friend, an executive vice president at the Roosevelt Institute, who wrote that “his face is one I saw a lot in sixth grade, toward the end of the school year when I became the boy most of the other boys decided was a fag.” Again: what kind of mass derangement led these employed, adult men to declare for a national audience that they had been victimized by the facial expression of an adolescent they had never met? This was the derangement of Woke 1: Sandmann came to stand in as a symbol for the widespread bad behavior of all sorts of large groups — white men, white boys, Republicans, what have you — and this transformed him from some random minor into an avatar of a powerful oppressor class who had to be stopped. A lot of journalists seemed embarrassed in retrospect about how they handled this story — and some outlets ended up paying settlements — but I never saw much reflection about how so many prominent journalists came to decide that in our society’s most relevant power structures, they were below some random teenager.

• In November 2019, author Sarah Dessen tweeted about how a recent graduate of Northern State University in South Dakota had dunked on her YA books in an article in a local newspaper, the Aberdeen News. Stay with me here — I know how stupid this sounds already. In its silly little story about the tenth anniversary of the university’s all-the-freshman-read-the-same-one-book program (I swear to god), the local paper included a salty little quote from Brooke Nelson, who had served on the book selection committee as an undergraduate in 2016. “She’s fine for teen girls,” Nelson said of Dessen and her books. “But definitely not up to the level of [the reading program]. So I became involved simply so I could stop them from ever choosing Sarah Dessen.” Anyway: Dessen trotted out this quote in a salty little tweet of her own¹, and a group of famous authors — Jennifer Weiner, Jodi Picoult, Roxane Gay, etc. — responded by dogpiling on Nelson. Nelson’s criticism of Dessen had in fact been an attack on female authors and even teenage girls broadly, they contended; by putting her on blast, they were fighting the patriarchy. Picoult called Nelson’s comments “sinister.” She said the comments demanded a response: “To not speak up about this incident isn’t just demeaning to Sarah. It’s demeaning to women, period,” she wrote. Weiner even appended a “#MeToo” hashtag to a post criticizing Nelson, arguing “when we tell teenage girls that their stories matter less—or not at all—there are real-world consequences,” and then added a link to a story about the long delays in responding to accusations against child molester Larry Nassar. Northern State apologized to Dessen on behalf of their alumna. Eventually, some people began to point out that a very successful YA author and her very successful literary peers were punching down at a student who simply thought one of Dessen’s books should not be seriously considered to be the book all the freshmen at a South Dakota college would read in a particular year, and the mob turned against Dessen. Many of the authors — though apparently not Weiner — came to realize they had gotten carried away and apologized. For example, Siobhan Vivian told Vulture she was sorry for having called Nelson a “fucking bitch.” But the episode exemplified the Woke 1 derangement in which random people could be transmogrified into powerful oppressors — if you believe some random student in the middle of the country is a tool of the patriarchy who represents the kind of ignorance that enables child molesters, you might forget that she should probably just be left alone with her opinions about your books.

Of course, neither of these incidents is a matter of public policy. But they reflect how the animating spirit of Woke 1 — a crusade to identify the most marginalized and place their concerns above all else — could easily turn into an indictment of the mass public, people who are neither especially powerful nor especially marginalized, as oppressors. When this instinct took root in politics, it caused a lot of damage to Democrats’ political brand in the process, and it presents major challenges for Democrats now as they attempt to recover and distance themselves from that mania.

Among the prime policy ideas we got from Woke 1 was “defund the police.” But advocates of defunding (and of police abolition) did not merely indict the police, the government, or “the system.” One of the key messages of this time was that you, a member of the public, should not call the cops, and that you should not want more cops around to keep you safe. To call the police was to be a “Karen.” Asian Americans concerned about racially motivated violence were allowed hashtag slogans but were scorned if they asked for more police protection. Tyler Austin Harper references an example of this in his recent Atlantic piece on Bates College, about a professor alleging in 2021 that a white student who threatened to call the cops in a dispute with a black student had “weaponize[d] state power to terrorize or kill” that student — an “attempted lynching.” What kind of message did this send to people who want to be able to call the police if there’s trouble — which is to say, most people?

This worldview — that the masses, basically everyone except the most marginalized and most oppressed, must reckon with their roles as oppressors and repent² — is incompatible with the populism that has since risen on the left. After all, the Woke 1 outlook invited sweeping claims about the culpability and obligations associated with broad demographic groups, especially white women, and when politicians on the center-left or the left bought into this worldview, they ended up scolding a public they were supposed to persuade, and to advocate for.

Consider the November 2020 tweet from State Rep. Francesca Hong that recently prompted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to declare on national television that “Woke 1 was craaaaaazy”: Hong’s call to “cancel Thanksgiving” on the grounds that the holiday celebrates “colonialism and the original superspreader event that killed Indigenous folx [sic] and women.” We should have canceled Thanksgiving hundreds of years ago, Hong declared. This is not a structural critique about challenges disproportionately facing Native Americans today. It’s an indictment of regular people who enjoy Thanksgiving, were upset about COVID disrupting the holiday, and just wanted to get together with their families to feast and watch football. That’s not just politically unwise; it’s substantively inconsistent with a politics that is supposed to defend the happiness and well-being of the masses.

Some politicians on the left have taken this lesson to heart. I thought Zohran Mamdani’s answer to a reporter’s question this week about the “Woke 1” discourse was good. He talked about how politicians owe the public an explanation when they’ve changed their minds, as he has changed his mind on policing. He’s talked previously about how he came to oppose police defunding because of his conversations with ordinary New Yorkers — neither the most powerful nor the most marginalized among us — in which they talked about wanting both safety and justice, and the police are an essential part of delivering that. Some leftists get angry when he says things like this — just look at the quote tweets on Newsday’s video of his anti-defund comments. But Zohran now understands how “defund” is incompatible with a mass movement in a society where the masses want protection from the police.

Mamdani’s concrete talk about how he’s changed is a lot more compelling than AOC’s approach of essentially asking for a mulligan — saying we all got a little craaaaaaazy without specifying exactly what changed about her worldview over time and why. But AOC’s approach is still better than the one we saw from Hong, who struggled to answer the question of whether she still wants to cancel Thanksgiving. Hong also struggled to explain what she thought was an appropriate role for police in our society, offering up word salads about “systems of care.” These failures were related. They indicate how, as an enduring believer in Woke 1, she thinks the public has a wrong and racist set of preferences. That’s a dead end for any political movement, especially for one that claims to speak for the broad public, and it is part of why she lost.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. Dessen eventually deleted her original tweet, which included a screenshot of Nelson’s quote in the local paper with this message: “Authors are real people. We put our heart and soul into the stories we write often because it is literally how we survive in this world. I’m having a really hard time right now and this is just mean and cruel. I hope it made you feel good.”

2. Workplace trainings that demanded introspection about how “whiteness” shapes the lives of ordinary white people; lectures about decolonializing our diets; $5,000 dinner parties where white women paid Saira Rao to yell at them for being racist and for crying when accused of being racist.