The effort to relitigate the social and political earthquake of 2020 is undergoing yet another hopefully brief revival. Back in May, New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé quipped on X: “Woke 1 was crazyyyy.” Last Sunday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez repeated Osse’s maybe-joking comment on ABC’s “This Week,” in seeming agreement, amid a slew of questions about a new, allegedly radical, wave of Democratic candidates, and whether “the movement”—the unignorable rebellion against the power of police—had gone “too far.” The congresswoman didn’t cut through the charges; she seemed to entertain them. Her elevation of “Woke One” set off a cascade of debate: “If Woke 1.0 is in the past, when did it die?” the New York Times asked in a pithyish explainer; “The Democrats Can’t Just Laugh Off ‘Woke 1,’” declared The Atlantic this week. Implicit in all this was a patronizing threat, and it made no sense: Repudiate your 2020 positions, which no reasonable person would vote for, even though you’re also winning right now. And it started with a weak joke on a bad website. This convoluted mess of content and campaigning was cursed from the start.
As in earlier iterations, the latest round of demands to repudiate all things (smeared as) “woke” is best understood as a desire to delegitimize opposition, brought about by a real challenge: the left building power. This time, that challenge arises from a few meaningful electoral victories by democratic socialists and their allies, which, going into the midterms and the next presidential election, have activated those who see their job in politics as protecting the Democratic Party from itself. Rather than enter head-on into a legitimate political struggle with the candidates to their left, rather than have a fight over substantive differences, some Democrats have instead decided to pin their problems on the rhetorical—hence the turn on “woke.” What started as shitposting—“woke 1.0” etc.—is being used as a tool with which to discipline the left. It is depressing to see elected officials who have benefited from this leftward shift, including AOC, indulge that nonsense.
Those wielding this tool, engaging in what we are condemned to nonsensically call “anti-wokeism,” are using “woke” mostly as a way of casting anyone challenging their power as being outside reasonable debate, as illegitimate. Dismissing “woke” is a way of dismissing those people, without wading into the dirty work of explaining in public that you consider them your lessers, as beneath consideration. In that regard, this is not so much a backlash as a revival. The origins of “woke” as a descriptor and where it came from help make that plain.
When Blues legend Huddie Ledbetter, also known as Lead Belly, was recorded performing his extensive repertoire in 1938, he closed one song with an advisory to Black people going south: “Stay woke, keep your eyes open.” The song, “Scottsboro Boys,” was inspired by the unjust criminal punishment of a group of Black teenagers and young men, who were falsely accused of raping two young white women and were sentenced to death—a case still unfolding when Ledbetter gave that advisory. Alabamans at the time considered the case a sign of their advancement: after all, they held trials, not lynchings. Scottsboro is synonymous with the ways white supremacy structures and reinforces the criminal legal system in the United States. Ledbetter himself had faced and survived prison, in part through his music. All this is what prompted Ledbetter’s warning, 90 years before the same forces were, as in Scottsboro, exposed for the world to see, after police stole the lives Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.
I do not expect anyone to remember that history, especially when the anti-woke turn relies on deliberately misrepresenting very recent history, one that its proponents lived and worked through. But if Woke 1 is whatever we say it is, it may as well be Scottsboro and Lead Belly’s song.
The anti-woke are pointing at something real, but the crisis is inside their own heads. They keep revisiting allegedly crazyyyy things people said in 2020—but not what actually happened in 2020. Neither are they are interested in whether negative consequences, if any, occurred as a result of this pandemic of people stating their beliefs.
My colleague Perry Bacon has astutely corrected the record: “There is no such thing as Woke One, and it would be almost impossible to define such a time, era, or set of positions.” Those stirred by current events to recite a litany of “woke” sins tend to turn to the same few examples as evidence of how the left went “too far,” but the demand to abolish the police is always on the list.
It’s true: That demand was made. So where did those abolished officers wind up? They’re still out there, still killing Black people, and now making way for ICE to abduct immigrants. Fine, fine, cops weren’t abolished—but they were defunded, right? Well, where, exactly? A number of cities pledged to cut police funding; most of them ultimately increased police budgets. A 2025 study of nearly 300 major U.S. cities found that in Republican-dominated cities, police funding significantly increased after the protests in 2020. Police were not fully defunded anywhere—or, at least not anywhere outside the anti-woke imagination.
So what did happen? A dam broke, and the routine police murder of Black people mobilized some white people, and that multiracial mobilization was scary to other white people. There was a groundswell of popular support for abolitionist projects, inspiring new connections between abolition and other social movements. For a moment, the summer of 2020 made people consider whether policing could ever keep us safe. The ongoing anti-woke revival is, in truth, an effort to make sure none of that ever happens again.
Each time the anti-woke crowd revive themselves, it is not because anything was stolen from them, but because they feel as if someone has challenged their presumed ownership. This is, as ever, an expression of white power, in particular an expression of its fears that it is losing its historical dominance. That is what happened in 2020. It is not complicated, even as it takes on other forms. It is MAGA crowds holding mass-produced signs reading “mass deportations now.” It is endless iterations of the same conspiracy theories about non-white usurpers and invaders stealing elections. It is Southern white prosecutors in Scottsboro.
“Woke” remains a live target across the political spectrum because white dominance is, too. It is sad to see the same refrain play out in 2026, when, far from having succeeded to “excess,” the movement was denied most of what it demanded, by Republicans and Democrats alike, who now insist that the movement did win. Why would they want to rewrite events to grant their opposition a win? Well, why bother saying you stand for something, when you might be told you have to stand for something else later? It is safer to campaign in opposition to what was never achieved; then you need only win in the mind. It is safer to fight a phantom. As the movement reminded us in 2020, there is no shortage of ghosts.
