A few years ago, during the peak of the Great Awokening shortly after the killing of George Floyd, I saw an academic I know post something on Twitter along these lines: “I agree with the spirit of ‘Defund the Police’, but I worry that as a slogan it is ambiguous and might be counterproductive.”
It was a very milquetoast point made by a very left-wing guy. But still, I remember thinking: Impressive. This guy is brave.
A few hours later, I saw another tweet from him. Again, I’m paraphrasing: “Deleted my previous tweet. I’m grateful to the person who messaged me to remind me that it’s not my job as a white man to weigh in on this matter.”
There was nothing particularly remarkable about this episode. Anyone who was on Twitter during this period, or simply in a Western institution swept up in the peak of social justice politics, will recognise it as a familiar example of a broader cluster of suffocating social dynamics: the fear of being branded insufficiently anti-racist, the public recantations and apologies, the moral certainty attached to whatever questionable ideas happened to be in vogue, the incessant signalling and enforcement of those ideas, the ritual defenestration, the cancel culture, etc.
Nevertheless, it came to mind recently when I saw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s attempts to distance herself from that period’s politics.
When asked about how progressives can “get around” their association with unpopular positions like abolishing prisons and the police, she invoked a saying from one of her local councilmen: “Woke 1 was crazy.”
Asked whether the movement had gone too far, she blamed the pandemic. During the shutdowns, there was a “huge opening of the Overton window… [T]he doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.”
Woke 1 Was Crazy
On one level, fair enough.
