“Woke 1.0 was crazy.” So saideth Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and it’s a measure of the inanity of American politics now, and of its dangerous formlessness, that her offhand remark created a storm of commentary. The left scrambled to concede woke’s excesses while defending its essence; the right rushed to declare that it will never allow the left to grant a dispensation to itself for a decade of social and cultural instability. Both responses were right: woke was ruinous. Both responses were wrong: woke fevers arose out of a true malaise. But an honest and thorough accounting never followed. Within days the left and right moved on to obsessing over AOC’s next publicly declared bombshell: she is freezing her eggs. Meanwhile America’s political and media culture fiddles with itself, and the world burns.
The question of the New York congresswoman’s fertility notwithstanding, her decision to distance herself – and thus the left wing of the Democratic Party, of which she is its tribune – from wokeism and its institutionalisation as DEI throughout American society appeared highly calculated. The midterms are less than three months away. They are the most important midterm elections in modern American history. There is no doubt that a political advertisement during the 2024 presidential campaign which dramatised Kamala Harris’s sympathy for the trans movement had a fatal effect on her candidacy. Woke’s obsession with trans ideology, white racism, defunding the police, and “cancelling” anyone accused of “microaggressions” that “trigger” a member of a protected group, cut against the grain of American decency. It is not surprising to hear Trump supporters, disgusted and alienated by his megalomania and his dazing incompetence, admit that they still support him because the alternative is too callous and morally esoteric to bear.
One of the peculiar features of American politics today is that it is simultaneously syncretic and mutually exclusive. Now that woke is being supplanted on the extreme left of the Democratic party by what Americans jejunely believe is “democratic socialism” – universal free pre-kindergarten is not “socialism” any more than Medicare is socialism – the self-styled “socialists” talk about money and class, but they barely say anything about race and gender. As for defunding the police, the response of former advocates of that position is: did I say that? If Americans were living in a moment when people still read, rationally debated, engaged in introspection and socialised inter vivos, the country would be brimming with liberal candidates reflecting on inequality of wealth and intractable racism in the same speech. But now that the “vibe” has changed (remember “vibe shift”? It has disappeared from the lexicon) and talking about race and gender is forbidden. For years, the left critique of woke was that it didn’t address material conditions. So after Maga’s complete triumph in 2024, the left started talking about material conditions. And that was pretty much all it talked about. America’s sneakered, suburban Che Guevaras are simply not able to hold two disparate ideas in their collective mind at the same time.
And yet the material realities the left obsesses over now often sound like the cultural obsessions they clung to during the Age of Woke. Consider Zohran Mamdani, anointed by the media as embodying the dawn of a new progressive age. Aside from a toothless pied-a-terre tax aimed at those whose primary homes are not in the city – expected to affect a mere 17,000 people – he has not accomplished most of his major campaign promises: free buses, city-owned grocery stores, help with rent for struggling tenants, higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy. He has indeed come through on his promise of freezing the rent for two million New Yorkers living in rent-stabilised apartments. The result is fewer available apartments, soaring rents across the rest of the city, onerous bidding wars and more restricted leasing terms. That is what happens when you inject a little “socialism” into the most savagely capitalistic city in the world. The truth is that New York’s unbridled capitalism, coupled with its uniquely generous social services, is what draws people from all over the world there.
One of Mamdani’s favourite terms is “systemic”. This was a cant term during woke, as in “systemic racism”. Mamdani has performed a neat transvaluation and come up with “systemic inequality”, which for a genuine Marxist would be redundant. But he has not made New York more affordable – remember “unaffordability”? No one uses that anymore either – for anyone but those two million rent-stabilised tenants – out of eight million New Yorkers – who were already highly protected from drastic rent increases. It’s not just Mamdani who has almost seamlessly converted the counter-productive rhetoric of “Woke 1.0” into the useless and counter-productive rhetoric of what we can call “Woke 2.0” in the form of “democratic socialism.” Democratic socialist candidates, or candidates who sympathise with democratic socialist values, espouse the same rhetoric across the country. What these figures actually mean when they speak hopefully about socialism is a welfare state which, aside from programmes like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, has no more of a chance of being created in America than a socialist system would. Surrounded by daily revolutions in social and cultural norms, what Americans want from their politics is gradual reform accompanied by guarantees of social and cultural stability.
The tale of how political reform in the age of liberalism devolved into the psychic convulsions of woke is long and tortured. I hope the Age of Woke will find its Richard Hofstadter, who wrote the classic historical text, The Age of Reform. Suffice to say that after politics became another form of entertainment in the 1980s – the actor Reagan laid the groundwork for the reality star Trump – politics itself had to acquire the rapid rhythms of entertainment to remain relevant. The five stages of the woke process – exposure, investigation, accusation, condemnation, cancellation – were riveting five-act mini-tragedies. Add to that the fact that nearly every facet of American life has been monetised, creating the perception that one is constantly falling behind, a perception that is driving competition between people to a maddening intensity. In such an atmosphere, displays of virtue gave the scrimmaging individual a morally irreproachable edge in the rising seas of American transactional life.
At the same time, the fragility of the self that woke made the framework for its moral war is real. The country could be saved by a rational, moral politician who knew how to minister to it. People, especially young people, feel overwhelmed by daily permutations in the power structure that make them feel not just small, but uncertain of who they are and what they believe in. A political ideology rooted, not in intellectual abstractions like class and the distribution of wealth, but in feelings of vulnerability and dreams of revenge, might be counter-productive, but it responds more effectively to a new psychological reality than an old politics does. It certainly has for the mirror-image of woke known as Maga. Woke lured the brittle, hurting self into its realm, but instead of arming it with productive social tools, it blinded it to actual social and psychological realities. You don’t call people racists and then demand they join the fight against racism; you don’t call for abolishing the police in order to reform the police; you don’t force people to embrace what the law should require them to no more than tolerate.
The universality of a fragile, vulnerable self is why what you might call Woke 2.0, exemplified by the ranting streamer Hasan Piker – who has called liberal Zionists “liberal Nazi[s]” and has also called for the murder of a Republican senator – is making inroads among people for whom the decline of Woke 1.0 has left an interior vacuum. In this sense, like the National Socialists cannibalising socialist sentiments in the 1920s, Piker often sounds like a Maga dream-candidate, mutatis mutandis. He called a Trump supporter who appeared on the BBC in 2020: “a South Vietnamese motherfucking, whatever, like Christian supremacist psychotic fucking refugee living in America now”, and directed her to “go back and live in fucking South Vietnam in the same conditions”. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for senate in Michigan, a crucial seat in November, refuses to disavow his close association with Piker.
American politics is melting into an undifferentiated mass of self-empowering emotion. It is why the commonsensical call for the replacement of woke with a politics based on the intolerable cost of precious goods like healthcare, housing and education immediately fell back into a woke cast of mind, with the figure of the billionaire taking the place of the traumatising, toxic white male. Never mind that Hasan Piker comes from wealth and lives in West Hollywood in a $2.7m home. Woke 1.0 was indeed crazy in the way it turned a great liberal tradition of reform and sensitivity to social suffering into a new type of American hustle. Woke 2.0 is now in a race with Maga to redefine sanity altogether.
[Further reading: Nigel Farage isn’t laughing any more]
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Subscribe here to commentThis article sounds like the very thing that might drive people to extreme socialism – or MAGAism. It has a go at just about everyone, but really doesn’t specify what future Siegel wants. He’s going to have to be a lot clearer than this if he wants to make a positive contribution.
A very interesting topic, but this is too convoluted and rhetorical to understand. Please could we have a version which it’s possible to comprehend?
I rather thought that. It does rather assume (a) a deep knowledge of a foreign country’s contemporary culture and politics (there’d be less expected of the reader’s background knowledge were this about India or even Germany) and (b) something of an immersion in online stuff of very dubious value.
I think it’s convoluted and rhetorical because it’s written based on the author’s assumption that woke was a) an aberration that we all regret and b) the reason that the far right is so ascendent, neither of which are actually true, so you get a word salad.
This article feels like it’s about to start dissecting the point that what is considered, meant and understood by ‘woke’ as a term has fundamentally changed and why – but then it veers off into an extended tour of “kids, get off my lawn”. I’m not familiar with the author but when I finished reading I scrolled up to the top and the little caricature confirmed my suspicions about exactly where (or when?) he was coming from.
I’m sorry Lee, but the neo-liberal flavored soft-leftism you seem to be pining for between the lines has failed, and the left has left you behind. Trump and MAGA didn’t happen as a reaction to woke, they happened for the same reason woke happened – the traditional political establishment failed to provide on it’s promises to the next generation. It’s not blue-haired Non-Binary baristas or Hasan Piker’s fault that you’re on the outside looking in now, it’s your own.
It’s idiotic for the Democrats to still see themselves in the lineage of ‘woke’ or as an evolving version of it.
It’s gone and it’s consigned to history, even if the last gasps of it are still visible online.
It started as a reaction to Trump in 2016, then peaked in 2020 due to a perfect storm of genuine resentments, lockdown boredom and a media that was also bored and locked down – and made the mistake of thinking online discourse was the real world.
Going forward, beating Trump is so incredibly easy. Be the grown up in the room, pick 1 or 2 popular progressive policy focuses, present a strong leadership, avoid niche controversy and don’t give airtime to radical positions within your own party.
Be Joe Biden, but 30 years younger, job done. If they pursue anything that whiffs of Woke 2.0 or 3.0, they will lose to JD Vance and it would be utterly shameful.
I’m unclear on how “class and the distributions of wealth” are “intellectual abstractions” rather than material realities. Although it would make sense for someone who went to ivy league schools to actually come out with such a thing.
If the Democrats do not watch out they will lose the November mid-terms. But then again maybe things have to get really bad before the adults take charge again. People forget that things can always get worse…..much worse. Politics is a binary choice in the USA so make sure you’ve got something that the people want to buy and stop playing to a small group of your own supporters. You have to appeal to the floating voter. Politics 101. I blame the primary system. Watch Real Time with Bill Maher to get weekly updates on Sky Comedy. Who’d be a politician!
Piker’s offensive “word soup” quote in the penultimate paragraph will seem very familiar to those who like me, find ourselves dealing on social media with the new breed of American “antiZionist”. .
America is a dream which continues even after people wake up. I am glad people in Europe wake up and avoid problems like Trump 2. Whoever in their right minds elected Trump because the Democrats put up a woman against him for the second time needs their heads examined. However about 30% of the British electorate would vote for Farage/Lowe irrespective of the inanity of their program. We desperately need some form of PR which levels the playing field and prevents 30% of the vote gaining a majority.