Those of you old enough to remember when Obama came on the scene probably remember how he quickly went from a complete unknown outside of Chicago to the head of the Democratic party ticket as though he had been chosen for the role. I'm seeing pundits make similar predictions about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Certainly she seems to be modifying her rhetoric to make her more palatable to the national electorate. Scott Pinsker has some thoughts about this in his piece, "The Cunning Genius of AOC’s ‘Woke’ Reboot." He warns:
Tread carefully, Republicans: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is still America’s most dangerous Democrat — and still the odds-on favorite to win her party’s 2028 presidential nomination.
And
if she captures the nomination, there’s (roughly) a 50%-50% shot she’ll
win the White House. Don’t underestimate her: She’s media-savvy,
camera-friendly, photogenic, and her PR instincts are as sharp as
Sardinian swords.
And his example of this is her recent comments attempting to downplay "wokeness":
Consider how deftly she just rebooted the “woke” narrative.
Because woke is a joke in 2026: Woke is cringe, woke is dead, woke is done.
Other than the fringiest of the fringe, nobody takes it seriously anymore. ...
[snip]
The excesses of wokeism are legion. A lesser politician would’ve tried to relitigate this or recalibrate that.
But AOC knew better.
Instead
of polishing a turd and pretending it’s chocolate, she acknowledged
overreaching, killed the old narrative, and set the stage for the “new
and improved” version 2.0.
Remarkably, she did it in a single sentence.
Pinsker goes on to note that by this, AOC "signaled a willingness to learn, grow, adapt, and change," which will be critical on a national stage because she will come across as an open-minded pragmatist because of her ability to grow and change.
Dace Potas also poo-poos AOC's retreat from "Woke 1.0" in an op-ed at USA Today. He concludes:
The existence of "Woke 1" implies that a "Woke 2" is already in the works. From what I can tell, it isn't all that different in substance, just strategy and rhetoric. Progressive candidates will keep being haunted by Woke 1.0 for as long as they run for office, unless they explain – explicitly – why this time is different. Otherwise, voters will see right through it.
And he explains:
To anyone paying attention at the time, woke was a lot more than “a derogatory euphemism for civil rights & justice,” as AOC put it back in 2021, when she wanted those positions taken seriously.
Among the excesses of Woke 1.0 was a movement aimed at defunding or abolishing the police, gender reassignment surgery for minors, the insistence that men can menstruate, justification of rioting, racial discrimination in hiring and much, much more.
Not every progressive held each of these
positions, but as a collective, they were fine letting them enter the
political mainstream. By her own admission, AOC described Woke 1.0 as an
attempt to shift the Overton window, the range of ideas considered acceptable in mainstream political debate.
“During this time, especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the Overton window,” AOC said.
“We were shut down. There was some of the highest unemployment rates
that we have seen because of those shutdowns, and I think that the doors
were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was
going to get us to a better place, and I actually think that the
discussions that were had in that time were quite fruitful.”
But it was more than that. Progressives pushed
corporate America into diversity, equity and inclusion mandates that
indoctrinated employees and built a cancel culture that met dissent with
job losses and charges of bigotry.
Even
progressives who didn't believe the most extreme positions were
incentivized to promote them, since it made their own positions sound
reasonable by comparison. Instead of "abolish the police," mainstream
Democrats arrived at "defund." Instead of "abolish borders," many
arrived at "abolish ICE."
In any event, the pivot from "Woke 1.0" is all show. To the extent there is a "Woke 2.0" it will be far worse than anything we have seen so far; just as Obama's idea of "racial healing" was to stoke racial hatred against whites. Over at the Battleswarm Blog, Lawrence Person points out:
There was no “Woke 1.0,” just a continuous racialist, anti-Western Civilization, anti-rational, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-Republican movement whose roots stretch back into the Comintern, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, carried forward into the Port Huron Statement, the Weather Underground, the campus radicals of the 1960s and their long march through academia and other western institutions, special campus victimhood identity politics carve-out departments for blacks, Hispanics, radical feminists and “Queer Theory,” into the political correctness of the 1980s that blossomed into the poisonous flowers of social justice, radical transsexism, Palestinian- and Islamo-felia and anti-Israel animus that has turned into full-blown antisemitism, and a radical fringe in the Democrat Party that metastasized to its core under Obama and President Autopen. AOC’s Democratic Socialists of America and their fellow-travelers were all on-board with their lunacy every step of the way.
[snip]
And throughout it all, the SJW/DSA types were onboard with all of it, every step of the way. There was no “woke 1.0,” there was only the same madness taking on new forms.
You didn’t regret it then and you don’t regret it now, you only regret getting caught. ...
[snip]
You don’t regret any of the pain you inflicted on normies, you only regret not getting to inflict more of it. You still view yourself as the natural anointed rulers of those benighted rubes in JesusLand.
Like other socialists before them, the DSA and its adherents truly believe "[e]verything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State". And they intend on controlling the State. Stalin blamed the Kulaks for the ills of society; Hitler blamed the Jews; and the modern Leftists blame white people. We've seen this play before and we know how it ends.
