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.