“For years, Democrats have debated whether the progressive politics that surged around 2020 went too far,” said Pilar Melendez and Allan Smith in NBCNews.com. Now Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, borrowing a phrase from New York councilman Chi Ossé, has officially admitted it did: “Woke 1,” she said last week, “was crazy.” Wokeness has become a shorthand for a series of former progressive priorities: defunding the police, self-flagellating admissions of guilt about privilege, and the adoption of stilted academic terms like “Latinx” to prove your elevated consciousness. Those who failed these tests could be attacked on social media and “canceled.” Donald Trump returned to power amid a backlash against wokeness, said Astead Herndon in Vox, so Democrats are backing away from previous woke stances. In this election cycle, they hope “to reintroduce themselves after workshopping their ideas over the last five years.”
Sorry, but the only lesson Democrats seem to have learned is that “some policies are so toxic politically as to deny them office,” said Kimberley A. Strassel in The Wall Street Journal. AOC and her cohort can chuckle about the extremist positions they held, but there’s nothing funny about those whose lives were forever damaged by the Woke 1 era. Just ask the Americans “who lost jobs or friends, or who were otherwise canceled” for violating far-left orthodoxy. Some dissenters were branded Nazis, fascists, or xenophobes for wanting a secure border. Woke Democratic prosecutors released violent criminals to commit new crimes. “Is this the part where we laugh with AOC?”
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