Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.
Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (1776)
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spawned a deluge of discourse last week after a candid interview on ABC's "This Week." In response to a line of questioning about recently defeated Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong’s since-retracted positions on abolishing prisons and “canceling” Thanksgiving, AOC summarized her thoughts with a quip borrowed from friendly New York City CD-36 Councilmember Chi Ossé: “Woke 1 was crazy.”
The statement spread like wildfire as mainstream media outlets picked up the clip, even prompting New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to respond. When asked if he agreed with the notion, he replied,
"I think that each person has a responsibility to tell New Yorkers-to tell Americans when they're running for office-what they believe. And sometimes what you believe can change, develop, it can grow. And I know that there are some for whom they still believe in that. I’ve made very clear that I do not believe in defunding the police, that I will not be defunding the police."
The discussion distinguishes two vaguely articulated yet widely accepted micro-eras in American left politics. “Woke 1”—roughly the decade leading up to 2020—was defined by the turn towards identity politics and social justice, galvanized by the election of Donald Trump, the George Floyd uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ensuing crisis. “Woke 2”, by contrast, represents a contemporary incarnation of the movement loosely associated with the turn towards left-populism and affordability since the second election of Donald Trump, best represented by the election of Mayor Mamdani and the subsequent socialist congressional insurgency.
“Woke 1” and the Deliverism of Biden
As an anti-climactic culmination of this progressive movement, the 2020 election of Joe Biden became the opportunistic crystallization of “Woke 1”. His performance on the campaign trail convinced enough Americans that he represented the broadest means of ensuring Trump and MAGA were denied the presidency. This cannot be mistaken, however, for a belief that Joe Biden’s commitment to progressivism was politically sincere. Throughout his career, only one thing has been clear: that he was a political chameleon willing to shift to any position to win office.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Joe Biden led fierce legislative opposition to court-ordered busing meant to enforce school desegregation. He argued against federal integration mandates and offered a fawning, personal eulogy upon the death of arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond. In 2008, both he and Barack Obama opposed gay marriage. In October 2024, he issued a formal apology for the U.S. Indian Boarding Schools program, a century-long concerted effort by the federal government to destroy Native American culture and assimilate Native children through a network of residential schools—while on that very same day continuing his policy of directing funding, intelligence, and weaponry to Israel for the purposes of enabling their genocidal displacement of the Palestinian people. He is hypocrisy incarnate.
As a consequence, all that Biden achieved during his presidency can be summed up by what has been previously described in Geese Magazine as “deliverism”: a simultaneous overemphasis on “competent” governance via reformist legislation and an insufficient or distinctive lack of an ongoing, permanent political campaign that uses the powers of office to empower the values of its base and grow the strength of the mass movement that elected it in the first place. ‘Wokeness’ was not developed to its highest potential; wokeness was not elevated into law: educational reform, aggressive protections for minorities, and, most problematically, the failure to suppress the far-right by democratizing the United States’ governmental structure and persecuting the forces behind the attempted Jan. 6 coup. While some performative backpatting was done, Biden was merely another climber who happened to stumble to the top of the ladder, eventually tumbling down as the second-least popular president of all time. The story reached its apex with Biden’s complicity in the genocide in Palestine: despite the clear moral stakes and the mass opposition to the genocide that developed in the Democratic base, Biden pushed forward and attempted to ignore the political demands of his era by appealing to the narrowest of successful economic reform.
It is precisely when the performative nature of opportunists inevitably betrays the values of their base’s identities, as Biden and the establishment have and continue to do, that the prospects for advancing our position appear. The pressure of the outrage produced by his weakness, betrayal, and subsequent failure to excite (which inherently includes his age and senility) is what led to Biden’s capitulation and resigned re-election bid. By bitterly preventing an open primary—only to immediately endorse Kamala Harris when he stepped down following his public disgrace on the debate stage—the eventual loss to Trump and the demobilization of the progressive working class were all but certain. But had there been a primary with a popular, charismatic, and even more “woke” socialist, it could have been the perfect moment to strike and win—concretizing the base against both the decrepit and morally bankrupt Democratic establishment and the far right.
Biden’s mindset, and the mindset of the liberals who rallied behind him, is actually rather simple. They believe that if they do things right—don't break any rules, pass commonsense reforms—the problems of our political era will be solved. The new radicalism of the far-right and the left can be dismissed as episodic, and ‘everything can go back to normal.’ But there is no linear path to victory as the liberals see it. We must intervene on the ephemeral conditions of one political moment into the next, which we struggle for control over, as they exclusively define our route. At each key frame in time, we must ask ourselves: based on the current position of our politics as it relates to the mass element, how should we approach this particular political moment? Should we attack or defend? Dodge or strike? What America required in 2020 was a bold, unapologetic socialist attacker; what we got was a tired, visionless liberal bureaucrat.
As for this moment, the combination of the failures of the Republican government and its subsequent attempts to blatantly revitalize pre-Civil Rights Act hatred for marginalized identities and political opposition has created a new situation—now is not the time for yellow-bellied wavering. The enemy is knocking at the door with a battering ram, and our job now is to reinforce our position with every resource available. We must get more woke, not less.
While the term’s origin is rooted in the history of Black Americans’ anti-racist struggle of the 20th century, for better or for worse, it has taken on new meanings for different social identities. Though it has ebbed and flowed, with the reelection of Donald Trump, the battle for the predominant mass definition of woke is one that fascists have been handily winning. It is not because MAGA says, “Look! The socialists want to abolish the police! They want to take away your Thanksgiving!”—that is a good thing for us. While not yet developed enough to warrant full ownership on a platform, thanks to our enemies, the ideas are unearthed by the public consciousness as they take their first steps towards salience and normalization.
It is our failure to contend with the same process pointed at us that has led to our repeated losses. After tireless decades of the Southern Strategy patiently orchestrating a media siege that chipped away at progressive ideas inch by inch, the resulting pole of “anti-political correctness” took less than ten years—beginning with Trump’s 2015 quips about not having time for “total political correctness”—to metastasize into a full-blown anti-civil rights movement in the form of Project 2025 and the right’s “second American Revolution”. It should not be in question whether pushing the envelope is mandatory at all times, lest we risk even more decades of setbacks, which we do not have. The far-right has proven beyond reasonable doubt that the little does, in fact, add up to the large.
Today, our forces are making the same error Joe Biden did. We are adopting the position of deliverism and technocracy rather than structural reform and political leadership. What seems like fruitful dividends in the short term are really festering wounds; each point won by a criticism of “Woke” is not an advance of sensibility but a stab in the side of the very movement that forms the basic conditions of possibility for American socialism. Without “Woke”—without hundreds of millions of Americans critically reexamining their relationship to politics and identity, questioning American and capitalist dogma, and organizing en masse around advanced political demands—there is no base for socialism; there is no energy for political struggle.
The Retreat of “Woke 2”
To admonish the demands of the movement taken up during “Woke 1” instead of tactically evolving their popularity is an abdication of national duty, a gross miscarriage of restorative justice for the historically oppressed, and a failure to defend against a fascist movement that seeks to exterminate said demands and their proclaimers precisely because of their political efficacy.
In what appears to be a preemptive defense of controversial positions that could undermine viability in the upcoming 2026 and 2028 elections, both AOC’s rhetorical retreat and Zohran’s failure to push the popular needle that reins in the power of the police in particular are considered ‘tactical’ decisions, not unlike the kind commonplace among their establishment counterparts such as Biden himself. AOC and Zohran are attempting to signal a split from the ‘woke’ pejorative in hopes of appealing to the abstract notion of ‘moderate sensibilities’ in potential voters who may otherwise be alienated from the left’s political pole. Although AOC and Zohran have chosen to maneuver for accessibility, the left insurgency would be making a costly mistake in following them.
Zohran and AOC are attempting to avoid being isolated in a voraciously anti-socialist Democratic Party environment that has suppressed others in their position many times in the not-so-distant past. Many believe that by moderating rhetoric, they are setting themselves up to remove potential obstructions to passing progressive reforms. This is outlined in their deliverist political approach, as such a strategy has been more or less explicitly stated by its adherents; when AOC was asked about the prospects of her and democratic socialism encroaching on power in 2028, for example, she proudly stated that “presidents come and go, single-payer [healthcare] is forever.”
For politicians like AOC and Zohran, the best-case scenario of their political approach is changing Democratic Party ideology from neoliberalism to something closer to what the party espoused during the New Deal era. For them, passing a reformist agenda of deliverism would be a massively successful campaign in a reactionary American political climate in which a radical vision is considered beyond the pale. It’s difficult to claim that they’re wrong in the abstract. When campaigning for the bare minimum of universal healthcare and an end to genocidal wars gets you cast as a communist, to demand a more radical transformation than that can easily feel too audacious and politically unviable.
However, these same calculations, whether or not they provide the desired accessibility for reformism, have no place in a socialist agenda for revolutionary change. Zohran’s ability to make deals with establishment governor Kathy Hochul or reactionary billionaire NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch is not necessarily the agenda of DSA and the radical left; it is solely Zohran’s. The left should not let this survivalism among the electeds liquidate our vision into theirs. Instead, we must seek to bolster the current momentum and leverage of the movement to push our electeds beyond the boundaries of the immediately viable.
The left has never been caged in by the immediate Overton Window that confines American politics; why should we now? If we only pushed political initiatives that felt immediately actionable, we would be indefinitely trapped within the narrowest scope of technocratic activity. Further, we would lose the energy and novelty precisely responsible for the current American electorate turning to us. Deliverism cannot be the ultimate horizon of DSA and the revolutionary left.
There may be no better example of such a schism as the dilemma around New York City Councilmember Chi Ossé of just a few months ago. Chi was prepared to challenge reactionary Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries for his congressional seat. The young councilmember’s witty charm, strong online presence, and organic leadership position within his community made him the perfect candidate, especially at an all-time peak in democratic socialist electoral viability.
The mayor didn’t think so. Zohran saw the writing on the wall for his reformist agenda: if he and his other congressional insurgent allies contesting weaker incumbents wanted to get over the line, the last thing he wanted to do was potentially challenge and lose to the leader of the congressional Democrats, sinking valuable resources that could be used for other campaigns as well as potentially inviting extra hostility and suppression from the establishment, who are at Jeffries’ beck and call. Zohran subsequently refused to endorse Chi and instructed DSA to do the same; they foolishly listened.
The debacle became almost immediately instructive, as not only did all 3 of Zohran’s allies win their primaries with relative ease, but Zohran’s supposedly tactical compromise had ostensibly zero influence on establishment amenability in the elections, with Jeffries not hesitating to assist incumbent Adriano Espaillat’s bad-faith smear campaign against socialist ally Darializa Avila Chevalier. Although Jeffries’ intervention wasn’t enough to defeat DAC, the gains made in Zohran’s deal with the devil appeared not to be as fruitful as originally thought. The newly discovered reality couldn’t be better stated than what NYC-DSA Co-chair Gustavo Gordillo tweeted on the day of the victorious Democratic primaries: “Chi would have won.”
Zohran's need to curb our movement's supposed excesses must now be reckoned with as a miscalculation of what energized the people to begin with: unrelenting political audacity. We relinquished a golden opportunity to unseat one of the biggest obstructions to socialist congressional intervention in Hakeem Jeffries’ incumbency. Is this really an approach that organized socialism should seek to reproduce?
This survivalist tendency among these elected officials is a product of fear for their own potential success; they loathe the thought of ramming into the halls of power, instead settling for politely knocking with a list of requests in hand, practically begging to be denied. They do not strategize new tactics for nee crossroads when traversing a treacherous path, instead opting to return home. They lack the necessary vindictiveness to work towards decisive victory against oppressors—they lack the burning passion of vision. This may be amiable for those merely seeking an upwardly mobile career in politics; it is useless for a movement that can only seek to completely reshape American society.
Is the only real responsibility of leading electeds to secure successful reforms? Is it this alone that builds a political habitat capable of mobilizing tens of millions? For those who only make excuses for our socialists in office, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. They find themselves squarely comfortable “sharing power” alongside the Republicans, whose rancorous advance towards complete control of the state is characterized by nothing but examples of incompetent governance and failing to deliver goods for the people. This is to say nothing of the fact that the Republicans make no secret of their unwillingness to share power with the deliverists.
It is beyond parody to witness the gradual death march of fascism pushing the Overton window in maximalist fashion in every facet possible, only for the left to surrender an equivalent advance under the guise that the boundaries of such a window must be honored and respected rather than transcended. The fascists understand that it is no longer the neoconservative myth of a fetishized model minority that must be patiently spoon-fed to a reluctant base under the subjugation of a superior liberal opponent, but instead the strident right-populist mythos of the criminal alien, white genocide, and an all-powerful and ever-weak enemy who exists everywhere yet nowhere at the same time. Despite this ambiguity, you cannot fault them for failing to name and describe their enemy—their enemy is woke.
The faulty logic assumed by AOC and Zohran is that the signifier of ‘woke’ has ‘matured’ in shedding its juvenile naivete in favor of a more realistic set of ‘real solutions’ for Americans. To them, continuing the success that has come with left-populist candidates across the country means that if we are to continue our triumphs, we cannot afford to associate with trivialities such as the abolition of prisons with disproportionately incarcerated people of color, overturning the celebration of a colonialist legacy steeped in the blood of millions, or the negation of an enforcer class whose militarized opulence steals food from the mouths of children. No longer is our movement an industrialized factory of poor Twitter takes and pie-in-the-sky ideals—it is now ‘Woke 2’.
To therefore distinguish ‘Woke 2’ as a complete reboot rather than a triumphant sequel is to infuse it with a reactionary character. If the latest iteration of woke is to represent any meaningful difference from its predecessor, it must continue forward—unabashedly seeking a far greater universalization of the politics it embodies. Not as a fleeing reduction, but an expansion into the widest swaths of the majority it continues to construct.
Some may argue that the success of “woke 2” can be simply chalked up to an affirmative reemphasis placed on the ‘class’ element. This is a reductive notion when we understand that the ‘working-class’ does not even make it onto the list of explicit enemies of the fascists. These right-populists understand that it would be impossible to succeed by cannibalizing their own base, even if they are robbing them blind behind their backs.
Their enemies are stated clearly: non-white people/immigrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people, liberals, and communists. These are the identities our opponents seek to alienate, and subsequently we must coagulate the demands of them all under the banner of socialism. All and more must make up our coalition—not simply defined by some narrow association to ‘working-class’, but as distinct social groups with needs that can and must be articulated in any campaign that seeks to create a better world. Such an articulation can only be made manifest by telegraphing the most unifying rhetoric possible in how it articulates the demands of this diverse yet increasingly cogent left-populist political base. This will require a mass political orientation that prioritizes the radical kernel of the unrepresented democratic majority.
After all, how is our movement supposed to fight for a future to believe in if we cannot paint a picture of a democratic political subject, let alone an unprecedented democratic revolution? How is a movement of millions supposed to halt the incoming coup with leaders who struggle to find nuance that lends itself to our political goals, in turn ceding terrain to the bourgeois narrative? Why do both AOC and Zohran refuse to fight pound for pound against the MAGA line at every level? Both are essentially expert communicators, yet they give in to their establishment line when their confidence is shaken by the mildest inquisition of the radicalism they voluntarily associate with and rely upon.
When Trump is accused of abetting the Proud Boys, it is “stand back and stand by.” When AOC and Zohran are pressed on defunding the very same police who will almost certainly be instrumental actors in future defense for the movement of reaction, we are fed flowery language about growth and moving on. This cowardice is self-limiting, and it is unbecoming of leaders who must know when to duck and when to punch.
For them, it is far easier to simply turn down the chance to crank up the volume of excitement and avoid the risk of rocking the boat. But the boat is rapidly flooding, with both us and the far-right inside. It must be rocked. To entertain this contrived and unnecessarily antagonistic opposition between “Woke 1” and “Woke 2” is nothing short of surrender, and inspires just as much confidence in the people we are supposed to attract towards a shared vision. The cruelest twist of irony in this regression is that this supposed electorate, which moderate views are intended to garner, is an evaporating political subject to begin with, if it existed at all in the first place. The populist moment requires participation in a certain crucial choice in the two-party system: you align with progress or you align with fascism. Those who attempt to play both sides in a split room end up with two enemies instead of one.
This isn’t to say we must throw the baby out with the bathwater. Many are now quick to claim that AOC and Zohran’s actions have made clear the necessity of socialist abstentionism, that we must detach from the levers of power as they ‘impurify’ us with the careerist survivalism of the electeds. To do so would be to retreat even beyond the cowardice of deliverism into the realm of political nihilism. Organized socialism must not relinquish the ground of state power and the national influence to the forces of reformism. Instead, we must wage critical struggle with socialist electeds to consolidate their platforms around the democratic revolution, away from Democratic Party accessibility and towards the kind of populist audacity that the moment requires. We must transcend the tendency to simply expand upon Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’, and rupture with liberalism entirely—even the New Deal kind.
What AOC and Zohran must do is clear: the foremost priority is to halt the advance of the far-right by implementing the strategic design of a Socialist Project 2029. We must create a program of socialist political power that fundamentally turns the state machinery against itself, cannibalizing MAGA and its adherents in government. This includes but is not limited to an executive platform of arresting ICE and its fascist collaborators, persecuting Jan 6 participants, and removing anti-democratic MAGA loyalists from power by replacing them with authentic representatives of the people using the powers of executive office. Creating consensus around this sort of focused revolutionary program would give AOC the precedent and popular backing needed to carry such a similar stance into the highest levels of government, guiding her platform away from meager reformism and into the consolidation of democratic forces.
Such a program will require a definitive unwillingness to cede terrain to the reactionary narrative. We must not hesitate to condemn the rapacious game played up by the bourgeois media, and call it what it is: an attempt to divide the people. We must refuse to back down from any further attempts by the bourgeois media at trying to make us retreat from our positions. Where an elected official or candidate is tried by inquiry for soundbites with loaded questions and nonsense, we must return fire immediately by directly citing the employed rhetorical device and returning the question of why they are maliciously tearing the millions apart, rather than churning out smoothed-over apologies. If a position that appears indefensibly ‘radical’ backs us into a corner, we do not retreat under any circumstances—if there is ground to gain, we neutralize the explosiveness by platforming it, giving it air to breathe by entertaining its possibility without necessarily claiming ownership. There must be no ceasing in our attacks, no admissions of defeat, and no mercy for those who line their pockets from our destruction. Protracted exposure legitimizes the embryo of more radical ideas in the public dialogue—this basic idea is the essence of how we gain ground.
Socialist leaders must ruthlessly expose these outlets by articulating plainly and broadly to the public the very nature by which they operate in real time. Any given moment on camera should be taken as an opportunity; all forms of media training should include specialized forms of conditioning that prepare to take a live position that redirects any intentionally divisive question back towards them. For the sake of all oppressed groups in the United States, AOC, Zohran, and DSA as a whole must immediately begin to turn the millions against them for aiding in the advance of fascism and obstructing the democratic revolution. Their image must be actively burned at the stake as pariahs—they must be transformed into enemies of the people.
Our dear electeds and friendly socialists would do well to learn from our enemies that they profess to despise. But if they wish to be true leaders, we demand proof that they despise them as the people do. This is what it means to fight.