Progressives’ attempts to distance themselves from the left-wing positions they once championed are meeting resistance from former members of the party and centrist Democrats, who demand they take accountability for their stances.
A string of comments from progressive darlings signals the growing bloc is trying to avoid accountability for the out-of-the-mainstream stances they held years ago, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), a floated 2028 presidential contender, repeating a line from a New York City councilman that “Woke 1 was crazy,” a phrase that refers to the era of left-wing politics that dominated the COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter unrest.
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Ocasio-Cortez was responding to a question about Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial candidate and state Rep. Francesca Hong’s prior support for abolishing prisons and canceling Thanksgiving.
“My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate,” she said on ABC News’s This Week, before going on to say Hong has moved away from those positions.
Hong, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, has been under increased scrutiny for her stances ahead of Wisconsin’s Tuesday primary elections, but said over the weekend that she’s “evolved” from some of her previous opinions.
“I had some hot takes, some bad takes on Twitter, but when you’re a business owner running a restaurant during COVID, trying to pay bills as a student, you’re putting feelings out there into the world,” she said. “But I’ve evolved, I’ve learned. I think it’s more dishonest not to learn.”
Ocasio-Cortez continued, “I have a local city councilman who has this saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’ and I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”
The phrase allowed Ocasio-Cortez to avoid answering for policy positions considered by most people to be extreme.
The New York Democrat is not alone in her attempt to wave away previously held stances of the left-wing movement, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the progressive movement’s standard-bearer, saying last week that “no serious person” he knows who is running for office believes in defunding the police, a left-wing stance that gained national attention in 2020.
But the insinuation that the progressive stances were just a phase isn’t sitting well with centrist Democrats, who see it as more than just “hot takes” made on social media.
Evan Barker, a former Democratic campaign operative who voted for President Donald Trump in 2024, posted on X that Ocasio-Cortez’s strategy is to “laugh away Woke 1 as ‘crazyyyy’” and that it was “some kind of mass hysteria.”
But Barker asserted that the movement “ruined careers, pushed an entire cohort of people out of Democratic politics,” and is still happening within the Democratic Party.
“If Francesca Hong is Woke 1, wait until you see a better organized and serious Woke 2,” Barker wrote. “The ‘vibe shift’ is a mirage.”
Yemisi Egbewole, a former Democratic staffer and alum of former President Joe Biden’s administration, wrote that she doesn’t think the party gets to “giggle away ‘Woke 1 was crazy’ as if it was all just harmless rhetoric.”
“Real people’s lives were affected by that era,” Egbewole wrote. “Also I wasted an unbelievable amount of time, energy and brain space explaining to progressives why Black neighborhoods still needed law enforcement. But that’s just my own stubbornness.”
The apparent strategy shift from top progressives comes just 85 days before the November midterm elections, where a growing number of socialist and progressive candidates will be on the ballot.
In Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul el Sayed distanced himself from comments by far-left streamer Hasan Piker, who has campaigned with el Sayed during Michigan’s primary, in which Piker said, “America deserved 9/11.”
El Sayed said the comment was “dumb” and that he thinks “Hasan himself would say that was a dumb statement.”
“He disavowed it,” el Sayed said. “So yes, America didn’t deserve 9/11, but you know, to sit here and play gotcha politics with a dumb thing somebody said out of context that they disavowed themselves — to say, ‘Oh well, what does that mean about what you think?’ I want to be held accountable for what I say and what I do, rather than this idea that we’re so stuck in cancel culture that all of us agreed was a bad idea back in 2020, but we seem to want to bring back.”
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Former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, a possible 2028 contender, said in a video posted on social media that “Democrats aren’t immune from blame” over why voters are cynical about politics in Washington, pointing to Hong’s candidacy and Piker’s comments.
Emanuel warned in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month that Democrats’ lead in the November election has “narrowed amid recent attention to DSA-led primaries.”
“In November, a continued focus on defunding, decriminalizing and decolonizing will highlight cultural issues that alienate many Democrats, not to mention a huge swath of independents (who make up a record-high 45 percent of the electorate) and disenchanted Republicans,” Emanuel wrote.
