As a possible national candidate, Ocasio-Cortez obviously has a motive to brush aside, as she did with a charmingly self-deprecatory laugh, the exotic positions she and other Democrats took on issues, particularly after the death of George Floyd in May 2020 and the ensuing multicity violent rioting.

They included demands to “defund the police” or even abolish police departments, to step up the already institutionalized demands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” hiring and promotions in bureaucracies, public and private, for racial reparations. These weren’t just words: Cities such as New York, San Francisco, Chicago, and Minneapolis did hustle to partially defund their police departments. 

The Floyd riots and calls for defunding police were immediately followed by a sharp spike upward in violent crime. Liberals have characterized that spike as a response to COVID-19, but charts compiled by writer Steve Sailer make it clear that the spike began not with the lockdowns but with the riots and Woke 1 depolicing. 

At the same time, the lockdowns, enforced with Woke 1 censoriousness, were causing not just economic damage but also long-lasting harm to children who were kept out of teacher union-run schools long after it was clear children were not vectors of the virus. And Woke 1 transgender demands, for biological men on women’s sports teams and public financing of even pre-adults’ gender transition surgery, were advanced by the Biden administration and endorsed by Harris.

The political damage was clear, and probably noticed by the increasingly politically adept Ocasio-Cortez, who put out by far the most effective single ad in the 2024 campaign, saying that “Kamala Harris is for they/them and Donald Trump is for you.” 

Now there are numerous signs that the nation is putting Woke 1 so far in the rearview mirror as to be invisible and has little appetite for Woke 2. Items include:

• The lack of visible vehement protests at the elimination of DEI programs, racial quotas and preferences, in federal regulations, in many state and local governments, and even in their strongholds in the universities. You hear grumbling about the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, but nothing like the politically charged attacks on its 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade. There’s covert opposition and attempts to retain DEI under different labels, but you don’t hear Democratic candidates talking about the issue.
• Similarly, there’s a dog-who-didn’t-bark response to the Trump administration’s effective shutdown of illegal immigration on the southern border. Missing from the political dialogue have been media stories about the asylum-seekers who are obliged now to pursue their claims not from somewhere in the continental United States but from a not particularly helpful or sympathetic Mexico or somewhere even more distant.
• Violent crime rates seem sharply down. After the Floyd riots, homicides rose even more in 2021 and seemed on a trajectory to reverse all the enormous progress in crime reduction accomplished since the reforms pioneered by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in New York in the 1990s. Homicides declined in 2025 to below the lowest numbers of the post-Giuliani years, and the FBI reported that violent crime dropped 9.3%, the biggest drop since 1936. For 2026, statistics aren’t fully available, but starkly lower rates of violent crime in New York and a huge 2020s drop in homicides in Baltimore. Why the huge drop in violent crime? No one is sure, but it comes as Democratic politicians are hastening to assure us that they never actually really wanted to abolish the police and the prisons when they were saying so back in Woke 1.
• The revelations of the hypocrisy and lies of Dr. Anthony Fauci and other public health officials during the COVID-19 epidemic. Fauci, who delighted in partying with Washington elites, according to his diaries, had to sit mute and invoke the Fifth Amendment as he was attacked credibly for having misled the public. Masking, he admitted privately, didn’t prevent disease spread, even while he urged penalties for non-maskers. The vaccine, while reducing deaths, did not prevent transmission, as he had assured the nation. Fauci’s efforts to discredit as “a conspiracy theory” the argument that the virus spread from a leak from the Wuhan laboratory he financed increasingly look very much like an effort to cover up the evidence that he financed the lab’s gain-of-function research surreptitiously, to make the virus more dangerous, in violation of a presidential order. The initial order, by the way, came from former President Barack Obama, not President Donald Trump.

MICHAEL BARONE: SOCIALISTS SHOVE THE RESISTANCE ASIDE IN FLORIDA

Against this evidence of the discrediting of Woke 1 come recent victories and near victories of members of or sympathizers with the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform calls for the abolition of police and prisons. Those candidates have been emphasizing economic issues, however, which pass muster in Democratic primaries but may not in general electorates in states such as Michigan. 

What is not apparent in the political landscape is nostalgia for Woke 1 police defunding, for heavy-handed statism like Fauci’s COVID-19 regime, or for a revival of the Biden administration’s open borders immigration policy. Democrats may be able to capitalize on the current Trump slump this year. But for 2028, they may not be able to dismiss questions about Woke 1, and Woke 2, as flippantly as Ocasio-Cortez tried to do this month.