I’ve said for a while that Democrats aren’t polling where they should be for a blue wave, and I still believe that. In fact, I think Democrats are very much aware of it, which is why even Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “admitting” that the party went too far.
"Woke 1.0 was crazy," Ocasio-Cortez said this past week. I’m not sure anyone believed it was a genuine moment of reflection, but they’re trying nonetheless. So why would the party that spent a decade pushing a woke agenda suddenly turn on it now, unless it had something to gain?
WATCH: ABC's Jon Karl lobs a Francesca Hong softball at AOC. AOC dances around the question, asserts that "Woke One was crazy"- brought about by Covid causing a "huge opening of the Overtone Window."
— Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) August 9, 2026
JON KARL: So, you have Wisconsin coming up next. Francesca Hong, who is the… pic.twitter.com/Navw0iESNS
It would be nice to believe that Democrats have truly seen the error of their ways, especially coming from someone like AOC, one of the most vocal leftists in Congress. We would all love to see Democrats across the party suddenly rushing to distance themselves from the radical excesses that began under Obama and got exponentially worse under Biden. The gender ideology in schools, open borders, and defunding the police are all getting quietly disowned. It would be great.
Don't buy it for a second.
Democrats didn't have some sudden crisis of conscience. They know they can't win elections running on their crazy ideas anymore, so they're pretending woke 1.0 was simply too much, a bridge too far even for them. It's a rebrand dressed up as reflection, timed for an election cycle that requires a fresh face on an old agenda.
Nobody explained this better than Greg Gutfeld this week on The Five.
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"I had to ask, like, has there ever been a moment when, over time, progressivism got less progressive?" Gutfeld said. In his own lifetime, he said, he's only ever seen "tactical consolidations after prior gains," pauses that create a new baseline before the next leap forward.
Gutfeld ran through the receipts. "Civil rights used to mean 'no, Jim Crow,' Now it means voter ID is racist," he said. Criminal justice reform, he said, "used to mean ‘Don't arrest people for smoking a joint.’ Now it's cut them loose if they beat a person senseless on the subway." Environmentalists "used to say, 'give a hoot, don't pollute'... Now it's ‘Stop having kids’, and ‘We should really think about banning AC,’” he said. Abortion, once framed during the Clinton years as something that should be "safe, legal and rare," has become, in his words, "if you don't like your baby, you can kill your baby."
That escalation is the whole game. "The distancing is a tactical pause; it doesn't dial back, it waits, wins elections, ratchets forward," Gutfeld said.
Even the label the left slapped on this moment gives the game away. "They call it Woke One, probably because they just gave away the game," Gutfeld said. "There's going to be a sequel. Woke Two, it'll be under a different name. Politically correct became woke, woke will become something else."
“The distancing is a TACTICAL PAUSE. It doesn’t dial back. It waits, wins elections and RATCHETS FORWARD.” @greggutfeld warns that progressivism never truly retreats, arguing the left simply rebrands its agenda before pushing toward the “next frontier of injustice.” pic.twitter.com/dXkkn1njuv
— The Five (@TheFive) August 14, 2026
Think about that for a second. Ocasio-Cortez calling woke 1.0 "crazy” should never be considered an act of contrition. Make no mistake about it, Democrats have kept their radical agenda fully intact. They are just trying to repackage it for an election year. The moment they win back power, expect Woke 2.0 to show up right on schedule, and expect the media to act surprised when it does.
