Last week, I came across a headline that made me stop scrolling.
AOC: "Woke 1 was crazy."
I actually went back and read it again.
AOC as in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
The same AOC who became one of the most recognizable faces of the American "woke" movement during its cultural peak?
Apparently, yes. So I went looking for the full interview. She was interviewed by ABC's Jonathan Karl about the Democratic Socialists of America and, specifically, Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong.
Karl confronted her with Hong's previous positions: defunding the police, abolishing prisons, and other statements made around 2020 that had since become politically difficult to defend.
AOC's first move was to point out that Hong had moved away from some of them. Then she laughed and said:
I have a local city councilman that has this saying: "Woke 1 was crazy."
The expression came from New York City Council member, Chi Ossé, who had used it a few months earlier when one of his own statements from 2021 resurfaced.
She adds:
I think that what's important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.
Karl pushed. Had the movement gone too far? Her answer was fascinating.
She talked about the pandemic, the extraordinary political environment of 2020. About what she called the enormous opening of the Overton window during that period. She argued that many discussions from the time had been productive, before eventually making a distinction:
Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today.
Pay attention. AOC did not say: "I was wrong. I no longer believe what I believed then". Nor did she repudiate the political movement that had produced those positions.
No.
She placed the past inside a context.
The rhetoric belonged to a particular historical moment. And the candidate standing in front of us today should, she suggested, be judged primarily on what she says now.
I knew that I had to write about it. Not that I particularly care whether AOC is "woke", no longer woke, Woke 1, Woke 2, or whatever terminology American politics invents next.
What interests me is the mechanism of the reversal: how political actors renegotiate their relationship with ideas once the environment surrounding those ideas changes.
Political reversals are treated as evidence of hypocrisy, opportunism, betrayal. Sometimes they are. But that's the easy explanation. It focuses our attention on the individual when the more interesting information is contained in the environment around them.
What follows is therefore not really an analysis of AOC. I want to use this reversal to examine three things:
- what changes around a belief before people begin publicly abandoning it;
- how actors reconstruct their past without destroying their present legitimacy;
- and, most importantly, how shifts in language can be used as early signals that the environment itself is moving.
Until August 23rd, everything I have built to help you think, read situations and make decisions more clearly is 26% off — from individual courses (coupon: SUMMER26) to the full Grey Zone Protocol and the annual Grey Zone Brief subscription.
I rarely discount my work. If you've been waiting to enter The Grey Zone, this is probably the moment.
The reversal is the information
Was AOC sincere in 2020? Is she sincere today?
We don't know. More importantly, we don't need to know.
The first mistake we make when observing a political reversal is to start inside the person's head: why did she change her mind? Was she lying before or now?
Before asking what changed inside the actor, look at what changed around them. The environment.
A reversal does not necessarily reveal a change in belief. Sometimes, it reveals a change in incentives. And in AOC's case, we can actually see some of them.