It’s Obvious Now Why “Woke 1” Failed. I Have an Idea for How Progressives Can Be Less Annoying Next Time.

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I need to acknowledge up front that it is unwise for anybody—including me—to deduce any comprehensive conclusions about the Democratic Party and where it’s headed from Wisconsin’s gubernatorial primary last week. That was a really weird race, and it only got weirder as Election Day drew nearer. The front-runner was Francesca Hong, a State Assemblywoman and DSA member who, according to the scant few surveys conducted, held a dominant lead over the moderate candidates in the field. Hong maintained that momentum throughout the spring and summer, as several establishment hands dropped out. The party searched far and wide to find a conventional Democrat to coalesce around, but the right person never surfaced. Then, in a last-ditch effort to fend off Hong’s insurgency, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, who had previously suspended his campaign, reentered the race less than a month before polls opened. This looked like a humiliation ritual to me: Crowley wasn’t polling competitively even when he was actively campaigning, and it seemed unlikely that his brand could be rehabilitated with such little time left.

But then Crowley … won. Sure, Hong massively underperformed her benchmarks—posting an abysmal 7-point margin of victory even in the cobalt-blue Dane County—and, yes, we must note that Crowley eked out a razor-thin plurality. There are plenty of ways to account for this upset, from polling errors to the musical chairs at the ballot box to Hong’s failure to spend basically any money on TV ads. But, really, much of the postmortem has focused on Hong’s association with what we’re now all calling “Woke 1.”

It’s hard to articulate exactly what Woke 1 is or, I suppose, was. But like pornography, you know it when you see it. Here are a few examples that come to mind. Woke 1 is a podcaster in Brooklyn listing their Twitter location as “unceded Lenape territory.” Woke 1 is a colleague at a public-relations firm starting a GoFundMe to escape a “toxic roommate situation.” Woke 1 is a 5,000-word article probing the crisis of bi erasure, a 34-year-old YouTuber canceled for dating a 25-year-old TikTokker, or perhaps a “ gay immigrant Muslim furry romance ” pitched as a weapon to resist Donald Trump. If you were to ask me, I might describe Woke 1 as a highly codified set of language principles that participants in left-wing causes were expected to internalize and wield with fluency because if they didn’t, they risked punishment, ostracization, or harassment. But even that doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter. I think when we derisively say Woke 1 now, what we are gesturing at is the shudderingly visceral feeling of the whole thing—the distinct haughty tang, the way-too-online insularity, and, most important, the telos that amounted to little more than inflicting guilt and experiencing guilt, in perpetuity. It was difficult to determine what that guilt could ever produce. After all, Lenape territory remains unceded, no matter how many times it is acknowledged.

This is the stench that hampered Hong’s campaign.