The Only Way Out of Wokeness is Through It

Making a “Big Tent” Case for an AOC Presidential Run

Gage Skidmore/CC by 2.0

Are Democrats doomed to repeat the social justice excesses that supposedly triggered a backlash, handing the White House to Donald Trump in 2024? That is a frighteningly real possibility according to Yascha Mounk’s recent article, The Resistance is Going to be Woke. Admitting much of his evidence is anecdotal, Mounk describes recent instances where Democrats seem to be doubling down on the cancellations, purity tests, and heavy-handed thought policing commonly associated with the term “wokeness.” To prove his claim of enduring wokeness, Mounk cites Tim Walz lamenting that the Harris campaign did not wholeheartedly embrace Biden era DEI programs, the recent censure vote by 75 of 76 Democratic Maine state legislators against their Republican colleague Lauren Libby for making a Facebook post criticizing trans female participation in girls sports, Democratic strategists flirting with irreverent Dark Woke messaging, and maybe the most ominously, the emergence of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) as the front runner for the 2028 Democratic nomination, a candidate who Mounk derides as “perhaps the most famous national representative of ‘woke’ politics.’” Mounk sees ominous signs that the Democrats are reverting to wokeness, thereby threatening the “Big Tent” coalition-building needed to retake the presidency in 2028.

Reading commentators like Yascha Mounk, it is easy to fall into the consensus opinion that, when it comes to wokeness, the Democrats have two options: refortification or retreat. Democratic candidates are left with the unpleasant choice of either doubling down and embracing Woke 2.0 or surrendering the field to a rightward “vibe shift” in the direction of anti-wokeness. Each one of these two approaches comes with its unique dangers. With its emphasis on empty symbolic virtue signaling, coalition fracturing judgmentalism, and endless litany of neologisms and shibboleths that must be learned to prove your sanctity, unchecked wokeness weakens the Democratic Party from within while alienating it from Americans outside its base. Yet, the anti-woke reaction triggered by the second Trump presidency has unleashed truly vile expressions of hate that would shock not just a nonbinary gender studies graduate in 2015 but a straight white male insurance agent in 1985. We now live in a reality where a multi-Grammy award-winning artist is releasing a track entitled Heil Hitler, and a white woman can almost become a millionaire by calling a 5-year-old the N-word. These are truly dark times. While Democrats face a definite risk digging in and doubling down on wokeness, they cannot surrender to the unquestionable evil being smuggled back into our culture under the “anti-woke” banner.

Both refortification and retreat fail to confront the two most important lessons we should have learned over the past decade: (1) the forces of oppression that wokeness opposed are very real and menacing; and (2) there is no evidence that the woke movement made the slightest progress in fighting those forces, and potentially made them worse. What if there was another strategy, one that recognized the noble aims of the woke movement but also its strategic failures? What if instead of refortification or retreat, we adopted a new strategy of redirection, a flanking maneuver that did not leave us to die a slow death of attrition in the culture war battle trenches but also did not cede ground to those eager to inflict harm on our society’s most vulnerable? What if the best field general the Democrats have to outflank the Republicans and overcome the liabilities of wokeness is none other than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?

Where Yascha Mounk sees AOC’s woke brand as a threat to the Democrats’ chances in 2028, I see it as a unique opportunity to turn the page on a disappointing chapter in the history of American leftism. No matter who gets the Democratic nomination in 2028, the Republicans will tar them with the charge of wokeness. At a time when the Trump Administration is labeling everything from reading Toni Morrison to honoring Jackie Robinson’s military service as “woke,” no Democrat with the slightest shred of moral integrity will be able to shake that label. Any centrist candidate will have to overcome the suspicion that they are just another Joe Biden, a blue-collar everyman puppet of unseen woke forces, someone who will overlay a veneer of social justice on nearly every policy but do next to nothing to uproot the oligarchic forces parasitizing our economy and warping our democracy. A centrist Democrat will have to overcome charges of not just being woke, but also being phony.

For all her cringey missteps (that MET Gala dress…ugh), AOC is often regarded as one of the most authentic Democrats, a sincerity that’s the beating heart of her populist appeal. Like Trump, AOC is a polarizing figure. But love her or hate her, just like Trump, Americans believe there is little daylight between AOC’s political and private personas. When it comes to politicians, she is no phony. Evan Stern summed up AOC’s appeal nicely, “Nobody vying for higher office has the degree of charisma and communications brilliance of AOC, and what’s more: her world view and political brand are deeply rooted in the anti-system, populist energy currently coursing through the country’s political veins.” Leveraging her perceived authenticity, AOC could own and embody the label of “woke” enough to not only redefine the term but also redirect its energy away from puritanical in-fighting toward advocating universal economic policies, protecting the rights of all Americans, and fighting the forces of oligarchy that have grown exponentially stronger in Trump’s first 100 days back in office. AOC would also have the clout to engage “the Groups,” the activist organizations supposedly to blame for pushing the Democrats leftward into indefensible policy positions. AOC’s charisma and credibility enable her to discipline the activist class, getting them to temper their narrow policy obsessions in the name of monumental goals that benefit every American, like Medicare for All, a Wealth Tax on the ultrarich, or transformative campaign finance reform. By making AOC the unofficial spokeswoman for all things woke, Republicans have inadvertently given her the valuable power to control, redefine, and refine the wokeness narrative.

In short, AOC is the Democrat best positioned to negotiate a culture war truce from a position of strength. Contrary to what the Democrats’ centrist poll watchers may say, the way to a bigger tent is not kicking out the trans people or the pro-Palestinian protestors to make swing voters more comfortable. A bigger tent is built by giving those outside it a genuine material interest to join while maintaining civility within the ranks of those currently inside the fold. As a promoter of programs like Medicare for All that are more popular with the general public than the Democratic Party establishment, AOC has the outsider status and tangible policy promises needed to attract independents to the tent. At the same time, AOC can reassure the activist class within the tent that their dignity and basic rights will always be protected, even if their most woke demands will occasionally be deprioritized to achieve universal economic justice.

Even if AOC can build a big tent coalition based on charisma and a change-making platform, won’t it all be burned down by her being a lightning rod for right-wing attacks on past wokeness? Of course, attacks on AOC’s wokeness will increase as her 2028 candidacy grows stronger. But right-wing obsessions over AOC as the embodiment of all things woke will be an invaluable asset in a redirection campaign that outflanks the Republicans on culture war trivialities, allowing Democrats to strike at their soft underbelly on economic issues. Trump won in 2024 on a similar campaign of redirection. The 2024 Democratic campaign used its billion-dollar war chest to wage a “Battle for the Soul of the Nation,” hoping to defeat Trump by casting him as a menacing threat to democracy, only to have their grand strategy brought to its knees by Republican sniping over the price of eggs. Similarly, a Republican fixation on AOC’s wokeness can be used as an opportunity to attack them as being woefully out of touch with American’s economic struggles, caring more about graphic novels in school libraries than the cost of living, being more concerned about one trans girls volleyball player than the 45,000 Americans who die each year from the lack of adequate healthcare. In the same way that 2024 Democratic messaging about Trump as a threat to democracy was neutralized by the sight of the goofy old orange man working the McDonald’s drive-thru or riffing with Joe Rogan, AOC could use her disarming demeanor to undermine the Republicans’ much more dubious charges that she is an agent of radical Marxist ideology. If AOC can “flood the zone” of network talk shows, cable news, and podcasts, she might transform the cultural understanding of wokeness as a uniting rather than dividing force. Being the face of Democratic wokeness, AOC can make swing voters come to see the term as synonymous with the kindness and empathy she exudes in her interactions with all Americans. No one has more power to make wokeness a political non-issue than AOC. It is not hard to imagine a 2028 Presidential Debate where AOC returns a Reaganesque, “There you go again,” every time J.D. Vance brings up the topic of wokeness rather than the substantive issues that affect Americans’ financial well-being. Wokeness is a fluid, contested concept, and the Democratic Party will search in vain to find someone better equipped than AOC to neutralize its political liabilities.

“For anybody who is committed to remaining on the left, there simply isn’t an alternative paradigm to wokeness,” Yascha Mounk concludes in his essay, painting the road to 2028 in dark, ominous tones for the Democrats. It’s a bizarre assertion that overlooks the universalist, class-centered ideology used by Democrats to secure victories from the New Deal to the Civil Rights Movement in the mid-20th century. But you really only have to go back to Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign to find a different paradigm that put the material needs of all Americans first over the identity politics that have dominated Democratic strategy since 1968. While wokeness infused Bernie’s 2020 campaign and the campaigns of his “Squad” followers like AOC, back in 2016, it was Sanders's lack of focus on race and gender that made him a target of criticism from the Hillary Clinton campaign. “If we broke up the banks tomorrow…would that end racism? Would that end sexism?” Hillary asked in 2016, using the embryonic spirit of wokeness to take the wind out of the sails of Bernie’s class-focused populist movement. History has been rewritten to blame the far left for imposing wokeness on a sensible Democratic establishment when, in reality, mainstream liberals embraced the symbolic and linguistic demands of wokeness to placate the activist class as a consolation for the universal redistributive economic policies Sanders promoted during his 2016 campaign. Corporate-friendly Democrats encouraged us to join the woke book clubs, listen to woke podcasts, follow woke social media accounts - all ways to signal our devotion to social justice in a manner that simultaneously made oligarchs like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg all the richer. The hollowness of these purely symbolic acts of wokeness would be painfully apparent in 2024 when these formerly “Good Billionaires” lined up front and center for Trump’s second inauguration. In response to this billionaire betrayal, Bernie Sanders’ launched his Fight Oligarchy tour, signaling a paradigm shift, a return to the populist spirit of his 2016 campaign, reconnecting with communities across America on a platform of economic justice rather than empty woke sanctimony. AOC’s emergence as a co-headliner on the Fight Oligarchy tour, suggests her alliance with a new paradigm, one that does not forsake the core principles that animated the woke movement but sees the best way to move those goals forward is to focus first and foremost on reversing the dangerous concentration of wealth and power that threatens our democracy.

How AOC’s messaging evolves along the trail of the Fight Oligarchy tour will tell us a lot about whether she is up for the challenge of leading the Democrats past the excesses of performative woke ideology without giving up on the noble struggle to fight oppression based on race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. We will learn even more if she decides to challenge Chuck Schumer for his New York Senate seat in 2026. In the meantime, we should not discount the possibility that the candidate best positioned to lead the Democratic Party past the political pitfalls of wokeness might just be the candidate most associated with the cultural movement. If the Democrats truly want a Big Tent party in 2028, they need a leader with the charisma to attract the disaffected into the fold and the inspiring policies to make everyone inside the tent want to stay. Of all the top contenders for the 2028 nomination, no one fits that bill better than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.