IMO Woke 1 really starts after the Obama 2012 victory because it was a mobilization-rather-than-persuasion victory. He lost the white vote by 20(!) points, lost the South, still won comfortably. There was a great deal written about how this dominating coalition of minorities + urban/educated whites, with particularly good margins among young voters, was just the beginning of a long-term trend that would deliver, if not something quite as a durable and long-lived as the New Deal coalition, then close to it. Dems needed to simply sit back and let demography work its magic, in time turning Sunbelt states reliably blue (even Texas would fall soon enough...), while older white voters high in racial resentment died out and new younger, diverse, progressive voters took their place. This deranged absolutely everyone. On the Right, it led to a panicked abandonment of democratic principles altogether, and investment in a political movement that was premised on establishing and entrenching permanent GOP rule by hook or by crook--while simultaneously trying to reverse the demographic tide that was sure to overwhelm them (through e.g. stemming new immigration). I really believe their derangement was less about Obama himself being Black, and much more about their sense that the *electorate* could now overrule the supermajority preferences of the white vote--something wholly unprecedented in American political history. No one had won a national election while losing the white vote by 20 before. THAT is what made them go insane. On the broad Left (meaning center-left Dems, liberals, progressives, and the actual Left, which was just starting to reemerge as a genuine force thanks to social media allowing heterodox beliefs to flourish amidst the collapse of the liberal elite's cultural hegemony), this deranged us in a mirror image of the Right: we, too, could abandon the arduous and persuasive work of democracy, and let our demographic destiny carry us into the brighter future. No more pandering to Bubba. Fuck Bubba! We could finally say it! No more of this humiliating Clintonian two-step to appease or at least anesthetize Middle American chuds. We could just fucking steamroll them with our Coalition of the Ascendant. This, combined with the simultaneous rise of social media platforms as this urgently-contested space for normative cultural power, focused our energies inward: we'd won the Culture War, so now it was time to fight over who got to administer Cultural Reconstruction. The Chuds were doomed, powerless, flailing and moronic (just look at their flight to increasingly absurd and laughable figures like Trump!), and we would get to impose the new order over their Oxycontin-addled complaints. What, then, would that new order *be*? Who would run it? What would they accomplish? What you see here is a parallel abandonment of basic democratic principles of persuasion and coalition-building; on the Right, the fascist drive to entrench themselves in unaccountable minority rule (clearly the much more serious and evil threat, particularly in a country where the Constitution makes this entirely feasible), and on the Left an intra-elite competition to see who would be in charge of this new coalition that could finally dispense with the debasing and grimy work of mass politics and persuasion. Of course, we turned out to be completely wrong. Looking at the Obama coalition and projecting it out linearly into the future was a bad idea for many reasons--including that it was pretty tenuous to assume the massive turnout and insane margins among minority voters for the First Black President would simply reappear on demand for any Democrat--and it led to a lot of bad assumptions. We ended up with a discourse that was honed for internal competition, and relied extensively on social pressure and ostracism--but in a modern, liberal democracy where people can simply leave your political community if they don't like it. And a lot of people did; we successfully ostracized them out of respectable liberal or progressive/leftist institutions and communities, and so they just found new homes on the Right. And it turned out, of course, that minority groups are not just identity hive-minds which reliably allocate the same proportion of votes to one party or the other independent of any other concerns. "The Black vote," "the Hispanic vote"--even "the youth vote" turned out to be malleable, dependent on candidate quality, economic concerns, ideological fit, just like any other group of voters. Trump 1 didn't really break the spell because it felt like a fluky, unlucky nightmare. He didn't win the popular vote, the margin was razor-thin in the midwestern Blue Wall, and Hillary was a bad candidate--and despite all that, Dems retained near-Obama margins with voters of color and young voters. Surely, the Coalition of the Ascendant was still on track; this was just a speedbump. The closeness of the 2020 election and then Trump 2 (with his popular-vote win and the apparent "racial depolarization" of the electorate) fully shattered this narrative. Instead, people remembered we would in fact have to do politics. We would in fact have to compete for people's votes, and persuade them to share our values--and the articulation of those values in policies and behaviors. The center responded to this, as they usually do, by offering immediate capitulation wherever possible to chase the median voter (the center is actually quite bad at persuasion; their response to disagreement is generally to just concede and beg, rather than any attempt to move the audience towards their own positions). The Left responded, thankfully, by showing a great deal of maturation--away from subcultural/counter-cultural criticism and attempts to pressure elites into adopting our values through social pressure campaigns, instead moving towards actual mass politics. DSA has proven this can work, and is working, even if we are still quite early. We would be insane to retreat from that lesson; instead we have to double down on it. That's what Woke 2 needs to be--not cynical abdication of values/principles to chase the median voter, but a genuine persuasive attempt to build a Left mass politics. But persuasion, by definition, requires talking to people *who do not yet agree with you*. You can't *persuade* someone who is already *on your side*. It requires enticement, intellectual and emotional empathy (for people you really might dislike, and for legitimate reasons!), and discipline. It is not nearly so satisfying and immediate as putting people in the public stocks of social media for collective humiliation. It is not as simple as imposing your will over the objections of those who don't agree with you. It requires a certain kind of humility--not "the voters rejected our ideas so we have to get new ideas"; you can still authentically believe what you believe--but a humility about *power*, and about *democracy*. You have to recognize that "I don't have the power to just impose my ideology; and frankly it's good that I don't, because democratic legitimacy is itself an intrinsic good and if we cultivate a democratic mass politics of the Left, that will be more durable and innovative and resistant to attack than anything imposed from above."