“Woke 1 was crazy.”

Those four words, spoken on ABC’s This Week earlier this month by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, unexpectedly blasted open the doors of political discourse. For nearly two weeks, debate has raged in columns and on social media about the concept of “Woke 1” — whether there was indeed such a discrete era, how bad it really was, whether the broader left is allowed to simply laugh off the “woke” excesses of the era. Or to take the opposite tack, whether trying to move on from those excesses is an appalling betrayal of activist movements.

Part of the problem is that for every five people talking about this, you’re likely to get six different explanations of what “Woke 1” actually means. Here’s mine: it’s the tut-tutting, puritanical style of progressive behavior, incubated in and spread from college campuses, that believed you could yell, condemn, finger-wag, and cancel your way to political change — and that reached its fever pitch in mid-to-late 2020, when we saw a spree of job losses and censorship on dubious grounds, because people were being yelled at, or because someone above them feared they eventually would be. This was a distinctly unproductive response to the mass outrage and protest over years of unaccountability for police murders, which demanded serious changes to American policing but ended up in part being diverted into censorship and policing of people’s behavior.