The political pendulum swings, and some people are getting caught up in its momentum. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been reasonably criticized for her giggly embrace of attacks on “Woke 1”—a made-up era of US politics some commentators are now demanding “accountability” for.

The “Woke 1” framing suggests that the United States was briefly ruled by the left. This fantasy erases MAGA from a moment in history when they controlled the levers of government and terrorized their opponents and those they had scapegoated for a moment of national crisis. In 2020, we saw armed protests against COVID mitigations, attacks on health care workers, the mass amplification of conspiracy theories, Trump’s “LIBERATE” tweets, escalating election denial, and the political trajectory that produced an attempted coup on January 6.

It’s true that 2020 was a year of extremes. Experiencing organized abandonment, being pent up at home to ponder the situation, and living much of our political lives in contentious digital spaces contributed to some rather intense pronouncements and actions. This was true on the right and the left. For many Americans, the murder of George Floyd was a flashpoint—one that demanded a reckoning. Calls for reimagining the social order, including abolishing the police, gained traction. And while some were envisioning a world without rampant state violence, where people’s identities were respected and their basic needs met, others were embracing very different forms of radicalization.

Historically, pandemics have been followed by increased social unrest and political upheaval. Many of us hoped this particular rupture might function as a portal, as Arundhati Roy suggested, opening the way for a leftward shift. For a time, this seemed possible.

I have my political disappointments about that period, but they are not about the things many pundits are seizing upon now, as they demand “accountability” for the social repercussions some people endured for racial insensitivity, transphobia, ableism, misogyny, or sex pest behavior—or for toothless corporate policies and mollifying gestures from Democrats that no one on the left asked for.

But whatever missteps people on the left made during that period—for example, some of us may have been too quick to dismiss potential allies we deemed insufficiently radical—our politics did not become the governing politics of the United States. The left did not take power. In fact, many of us lent our momentum to the Biden campaign as a moral compromise to end the Trump regime. The country was not remade according to abolitionist, socialist, or movement demands. Nor did the left lose two elections to a fascist. The Democrats did.

What failed to regain sufficient public support to hold off fascism was the neoliberal status quo. And today, Democrats are still fighting to keep their party’s politics in the center—a position from which they will either continue to lose, or win and then lose, because they ultimately have nothing transformative to offer in a time of increased economic suffering.

Meanwhile, the right continued on its intensified path, ever-radicalizing, until we wound up here.

I am not minimizing the left’s shortcomings. I happen to think leftist Twitter culture, prior to the Elon takeover and sometimes even after, involved a lot of excesses. (Anyone remember the nice lady who made her neighbor chili?) I sometimes engaged in those excesses. (Though not the chili situation.) I was sometimes targeted because of them. (And my god, that shit was ridiculous.) Some leftists, reasonably aghast at Biden’s role in the Gaza genocide, quite unreasonably minimized the threat of a second Trump administration. That was a mistake, and one that aggravated me to no end, but it’s not the mistake we’re being called crazy for.

I have come to accept that people don’t always reach the most sensible conclusions in environments designed to amplify rancor and reward conflict, while bombarding people with more bad news and atrocity than their brains were built to process.

People grow, and movements adjust, based on experience and changing conditions. I have learned a lot in recent years, as I hope we all have.

But I want to call attention to what’s been memory-holed, because the same kind of public forgetting that allowed some people to minimize the threat Trump posed during his second run for the presidency is taking hold again. Democrats are entertaining years-old complaints about the left, while daily political discourse often fails to register just how catastrophic, corrupt, and fascist the reigning politics of the moment have become. This time, the reality is so overwhelming that normalization is almost inevitable. Between the gutting of government aid, crypto-fueled corruption, the politicization of disaster relief, and Trump’s crooked dealings with the tech industry, who can keep up? Last I checked, people were focused on the weird, fawning letters of a Trump tag-along Ivanka look-alike.

So, as a reminder: Right-wingers attacked health care workers in 2020, while Trump spread misinformation, seized and redirected PPE bound for blue states, and fueled election denial, before ultimately fomenting a coup. But no one is demanding a reckoning for any of that, because we are currently ruled by fascist politics.

Derecka Purnell has warned that the betrayal and abandonment of the movements some are associating with the so-called “Woke 1” era has consequences for the present. “Downplaying those movements puts organizers who continue this work at risk,” she recently wrote in The Guardian. By depicting the left as some cultural force that went “crazy,” people who took similar or adjacent positions in 2020—perhaps because they were caught up in someone else’s momentum then, too—are now capitulating to the right and feeding narratives that reprisal against the left is appropriate.

Leftists need not substantiate these claims by relitigating the question of whether “defund the police” was a good policy demand. Were there other political directions we might have taken at that time? Yes. Did leftist or liberal critics of “defund the police” successfully organize us in those directions? No, they did not. Defund campaigns managed to harness the energy in the streets, and while I personally prefer policy demands that center addition rather than subtraction, I am not sure one could have successfully channeled the militant energy in the streets at that time into a demand that did not directly challenge the power of police. I understood the choices organizers made, and I supported them. I have no regrets about that support, and will not accept any revisionist history that blames those campaigns for the failures of Democratic politicians.

Some lessons were learned from those longshot efforts, and some victories were won. Important relationships were built. Ultimately, the police state continued to entrench itself—which it had already been doing, because that is the political trajectory of what I have previously referred to as the collapsing box. If it seeks to maintain its current order in an era of catastrophe, the system, such as it is, has no choice but to continue to bolster its police powers and eject the unwanted from its fortressed boundaries. To achieve different outcomes, that order will have to be undermined in truly fundamental ways.

And ultimately, we still live in a country where people are terrified of one another. Our alienation has only increased in recent years, intensifying this effect. Even people who do not trust the police are often afraid of the idea of living without them. We need projects that help people experience themselves and each other differently—to build trust, meet needs, and become less afraid of one another. But we should not deceive ourselves that efforts to create belonging or meet people’s needs at scale will be vilified any less than the defund movement was, because meeting people’s needs also fundamentally undermines capitalism, empire, and the billionaire state. Still, it appears we may need to stage our next longshot battle on that front—perhaps organizing people who are rejecting some of the empire-building of big tech into fighting for things they actually want for their communities.

We won’t get far in such efforts if we accept the mythology that our previous demands or movements ever became the stuff of institutional power or Democratic governance. Democrats have consistently failed to campaign well and have made disappointing, even devastating, choices that injured them politically. They cannot credibly blame their own political failures on unrealized demands from the left.

Are people too shitty to each other on the internet? Are mountains sometimes made of molehills? Yes and yes, and this is not a specific failure of the left either. Our daily discourse is governed by algorithms that amplify rancor and reward conflict. Some of us have been learning to step outside those dynamics and the unworthy conflicts they can generate. That’s worth doing, not because “Woke 1 was crazy,” but because we should constantly be learning how to better relate to each other and do better politics.

Calls for “accountability” around “Woke 1” when everyone prosecuted for January 6 has received clemency would be laughable if they weren’t so dangerous. The scapegoating efforts of the right have already resulted in violence, legal attacks on trans people, state-sanctioned murder of immigrants and ICE watchers, occupations of Democratic cities, and mass deportations. We are living in a culture where fascist ideas are dominant and wielded with the force of the most powerful federal government in the world.

The left does not need to pursue its own exoneration in this moment. There is no reason to indulge the fantasy that we governed the nation during these recent, disastrous years, or that our country’s brief flirtation with racial justice was an unthinkable disaster with countless innocent victims. Are we, the left, messy as hell? Absolutely. Do I get sick of our shit sometimes? You bet. But our politics are not the politics that have detached this country from reality, or normalized increasingly inhuman policies.

We are stumbling through a catastrophic landscape that is not of our own making, trying to figure out what making justice might look like. The fact that people had ideas about how to transform that government with leftward momentum—to create a world with less state violence, where more public needs would be met—did not create the dystopia we are living in. Nazi ideologies and a neoliberal status quo too weak and pathetic to fight off fascism did that.

Whatever missteps we might have made in recent years, it is folly to demand a reckoning for leftward politics that never governed the country while fascists wield the machinery of the federal government to unmake reality and reorganize the world into corporate, fascist fiefdoms.

Let’s be fucking serious.

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