“Woke 1 was crazy.”
The line — as reported by CNN, the Deseret News and much of the American press — was delivered, laughing, by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in front of the ABC News cameras in mid-August, in reference to the 2017–2020 season of American progressive politics: the period in which, in her own words, the doors were open to any proposal whatsoever so long as it moved things “to a better place”, defunding the police included. Within days Axios had accused her of rewriting her own history with an eye to 2028, the Boston Globe read the remark as a signal about the future of the Democratic Party, and the progressive press, from The Atlantic to Mother Jones, put her on trial for betrayal — with Fox News cast in the novel role of amused chronicler of friendly fire. It is worth dwelling on this detail, because it contains in miniature the whole of the argument that follows: the woman who was that season’s parliamentary face tries to step off the train, and the train tries to put her on trial. A movement founded in the name of inclusion that ends up indicting even its own icon is not a paradox. It is, as we shall see, the machine working exactly as designed.
The collapse is not a matter of opinion
Collapse is the right word, and the figures are there to be read. In January 2025 Meta dismantled its DEI apparatus — diversity, equity and inclusion: the corporate programmes for diversity and inclusion — eliminating the dedicated team, the equity programmes and the diverse-slate hiring system, with a revealing justification reported by CBS News: the American legal and political landscape has changed, beginning with the 2023 Supreme Court ruling that prohibited affirmative action in university admissions. Walmart removed race and gender as factors in the award of supplier contracts; Ford softened its own policies in 2024; and IBM, Forbes reports, is said to have done the same, citing “inherent tensions”. McDonald’s, according to ABC News, has stalled at 30% of senior leadership drawn from under-represented groups, against the 35% it had publicly set itself for the end of 2025. As early as June 2024, Tractor Supply — the American farm-supply chain — had scrapped DEI roles, support for Pride events and climate targets in a single move, three weeks after a social media campaign by the anti-DEI activist Robby Starbuck (keep this detail in mind: we shall need it later). Rather than an ideological retreat announced with trumpets, this has the look of an orderly liquidation, conducted in the antiseptic language of shareholder communications — which is how companies bury the things they no longer believe in.
The electorate, for its part, had already entered its own view into the record. Analyses of the 2024 vote, from AEI to NPR to the socialist magazine Jacobin (which, from opposite shores, say the same thing on this point), certify the completion of a decade-long transfer: Trump won 56% of voters without a degree and half of those earning under a hundred thousand dollars; Harris won 55% of graduates and a majority of higher earners. The party that spoke in the name of those at the bottom found the votes of the next-to-bottom on the other side. The polling deserves honesty: the picture is not univocal. Alongside the Pew Research Center, which measures erosion — American workers who consider DEI “a good thing” falling from 56% to 52% in two years — and Gallup, which records the decline of diversity as a corporate priority, there are surveys finding that underlying support holds. But that ambiguity is precisely the point: the consensus declared to pollsters and the actual behaviour of companies and voters tell two different stories, and we shall shortly see that this gap has a name, a theory and thirty years of literature behind it.
The interesting question, however, begins where the observation ends: why a movement founded in order to include should have become a machine for expelling — and one so accomplished at expelling that it hunted not merely its declared opponents but, above all, those who shared ninety-five per cent of its positions and were guilty of failing to share the remaining five. Because this dynamic, far from being an anomaly peculiar to woke politics, is the standard mechanics of every moral community, and it is predictable enough that we can take it apart component by component.
Purity has no thermostat
The first component of the machine is a problem in the economics of status. Inclusiveness as a practical objective is satiable: it can be measured, achieved and declared complete. Status within a moral movement, by contrast, is a positional good, because what counts is not how virtuous one is in absolute terms but how virtuous one is relative to everyone else; and once every member has adopted the same virtue, the only way left to distinguish oneself is to raise the stakes — to be purer than the average, or to denounce those who lag behind. Raising the stakes shifts the average, the new average calls for a further raise, and the cycle has no stopping point because no one holds the authority to say “this is enough”.
The journalist Gavin Haynes, who devoted a BBC Radio 4 documentary to the phenomenon in 2020, calls it a purity spiral: a community whose primary purpose becomes the enactment of a single value that has neither a ceiling nor a shared interpretation. And he documented it in the least likely of places — the knitting communities of Instagram, the world of young-adult fiction. Not the commanding heights of politics: knitters. Which tells us something important, namely that the spiral does not depend on the content of the ideas but on the structure of the competition: wherever a community competes over an unbounded and unfalsifiable virtue, the race to raise the stakes starts of its own accord.
The second component explains the apparently most absurd part: why the hunt concentrates on the near-aligned rather than on opponents. René Girard, in his theory of mimetic desire, distinguishes between the external mediator — distant, unreachable, with whom no rivalry is possible — and the internal mediator, our peer, who desires the same things we do and for that very reason becomes a rival [cf. René Girard, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, 1961]. The internal heretic is the perfect mimetic rival: he contests the boundary of the group from within and competes for the same audience, the same moral authority, the same spaces. The declared opponent, by contrast, competes for none of these things and, crucially, is not punishable: he has nothing to lose from ostracism by a community to which he does not belong. The lukewarm member does have something to lose — he cares about his own belonging — and so social leverage works only on him. Hunting the heretic, far from being excess of zeal, is the only exercise of power actually available, which is why it is the one exercised.
The third component is what makes the spiral irreversible, and it carries an almost poetic name: evaporative cooling. The expression, applied to opinion groups, is Eliezer Yudkowsky’s: just as in a liquid the most energetic molecules evaporate first, leaving the remainder colder, so in a group under pressure the moderates leave first — those who have alternatives and less tolerance for a courtroom atmosphere [cf. Eliezer Yudkowsky, “Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs”, 2007]. The residual group is more extreme, the climate hardens, and the next stratum of moderates evaporates. It is a ratchet that turns in one direction only, until all that remains is the core for whom no one is ever sufficiently left-wing — the “further left than Stalin” that anyone who has frequented certain mailing lists will recognise at once.
The economics of denunciation
All of this existed before social media, but it turned slowly, because denouncing someone carried a cost: time, exposure, the risk of retaliation. Social media reduced the cost to zero and added a reward, turning moral denunciation into the cheapest signal of virtue ever devised. The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call it moral grandstanding, the use of moral discourse for self-promotion: the public raising of the stakes (“this is even more serious than you think”), the pile of identical condemnations, indignation as performance [cf. Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke, Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk, 2020].
And to ensure that the machine never runs short of fuel, there is what the psychologist Nick Haslam has named concept creep: the concepts of harm — trauma, violence, abuse, insecurity — expand systematically over time, both horizontally, covering new phenomena, and vertically, by lowering the severity threshold [cf. Nick Haslam, “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology”, Psychological Inquiry, 2016]. If the definition of an offence widens every year, then every year brings fresh material for those who enforce the rules, and the spiral knows no famine.
The final mechanism is the closing of the escape routes. Two moves make any defence impossible. The first is kafkatrapping, a term coined — ironically enough, given what we are about to discuss — by Eric S. Raymond, one of the fathers of the open source movement: denying the accusation is proof of guilt, because “privilege manifests itself precisely in the failure to see it”. The second is the doctrine of silence is violence: neutrality is not permitted, and whoever says nothing is complicit. Combined, the two moves eliminate every safe position for the non-fundamentalist: he cannot defend himself, because defence is confession, and he cannot abstain, because abstention is guilt. At that point two options remain — total adherence or the target’s role — which is exactly the fork that anyone who has observed these environments will recognise.
The Linux laboratory
If you want to watch all of these mechanisms turning in plain sight within a closed ecosystem, the free software world is the perfect laboratory, for a structural reason worth making explicit: open source communities have no courts. No human resources departments, no disciplinary proceedings with a right of defence, no third-party bodies: governance is purely reputational, and when governance is reputational the only sanctioning instrument available is social exclusion — that is, collective lynching. Add an engineering culture historically blunt and frank to the point of brutality, graft onto it codes of conduct written in the vocabulary of activism, and you have guaranteed friction plus infinite material.
The chronology speaks for itself. September 2018: the Linux kernel replaces its “Code of Conflict”, which amounted to be excellent to each other, with a detailed Code of Conduct, and half an hour later Linus Torvalds, its founder, publishes an email apologising for his historic bluntness and suspends himself from the project he created in order to reflect on his own behaviour. September 2019: Richard Stallman, the father of free software, resigns from the presidency of the Free Software Foundation over remarks about the Epstein case that were judged intolerable; when the board re-elects him in March 2021, the reaction is an open letter demanding his removal, public statements from the sector’s major organisations, and the mass resignation of the executive director and much of the staff — the trial of the man who invented the cause. April 2024: Vaxry, the young maintainer of the Hyprland compositor, is banned from freedesktop.org, the shared infrastructure of the Linux desktop, not for his code but for the tone he had used years earlier in his community’s Discord: he will no longer even be able to file bug reports with the projects on which his own software depends.
The pattern that emerges from these cases is always the same, and it is the signature of the spiral: the sanction is proportionate to the signalling value of the execution far more than to the offence. The harm is not what is punished; the rite is what is celebrated — and the rite, in order to work, needs a target that stands out, not a culprit who has done damage.
The ground shifting underfoot
So much for the internal mechanics. But purity spirals have always existed, and they do not always capture universities, corporations and half of Western public discourse: why did this one succeed, and why is it collapsing now? The answer lies outside the movement, in the terrain that made it sustainable, and the theory that describes it has fifty years of data behind it.
The political scientist Ronald Inglehart first formulated it in 1977 in The Silent Revolution, and subsequently tested it against fifty years of the World Values Survey, the values study that has covered more than a hundred countries since 1981. The thesis: generations raised in material security shift their priorities from survival values to self-expression values — identity, self-realisation, quality of life, moral purity [cf. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution, 1977; Inglehart and Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy, 2005]. Symbolic politics, put bluntly, is a luxury of security. And the corollary we are now living through is that the mechanism also runs in reverse: the crisis of 2008, the pandemic, war in Europe, American inflation reaching 9.1% in mid-2022, European house prices rising by 48% between 2015 and 2023 while the economy returned durably to the top of voters’ concerns — all of this has produced a measurable regression towards survival values across much of the Western population, a possibility Inglehart himself acknowledged before his death in 2021. When security evaporates, the hierarchy of needs reorders itself unaided: no one need “defeat” identity politics; the ground is simply removed from beneath it.
There is then the class version of the same phenomenon, which explains the resentment the collapse carries with it. Rob Henderson calls them luxury beliefs: beliefs that confer status on those who profess them while offloading the costs onto those lower down [cf. Rob Henderson, Troubled, 2024]. Calling for the police to be defunded costs nothing to someone living in the safe neighbourhood and a great deal to someone living where the police are genuinely needed; celebrating the dismantling of the family is an affectation for those with social capital in reserve and a sentence for those without it. Economic instability does something precise to such beliefs: it reattaches the costs to their owners. When the bill arrives at your own address, the belief ceases to be an ornament.
And finally there is the reason the collapse appears so sudden, when the polls had for years been telling a different story. The economist Timur Kuran calls it preference falsification: when dissent is costly, people conform in public and dissent in private, and the apparent consensus becomes far more solid than the real one [cf. Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies, 1995]. It is a stable equilibrium for as long as the cost of dissent remains high, and an explosive one when that cost falls: it takes only a few visible figures breaking the ice without paying a forfeit, and the hidden preferences reveal themselves all at once, in a cascade. The backlash we are witnessing is not a mass conversion: it is the simultaneous surfacing of opinions that were already there, held under falsification by a decade of social costs. That is why it appears disproportionate, and why those on its receiving end experience it as a sudden betrayal: the silent majority was silent, not absent.
The good news, with a caveat
Here comes the part which, as an observer of narrative mechanisms, I consider the best news of these unstable years: scarcity is a reality test, and invented problems do not pass it, because no one is willing to pay for them once money matters. Collective attention occupied by bills, wages and security leaves little audience for moral executions, and without an audience grandstanding no longer pays: the moral status market is having its 2008.
But I owe you a caveat, because the symmetry is too convenient to be wholly true. Instability does not select for real problems: it selects for salient ones, and the two are not the same. The very insecurity that sweeps away debates about pronouns is the ideal terrain for the scapegoat, which is itself an invented problem, only with far more concrete marketing: “you can’t make it to the end of the month because of them”. European history between 1929 and 1933 is, in its entirety, the story of a material crisis intercepted by those selling scapegoats at knock-down prices. And Girard, once again, warns us that the mob that has run out of heretics does not disperse: it changes target, because it needs the rite in order to hold itself together [cf. René Girard, Le bouc émissaire, 1982]. Remember the Tractor Supply detail I asked you to keep in mind? An activist with a social media following, a three-week campaign, a company that capitulates and dismantles everything: that is precisely the same crowd mechanics we have just taken apart, with the political sign reversed. Those celebrating the collapse of the woke spiral by using the spiral’s own instruments are merely changing the quarry, not closing the hunting season. And the pendulum swinging back does not distinguish between the invented problem and the real one that the movement had commandeered as its banner: both go in the purge, and in a few years’ time whoever has to address concrete discrimination — which exists and will continue to exist — will find the vocabulary burnt.
This period, in short, is returning the demand for real problems to the top of the agenda; it is not yet returning their solution. It is a market opening, not a result, and whoever captures it will decide how this ends.
The solution nobody will like
And so I shall close with a proposal, warning you that it is designed to displease both camps, because it takes from each the thing they most cherish: the pleasure of purity.
First: instrumental goals, not moral identities. A movement that defines itself by what it wants to achieve can measure itself, correct itself and — above all — declare victory and disband. A movement that defines itself by what it morally is can never declare victory, because victory would dissolve it: its structural incentive is to find offences for ever. The test question for any cause, yours included: “what would have to happen for you to be able to say we are finished?” If no answer exists, you are not solving a problem; you are sustaining a belonging.
Second: due process even for those you find odious. Procedures for accusation and defence, proportionality of sanction, the possibility of rehabilitation. Not because the guilty deserve kindness, but because a community without procedure hands the sanctioning power to the loudest, and the loudest, as we have seen, has incentives all of his own. Open source communities are learning this at their own expense: a code of conduct without procedural guarantees ends up being an unattended weapon rather than a court.
Third: the eighty-per-cent ally is an ally, not a twenty-per-cent traitor. This is the rule that breaks the Girardian mechanics of the proximate enemy, and it is the most unnatural of all, because it asks you to give up the only punishable target. But it is also the only arithmetic that builds majorities: coalitions are made with those who disagree about the remainder, or they are not made at all.
Fourth: detach status from declared virtue and reattach it to verifiable contribution. Which is, after all, the principle by which free software built — before its inquisitorial season — the greatest work of voluntary cooperation in human history: what a person thought did not matter; what mattered was that the patch worked.
None of these four rules is emotionally satisfying, and that is the point: they are boring, procedural and tolerant of people we dislike. They are also the only arrangement that allows a plural society to solve problems instead of consuming heretics, and they apply identically to the fundamentalism now collapsing and to the one, of opposite sign, that is applying to replace it.
Purity is a pleasure; procedure is work. But humanity, historically, has moved forward every time it has chosen the work.
Further Reading
- CNN: “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bad explanation for her ‘woke’ comments” (10 August 2026), https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/10/politics/aoc-woke-democrats
- Deseret News: “AOC says Democrats have moved on from ‘Woke 1′” (12 August 2026), https://www.deseret.com/politics/2026/08/12/aoc-says-woke-1-was-crazy/
- Axios: “How AOC is rewriting her own ‘Woke 1’ history” (16 August 2026), https://www.axios.com/2026/08/16/aoc-walk-back-positions-2028
- Boston Globe: “AOC is talking about Woke 1.0, and it may provide a signal about the future of the Democratic Party” (15 August 2026), https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/08/15/nation/aoc-woke-midterms-2026-2028/
- Fox News: “AOC faces progressive backlash for laughing off ‘Woke 1’ era rhetoric” (August 2026), https://www.foxnews.com/media/aocs-attempt-dismiss-woke-1-crazy-draws-criticism-left-leaning-outlets
- CBS News: “Meta ends diversity programs, joining McDonald’s, Walmart and other major companies to back off DEI” (January 2025), https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meta-dei-programs-mcdonalds-walmart-ford-diversity/
- ABC News: “Meta, McDonald’s: These companies are rolling back some DEI policies”, https://abcnews.go.com/US/mcdonalds-walmart-companies-rolling-back-dei-policies/story?id=117469397
- Forbes: “IBM Reportedly Walks Back Diversity Policies, Citing Inherent Tensions” (11 April 2025), https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/04/11/ibm-reportedly-walks-back-diversity-policies-citing-inherent-tensions-here-are-all-the-companies-rolling-back-dei-programs/
- CNBC: “Rural retailer Tractor Supply eliminates DEI roles, Pride support and carbon goals” (28 June 2024), https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/28/tractor-supply-ends-dei-pride-support-carbon-goals.html
- AEI: “Working-Class Realignment”, https://www.aei.org/featured_data/working-class-realignment/
- NPR: “Why working-class voters have been shifting toward the Republican Party” (14 November 2024), https://www.npr.org/2024/11/14/nx-s1-5183060/why-working-class-voters-have-been-shifting-toward-the-republican-party
- Jacobin: “The Working Class Has Left the Building” (November 2024), https://jacobin.com/2024/11/working-class-voters-democrats-trump
- Pew Research Center: “U.S. workers’ views of DEI grow slightly more negative” (19 November 2024), https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/19/views-of-dei-have-become-slightly-more-negative-among-us-workers/
- Gallup: “Fewer Americans See Diversity as a Business Priority”, https://news.gallup.com/poll/696221/fewer-americans-diversity-business-priority.aspx
- LSE USAPP Blog: “New research shows the American public continues to support DEI policies” (4 June 2025), https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2025/06/04/new-research-shows-the-american-public-continues-to-support-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-policies/
- Slashdot: “Linus Torvalds On Linux’s Code of Conduct” (27 September 2018), https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/09/27/1529236/linus-torvalds-on-linuxs-code-of-conduct
- Free Software Foundation: “Richard M. Stallman resigns” (16 September 2019), https://www.fsf.org/news/richard-m-stallman-resigns
- FSFE: “Statement on Richard Stallman rejoining the FSF board” (24 March 2021), https://fsfe.org/news/2021/news-20210324-01.html
- EFF: “Statement on the Re-election of Richard Stallman to the FSF Board” (March 2021), https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/statement-re-election-richard-stallman-fsf-board
- The Register: “Free Software Foundation staff quit en masse” (30 March 2021), https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/30/fsf_mass_resignation/
- Drew DeVault: “FDO’s conduct enforcement actions regarding Vaxry” (April 2024), https://drewdevault.com/blog/FDO-conduct-enforcement/
- UnHerd: “Cast out: how knitting fell into a purity spiral” (January 2020), https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-purity-spiral/
- European Parliament: “Housing crisis: why prices are rising and what the EU is doing about it” (14 October 2024), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20241014STO24542/housing-crisis-why-prices-are-rising-and-what-the-eu-is-doing-about-it
- Allianz Research: “High prices, thin buffers: America’s affordability crisis persists”, https://www.allianz.com/en/economic_research/insights/publications/specials_fmo/260211-US-affordability.html
- Data for Progress: “Inflation and the Economy Consistently Rank as Top Issues Among Likely Voters” (6 March 2024), https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/3/6/inflation-and-the-economy-consistently-rank-as-top-issues-among-likely-voters-and-heres-our-new-way-to-ask-issue-importance
Theoretical References
- Girard, R. (1961). Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Grasset
- Girard, R. (1982). Le bouc émissaire. Grasset
- Inglehart, R. (1977). The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton University Press
- Inglehart, R. and Welzel, C. (2005). Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy. Cambridge University Press
- Kuran, T. (1995). Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification. Harvard University Press, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674707580
- Tosi, J. and Warmke, B. (2020). Grandstanding: The Use and Abuse of Moral Talk. Oxford University Press
- Haslam, N. (2016). “Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology”. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418
- Henderson, R. (2024). Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class. Gallery Books
- Haynes, G. (2020). “The Purity Spiral”, BBC Radio 4 (Seriously… series)
- Yudkowsky, E. (2007). “Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs”, LessWrong
- Raymond, E. S. (2010). “Kafkatrapping”, Armed and Dangerous (blog)
