Progressive-Left Housecleaning: Defund the Police, Gone. Israel Bashing, Here to Stay

(Essay(

“Woke 1.0 was crazy!” So said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about the politics of 2020. It was, well… kind of a lark. She’d been responding to questions about positions that she and others on the progressive left championed, including defunding the police. It came with a laugh, as if it had been a party that got a little out of hand..

In a recent Substack piece, journalist Glenn Greenwald lambasted AOC and her ideological cronies for giggling their way out of a moment that was nothing to laugh about. People were canceled. Careers were ruined. Institutions adopted ideological orthodoxies conceived not over decades, but over months. Say the wrong thing and you’re out.

Like a matryoshka doll, with “interesting” new developments popping out daily, another has just emerged from an old one. “Defund the police,” if you’ve noticed, is now being shied away from, just as a segment of the progressive left is distancing itself from ideas and rhetoric that reached their apogee (or nadir, depending on how you view it) in 2020.

The political motivations for this are impossible to miss. A successful presidential run in 2028 has to appeal to working-class voters, including Black and Hispanic voters, who don’t necessarily share the progressive activist class’s pet projects. The cost of housing and groceries means more than something cooked up by a professor in a cubicle.

AOC is smart. She and others of her ideological persuasion understand that a democratic-socialist economic program can attract a much broader constituency if it removes itself from the cultural and identity politics of 2020. There is, however, something curious about this sudden housecleaning. One idea has survived the Ajax and the Lysol: the progressive movement’s hostility toward Israel.

None of what follows is an argument that Israel is above criticism. It isn’t, and there is, in Yiddish syntax, what to criticize. But why, I ask, has this one idea been granted an exemption?

Minneapolis 2020.

The same movement that’s willing to treat its 2020 excesses as laughable indiscretions has left them intact when they apply to the Jewish state. Israel continues to be described in the same language that became ubiquitous during the height of Woke 1.0: colonialist, imperialist, racist, apartheid, ethnostate. And most powerfully of all, genocidal.

But it only works if the complexity of the actual history goes missing: Jews of “color” exiled throughout the Levant and North Africa, millennia of Jewish presence in the land, Jewish refugees from Europe and Arab countries, wars begun by neighboring Arab states, Palestinian nationalism, terrorism, occupation, settlements, competing national claims, failed negotiations, Israeli political divisions, Palestinian political divisions.

To the progressive, the case against Israel fits perfectly within the simplicity of the moral architecture of that period: oppressor and oppressed. The words appear so often I’ll just say O&O.

Among Democrats, particularly younger Democrats, attitudes show what voters want. Affordable housing, affordable food. But also politicians who know the rules and regulations of O&O. A Pew survey conducted in late March 2026 found that eight in ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents hold an unfavorable view of Israel. That’s up from 69 percent a year earlier.

Defunding the police is only a problem when you need the votes of people who dislike crime. Race and Gender Speak becomes an issue when most of the people whose interests you claim to represent don’t speak that language. But hostility toward Israel doesn’t carry that cost. A progressive-left politician with national ambitions like AOC understands that dropping “defund the police” helps her chances of election, while softening hostility toward Israel would shrink them.

That makes Greenwald interesting to think about. He wants the canceling and the speech-policing investigated and accounted for, not giggled away. At the same time, he has been, and continues to be, one of Israel’s harshest critics. His case against Israel snakes through the same O&O framework he treats as a symptom of the illnesses of 2020.

If Woke 1.0 really was crazy, everything it produced deserves attention. And if a movement is willing to re-examine its assumptions about policing, race, gender, and speech, it ought to explain why its assumptions about the Jewish state remain untouched. Perhaps the answer is simpler than we’d like. Those other ideas became politically expensive.

Hostility toward Israel still gets great bang for the buck.