So, before that time goes farther down the memory hole, discarded as just one of so many vibe shifts, I have one question for the formerly woke:

If you can dismiss it so casually now — all the defunding and abolishing, the BIPOCing and Latinxing, the canceling and decentering and my truthing — how much of it did you truly believe at the time? How much was conviction, how much was a pose, how much was groupthink, how much was fear?

If you did believe it, jettisoning it now should take something more than a sheepish grin. If you didn’t believe it and yet declared it with such passion, with such pretensions to moral clarity, with such disdain for contrary perspectives, then the least you can do now is acknowledge that dissonance. You should explain the shift, not just explain it away.

Some writers and thinkers have admitted that they supported certain progressive verities — or didn’t push back against them — because they felt cowed by their audiences, or because they feared for their careers. My hope is for a modicum of such intellectual accountability from the political class, too, just enough grace to blush.

When the formerly woke look back on that time, for example, what specifically do they now regard as crazy or cringey or silly? Do they regret particular beliefs, or just the provocative ways they expressed them? Have they decided that some of their previous positions were impractical or wrong, or just too electorally risky to state in public?

To expect intellectual accountability from politicians may be foolish, I know, and parties and movements are allowed and expected to evolve. The right, for instance, went from Goldwater and the Reagan Revolution to Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America, to George W. Bush and compassionate conservatism, to the Tea Party and then to MAGA, with consistencies as well as discontinuities along the way. Not every politician must explicitly disavow what came before.