I once asked a mother on food stamps what she would do without them. “I’d get a husband,” she replied matter-of-factly. Here was news, I thought — a tantalizing bit of evidence of welfare’s corrosive effect on the inner-city family. But when I recounted this exchange in an article for one of the nation’s most influential newspapers, the editor ordered me to leave it out. Quoting it, he said, would “stigmatize the poor.”

That was Heather Mac Donald, writing 26 years ago in her book The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society.

Some things never change, do they?

It’s no secret that bad ideas tend to come from the Left. That’s because while conservatives tend toward conserving the ideas and institutions that have withstood the test of time, progressives are forever hell-bent on progressing. Whatever that means.

Consequences? they sneer. Don’t bother me with consequences.

So whether it’s giving high school students academic credit for honing their graffiti skills, or encouraging blacks to resist racial oppression by stealing from their employers, or subsidizing criminal behavior by categorizing it as proof of a disability and therefore deserving of government benefits; or whether it’s some of the Left’s more recent bright ideas, such as defunding the police, or green-lighting theft under $950, or inviting illegals to surge to our southern border, or masking up against microscopic pathogens, or forcing experimental vaccines on perfectly healthy young people, or locking down schools and businesses and whole cities and states, or enacting wage and price controls, or letting men compete against women in sports, or telling the cops to give black people space to destroy things when they’re really mad — bad ideas almost always come from the Left.

Finally, it seems, this fundamental truth is catching up to them. As CNN’s resident data analyst Harry Enten pointed out recently, the Democrat Party’s net favorability is currently at a staggering minus 24. For reference, the number was plus-one during the run-up to the 2018 midterms. I mean, does anyone outside of paid staff and immediate family actually like the Democrats and their policies these days?

My guess is not, and so, it seems, is the guess of one Sandy Cortez, the future Democrat presidential candidate who took to the tube over the weekend to yuck it up about those crazy days of yore with Jonathan Karl of ABC News’s “This Week.”

AOC is going to run for president in 2028. Now she’s saying Democrat policies in 2020 era — woke 1 she calls it — were all crazy. Many of us remember being ripped for opposing all these insane policies. Now Dems want to pretend that era never happened. pic.twitter.com/QarcJJNZyD

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) August 9, 2026

“I have a local city councilman,” said AOC to a star-struck Karl, “that has this, uh, uh, saying, ‘Woke 1 was crazy,’ uh hyuck hyuck hyuck hyuck. And I think that what’s important is that we have to assess what a candidate is saying now.”

So: Woke 1 Was Crazy. That’s the new slogan, the new confession, that AOC and her colleagues will be trotting out as a way to breezily distance themselves from their disastrous policy prescriptions of the very recent past — and from the current policy prescriptions of the Democratic Socialists in their midst, like doing away with the Senate, and packing the Supreme Court, and seizing the means of production, and closing the prisons, and defunding the cops, and eliminating Thanksgiving.

“The obvious question for AOC and her allies,” suggests the Manhattan Institute’s Jesse Arm, “is, Which views from ‘Woke 1’ do they actually think were crazy? Sex-change operations for children? Biological men in women’s sports? Race-based discrimination in hiring and admissions? Decriminalizing theft? Refusing to prosecute repeat offenders? Open borders? Debt forgiveness? Banning private health insurance?”

That’s a pretty good laundry list for AOC and her ilk to ponder, and just in the nick of time. For you see, she and her colleagues have seen the polling, and they now realize that the American people have become increasingly repulsed by the Democrats and their ideas.

If they’re going to take the House back from the Republicans, they’ll at least have to stop making voters throw up in their mouths.