“Woke 1.0 was crazy,” progressive Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this month.

Given Ocasio-Cortez’s own record – she previously insisted that some groups “have no choice but to riot,” called for defunding the police and “prison abolition” and used the demeaning term “menstruating person” to describe a woman – the crazy that she speaks of was also her own.

Good on Ocasio-Cortez for acknowledging mistakes. Now can we have some accountability for the vast damage that Woke 1.0 did, not to mention the damage that Woke 2.0 continues to do?

Wokeness, as it commonly came to be known at the start of this decade, wasn’t just an Orwellian linguistic fad or a tedious set of corporate training sessions in cultural sensitivity or wacky policy ideas about addressing racial and socioeconomic inequities. As it was experienced by those on the wrong end of it, it was a system of enforced ideological conformity, policed by social bullying and institutional coercion (or cravenness), which damaged and sometimes even ended reputations, careers and at least one man’s life.

Restitution, if only in the form of honest contrition and perhaps even a public apology, is in order.

Restitution, for instance, for Stan Wischnowski, the top editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, who in 2020 had to resign and issue a grovelling apology for the sin of running an article by the paper’s architecture critic with the headline “Buildings Matter, Too”.

Restitution for Mike Pesca, the host of a popular podcast, “The Gist,” who was suspended indefinitely from his job at Slate for making a case, in an interoffice back and forth, that it may sometimes be permissible for a non-black person to quote a racial slur in narrow contexts.

Restitution, yes, for James Bennet, a former editor of The New York Times′ Opinion section, who was forced from his job after the publication of a controversial guest essay by Republican Senator Tom Cotton calling for the military to be called in to halt looting and violence that emerged during the Black Lives Matter protests.

Restitution for authors, like my friend Richard North Patterson, who has 16 New York Times bestsellers to his name. When he wrote a novel that dealt with racial discrimination and had a black woman as a leading (and wholly sympathetic) character, roughly 20 major imprints rejected it, with several making it clear it was because he was white.

Restitution for every aspiring young fiction writer with the misfortune of being white and male and therefore quietly but efficiently cut out of the game of literary prizes and publication opportunities. As Jacob Savage noted last year in Compact magazine, his research found that at the time, “not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker”.

Restitution, also, in academia.

For Jason Kilborn, a University of Illinois, Chicago, law professor, who was barred from campus and placed on administrative leave after he had used the first letter of two slurs in his civil procedure exam, an affront the Black Law Students Association described as “mental terrorism”. For evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven, who was railroaded out of Harvard University after a TV appearance in which she said that the terms “male” and “female” were scientifically essential even as she insisted that “facts about biology” shouldn’t “prevent us from treating people with respect”.

Restitution for the hapless men who got caught up in a #MeToo maw that made no distinction between Harvey Weinstein-style predation and fumbled romantic advances or unsatisfying hookups. Comedian Aziz Ansari was the most notable victim of this form of public humiliation.

Certain readers of this column will be tempted to rejoin that all this is old history. So is the Red Scare of the 1950s, but that’s no reason to forget about it. Other readers may say that what President Donald Trump and his allies are doing is just as bad as Woke 1.0 or far worse. I’ve denounced them, too, but that’s pure whataboutism.

If liberals want to be serious about standing up for liberty, they have a particular obligation to acknowledge and reject the illiberalism that swept so much of the left in recent years. Any politics of moral certitude and promiscuous demonisation – whether it comes from MAGA on the right or wokeness on the left – isn’t just unfit for a free society.

It’s crazy.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.