The contradictions of wokeness
Vox
0:00 Hey, it's Sean.
0:01 Today, we're running one of my favorite episodes.
0:04 It's with Musa al-Gharbi.
0:06 He's a professor at Stony Brook University
0:08 and the author of We Have Never Been Woke.
0:11 The book, like the conversation,
0:14 isn't really about the ideology of wokeness, whatever that is.
0:18 It's more about the language and the symbols
0:21 around the movement and how elites have co-opted them.
0:25 Which is to say, this is much more than a superficial critique of woke politics.
0:31 Anyway, it's terrific and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
0:43 There are several terms in our political vocabulary
0:47 that have been stretched to the point of incoherence.
0:50 Marxist and Orwellian spring immediately to mind.
0:55 But at this moment, I'm not sure any term can compete with woke.
1:03 Whether you're on the left or the right, whether you're pro or anti-woke,
1:08 or even if you're not especially political and don't follow this stuff,
1:12 woke is a word you simply cannot escape.
1:16 The problem is that woke has become a catch-all term,
1:20 often deployed in bad faith to smear or dismiss
1:25 anything that has any vague association with progressive politics.
1:30 As a result, anytime you venture into an argument about wokeness,
1:34 it becomes hopelessly entangled in this broader cultural battle.
1:40 However, wokeness is not purely a figment of the reactionary mind.
1:47 Even if we can't quite define it,
1:50 it refers to something actually happening in the world.
1:53 And if we can cut through all the and all the bad faith,
1:57 it's worth understanding what it is and where it comes from.
2:04 I'm Sean Illing, and this is The Gray Area.
2:17 Today's guest is Musa al-Gharbi.
2:19 He's a journalist, a professor at Stony Brook University,
2:23 and the author of a very interesting new book called We Have Never Been Woke:
2:28 The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.
2:32 Musa's book is a serious effort to understand this movement
2:37 and the effects it is having or not having on our society.
2:41 And whether one agrees with all of his conclusions or not,
2:46 it's impossible to read this book and not walk away feeling
2:50 like you know more than you did before you read it.
2:53 So, I invited him on the show to talk about what wokeism means,
2:57 why it's not as new and unprecedented as people think,
3:01 and why the social and economic forces driving it are so complicated.
3:11 Musa al-Gharbi, welcome to the show.
3:13 It's great to be here.
3:14 Thank you so much for having me.
3:16 I'm glad we're finally doing this.
3:18 Um Wokeism is a topic I've mostly avoided on the show.
3:24 Uh not because I don't think it refers to a real thing happening in the world,
3:29 but because most of the discourse around it
3:32 is so tedious and circular and or bad faith.
3:37 Um and if your book was merely a defense of wokeness or an attack on it,
3:43 I don't think I would have invited you on, but it's so much more than that.
3:47 In your mind, what makes it a fresh contribution?
3:51 I think one of the big contributions of the book is
3:55 that it helps contextualize the present moment in a different way.
3:58 It shows that what's happening after 2010 is actually a case of something.
4:03 And in fact, there have been um three other previous awakenings.
4:06 And by comparing and contrasting these cases,
4:08 we can actually get a lot of insight
4:10 into questions like why do these awakenings come about?
4:12 Why do they end?
4:13 Do they change anything?
4:15 Um and and and these kinds of questions,
4:17 instead of trying to just explain things that are happening
4:20 today in terms of other things that are also happening today.
4:23 Um to kind of uh step back and take
4:25 a more kind of structural look at what's happening.
4:28 So, I think that's one of the big values.
4:31 Primarily, what it's trying to do
4:33 is this deep study of contemporary inequalities,
4:36 um how they come about, who benefits from them and how.
4:39 And uh and here I think it makes an important
4:42 contribution as well because especially in symbolic capitalist spaces,
4:47 so spaces like uh higher ed, journalism, and so on.
4:52 Uh when we tell narratives about how various social problems come about
4:56 and persist and so on, the stories that we tell are kind of self-serving.
5:00 And and uh and in particular, we tend to focus on basically uh the millionaires,
5:06 the billionaires, the multinational corporations,
5:08 and also those damn Republicans.
5:10 And it's not like those stories are uh false per se,
5:13 but they're also like really really really incomplete.
5:19 And um and so, part of what I'm trying to do
5:21 in this book is kind of uh is hit those missing notes
5:24 to to show people like even if we want to explain
5:28 the actions of the millionaires
5:29 and the billionaires and the multinational corporations,
5:32 for instance, um it's actually impossible to explain how any
5:37 of the stuff that those actors do actually happens um without us.
5:42 It's with us and through us that they accomplish those goals.
5:45 And then the last contribution, I think,
5:47 is it's a cool study of the political economy of the knowledge professions.
5:52 Uh so, how does the changing kind of power and wealth
5:55 of the symbolic uh professions and the people who take part in them,
5:59 how does that relate to our changing kind of moral
6:03 and political narratives and and our and the ways
6:06 that we behave politically in society
6:08 and our ideological alignments and things like that?
6:11 I want to get into the meat of the case you're making here.
6:16 Let's just do a a little bit of table setting um to ground us.
6:21 And I realize every interviewer uh is probably asking you to define wokeness.
6:31 And in the book you you don't offer a precise definition because it's
6:35 a contested term and like many contested terms it can't be clearly defined.
6:42 However, I do think it will help if you explain why you resisted
6:47 defining it and then at least give me the most general account you
6:53 can of wokeness so that we at least know what we're talking about
6:57 for the rest of this conversation or people know what you're talking about.
7:00 Yeah, absolutely.
7:01 So, uh so the yeah, there's this move in the discourse
7:04 that I think is really unhelpful um that's basically
7:07 like um if you can't provide a crisp analytic definition
7:11 of something then you just don't know what you're talking about.
7:14 Um you're not talking about anything.
7:15 There's no there there.
7:16 It's a moral panic or whatever.
7:18 And um I think that's really bad way to think about how language works.
7:21 Like the idea that we need necessary and sufficient conditions for something
7:26 um in order to understand what it is is just false.
7:29 So, what I don't do in the book is provide that.
7:31 Um but I but I do provide kind of a a rich thick description
7:35 about what people what different stakeholders seem
7:38 to mean when they refer to wokeness.
7:40 And there there's actually a lot of agreement.
7:42 Um there are there are a whole bunch of things that kind of people across
7:45 the political and ideological spectrum seem to have
7:47 in mind when they're talking about this contested term.
7:51 I don't think they cohere into a definition,
7:53 but it is the case that stakeholders
7:55 kind of across the political and ideological spectrum,
7:58 there is a kind of broad zone of agreement of kinds
8:01 of things um that we're talking about when we talk about wokeness.
8:05 And I'll say, during the last period
8:06 of awakening in the late '80s to early '90s,
8:09 uh instead of talking about wokeness, they talked about political correctness.
8:12 But it was um but it was as the very
8:15 like the same constellation of attitudes and dispositions, more or less.
8:19 And um and the dynamics of how that word played
8:22 out in the public uh unfolded in much the same way.
8:25 So, at first, there was a lot of people who
8:28 identified as politically correct in an unironic way to mean,
8:32 my views, my moral and political views are correct.
8:35 Um and uh other people started to associate
8:39 PC culture with this kind of sanctimonious, purely symbolic form of activism.
8:46 And then gradually the right seized upon this dispute within
8:49 the left and started attacking anything they didn't like as PC.
8:53 And uh then it became difficult for anyone
8:56 to associate unironically with the term political correctness,
9:00 and the term political correctness became almost purely a term of derision.
9:04 And even to be politically incorrect took
9:07 on a somewhat positive valency at people like Bill Maher who had a whole show
9:10 um political politically incorrect or something like that.
9:13 And you see the same thing playing out with woke today.
9:16 Um so, uh increasingly, no one self-identifies as woke um in an unironic way.
9:23 Um and so, the same kind of uh dynamic that we saw playing out in the last
9:27 awakening around political correctness is now um playing out
9:31 in a very similar way around the term woke.
9:33 And in the next awakening, um the term woke probably won't be part of it.
9:38 Uh there'll be some probably some other term as this as this one some other
9:42 term that activists use to define themselves
9:44 and their approach to politics and so on.
9:48 Okay, so so we're in the midst of the fourth
9:51 awakening according to you that we've had in this country.
9:54 We There's one in the 20s or 30s.
9:57 There's another one in the 60s.
9:58 There's the one you're just talking about in the 80s, 90s.
10:02 And then this current one.
10:05 What do all these periods have in common?
10:08 What is the thread that ties them together?
10:11 Um the tweet length answer is um that these uh periods
10:16 of awakening happen when there's um when there's a a big
10:21 crisis for elites where they are expecting a certain life and uh
10:26 it seems like they won't be able to live that life.
10:29 One thread that cuts across all four awakenings um is
10:33 that they they tend to occur during these periods of elite overproduction.
10:37 And so um elite overproduction is
10:40 a term that's taken from sociologist Jack Goldstone
10:43 and historian Peter Turchin and it refers
10:45 to a condition where society is producing
10:48 more people that have a reasonable expectation to be elites um than we have
10:53 the capacity to actually give them
10:55 the elite lifestyles and positions that they're expecting.
10:58 So you have growing numbers of people who did everything right.
11:01 They got good grades.
11:03 They went to college.
11:04 They went to the right colleges.
11:05 They studied the right majors.
11:07 And um and they're expecting six-figure salaries and to be
11:10 able to have a uh uh a house and to get
11:12 married and settle down and have kids and a standard
11:14 of living that's close to or better than what their parents experienced.
11:18 And all of a sudden they're not able to do any of that.
11:20 Um when you have growing numbers of people in that kind of a condition,
11:24 what they tend to do is indict the social order that they think failed them
11:28 and try to tear down some of the existing
11:31 elites to make space for people like themselves.
11:33 So, that's at at their core what I argue is happening in in awakenings.
11:38 The The two factors that that cut across all four
11:41 awakenings um are the uh elite overproduction and this other factor,
11:47 uh popular immiseration.
11:48 So, elite overproduction um one reason
11:53 why that's not enough to predict awakenings, why it's it's not sufficient,
11:58 is because um often when elites are having a tough time,
12:04 it's hard to get anyone to care.
12:06 And that's because there's this phenomenon where the fortunes
12:09 of elites and non-elites tend to operate counter-cyclically.
12:13 When elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care.
12:17 No one's breaking out a tiny violin and going, "Oh, poor elite guy.
12:21 He has to live a normal life and get a normal job like everyone else.
12:25 Oh, let me play you a sad song, right?" Um so,
12:28 if times are pretty good for everyone else, but bad for elites, no one cares.
12:31 Um but there are these moments um when the trajectories get collapsed,
12:36 when when things have been kind of bad
12:38 and growing worse for ordinary people for a while,
12:41 and all of a sudden they're bad for a lot of elites, too.
12:44 Those are the moments when awakenings happen because um
12:48 the the frustrated elite aspirants not only have a motive,
12:52 but they also have a means to really mess with the system cuz there's this huge
12:57 base of other people in society who are
12:59 also really frustrated with the way things are going,
13:02 who also have a bone to pick with the people who are kind of running the show.
13:06 And so, they have a more leverage.
13:08 These frustrated elite aspirants have more leverage
13:10 over the system than they otherwise might.
13:12 Let me push on something for a second.
13:14 The case you make in the book is that the elites and you
13:18 and I are technically part of this group because of what we do.
13:21 Like to imagine that we're part of the 99%
13:25 and it's the 1% who are the real elites when in fact it's really the the top 20%
13:31 who are hoarding most of the power and wealth.
13:35 Isn't it true though that like much of what
13:39 you call the symbolic capitalist class that's a term we're
13:42 we're about to define right after this but for now
13:44 let's just say people like me and you and journalists,
13:46 academics, bureaucrats, lawyers,
13:49 corporate management types and so on like most of us
13:52 exist in a kind of parity that is much closer
13:57 to the lived experience of the middle and working classes than
14:00 it is to the tech CEOs or the hedge fund managers.
14:03 You know, you and I have much more in common
14:05 with uh a school teacher or firefighter or a retail
14:09 manager than we do with Mark Zuckerberg or Jay-Z
14:12 or whoever the hell is running Goldman Sachs these days.
14:15 It seems to me that in theory at least there's
14:17 more convergence of interest here than your thesis might suggest.
14:22 What am I missing?
14:23 I mean I think that's definitely how we like
14:25 to think of ourselves um one of the problems
14:29 that we have is that we compare ourselves I
14:31 think too much to people like Mark Zuckerberg and go
14:34 oh well I'm just a normie rather than comparing
14:36 ourselves to norm so I gave I'll I'll give
14:38 you an an example I talk about in the book
14:41 is um when you look at like adjunct professors.
14:45 So adjunct professors relative to tenure line professors are clearly exploited.
14:49 They make a lot less money for doing the same
14:53 kinds of work um they have no say over faculty governance,
14:57 they have really precarious labor contracts,
14:59 they have no academic freedom to speak of as I
15:02 discovered first hand when I did that job.
15:04 I was one, it sucked.
15:06 Uh and um but it's also the case that um
15:10 if you are a full-time adjunct instructor on average
15:13 you make much more than the typical uh American
15:17 worker and you also have much better working conditions,
15:19 you have much higher social status and so on and this is part of the reason
15:23 why people choose to adjunct instead of becoming
15:25 a manager at Waffle House or something,
15:27 is because they don't want to be those people.
15:30 They don't like the idea of working as a manager
15:33 in a Waffle House or something like that.
15:34 They would rather struggle struggle as a as an adjunct uh you know,
15:39 at Berkeley um than to be a shoe salesman um
15:43 they they they don't see themselves in the same boat.
15:45 They don't want to be in the same boat.
15:46 Um they passionately don't want to be in the same boat.
15:49 And and even in terms of um things like culture,
15:53 um in many respects actually we we are closer
15:56 to people like Mark Zuckerberg and and those folks.
15:59 And in fact in increasingly the millionaires
16:01 and the billionaires are drawn from us.
16:02 Anyway, uh Zuckerberg being a great example.
16:05 I would like for instance take take journalists.
16:08 Um so journalism used to be a job
16:10 where you had decent numbers of working class people.
16:13 That's not the case so much anymore.
16:15 Um both because of credential requirements like
16:19 journalists are increasingly focused on um only
16:24 people with college degrees can be journalists
16:26 and especially people who graduate from elite schools.
16:29 And uh and so like in a in a world
16:32 where you need to have a college degree and a college
16:34 degree in the right majors and from the right
16:36 schools in order to be a journalist and in order
16:38 to be a journalist you also have to basically work
16:41 for free in really expensive cities to get your foot
16:43 in the door and so on, then the only people
16:45 who can really be journalists are people who are relatively affluent.
16:48 Um and and that has important implications for the way we do our job.
16:52 Uh so for instance, it's it's holding the elite to account plays out
16:57 much different if the people you're supposed to be holding to account are
17:00 your classmates and your friends and your lovers and your neighbors um versus
17:04 if you have this kind of sociological distance between you and the elites.
17:08 Um And the the perspectives of non-elite people
17:14 are also not particularly present in our institutions.
17:17 So a great example, uh there's a an essay
17:20 by Bertrand Cooper called Who Gets to Create Black Culture.
17:24 And in this essay, he points out,
17:26 like if George Floyd was alive, um after he was killed,
17:30 um you know, he became the New York Times, the Washington Post, HBO, everyone.
17:36 George Floyd, George Floyd, George Floyd.
17:38 If George Floyd hadn't been killed,
17:40 but he wanted to write for the New York Times,
17:42 there's zero chance he would have had to he would
17:44 have had been able to write for the New York Times.
17:46 The New York Times doesn't care what
17:48 people like George Floyd think about anything.
17:50 Um their perspectives uh are not valid.
17:53 Uh they're not valued.
17:54 Uh ironically, George Floyd became someone who mattered
17:57 to us after he became a victim of state violence,
18:01 and we could use his death in our power struggles.
18:03 Until that point, George Floyd and his perspectives don't matter to us.
18:08 People like George Floyd don't matter to us.
18:10 We don't engage with those people.
18:12 We don't uplift their perspectives.
18:14 Um and so, actually, I just don't think it's true that we have a lot
18:17 in common um with ordinary Not only do we not have a lot
18:20 in common with ordinary people in terms of um our interests
18:25 and social networks and things like that, but we don't want to.
18:28 Even when you look at things like our moral and political views,
18:31 our moral and political views and the ways
18:33 that we engage in in politics are far out of step with the way that um the rest
18:39 of Americans talk and think about these social issues,
18:42 but are actually much closer to the ways that millionaires
18:45 and billionaires and those kinds of people talk and think about politics.
18:48 Do you think the New York Times doesn't give
18:51 a about George Floyd until he's been killed by the state,
18:54 or is it that the audience won't pay attention until that's the case?
18:59 I think it's kind of both.
19:00 And part of the reason it's both, actually,
19:02 um I talk about this a bit in the book,
19:04 is that the people who produce and consume
19:06 these um narratives are base are increasingly the same people.
19:10 Um it's the same slice of society that's producing
19:13 almost all of this work in the symbolic professions
19:16 and they're the almost the exact same as the audience
19:18 that's consuming them in terms of where they live,
19:21 the professions they work in, what their values are,
19:24 the kinds of educational background they have, and so on.
19:27 Um, it's this really incestuous relationship increasingly between
19:31 writers and audiences where they're they're virtually identical.
19:33 So, I I I think it's the case that a lot of the writers don't really, um,
19:38 and and editors and stuff don't really have their pulse
19:40 on the their finger on the pulse of normies,
19:42 but I think it's also true that the audience of the New
19:45 York Times doesn't particularly care about normies and their problems, either.
19:48 I think there's just something undeniably true about that.
19:51 You know, there there's a uh a particularly
19:54 depressing section of the book for me, at least,
19:56 where you're talking about how much of what we think of as the discourse,
20:02 non-fiction books, newspapers, journals, magazines,
20:07 is mostly just elites talking to other elites with the pretense that it
20:11 matters to or is even seen by the rest of the country,
20:15 but it really isn't for the most part.
20:17 So, a lot of it is just masturbatory.
20:20 Yeah.
20:20 It matters especially for the work that's trying to understand and mitigate,
20:26 um, social problems, um, because a lot of the people that we're trying
20:30 to help are just not part of the conversation.
20:33 So, this would be a good time to explain this term symbolic capitalism.
20:38 Because the thing people are constantly puzzling over is that the elites
20:44 in our society who benefit most from the systemic inequalities,
20:49 mostly highly educated white liberals,
20:53 are also the ones most exercised about all of these inequalities.
20:59 Now, this appears to be a contradiction on the face of it,
21:01 but it's really not for you, right?
21:03 Like, this is just a game symbolic capitalist play with each other.
21:08 It's not just a game.
21:10 So, so one of the ways I think the discourse sometimes goes
21:13 awry is that there's this kind of narrative tendency that we have
21:18 where we think if we can expose that someone is has an interest
21:21 in doing something or believing something that they must not be sincere.
21:26 Right.
21:26 Um not true.
21:27 Yeah, and I think that's a bad way of thinking
21:29 about thinking because our cognitive and perceptual systems I argue are
21:32 kind of fundamentally geared towards perceiving and thinking about the world
21:37 in ways that enhance our interests and further our goals.
21:40 And if we take that research seriously,
21:42 then we could we would see that there's actually not a contradiction between
21:46 sincerely believing something and also mobilizing
21:50 that belief in the service of yourself interest.
21:53 In fact, if you had an interest in believing something,
21:55 you would believe it even more sincerely.
21:58 And you would probably try to get other people to believe it as well.
22:01 I just take it for granted that when we say we want the poor to be uplifted,
22:06 that we want people who are marginalized and disadvantaged
22:08 in society to live lives of dignity and inclusion.
22:12 I don't think we're being insincere about that.
22:14 But that's not our only sincere commitment.
22:16 We also sincerely want to be elites.
22:18 Which is to say we think that our voice
22:22 and our our preferences should matter more than
22:25 the person checking us out at Stop& Shop
22:27 or the gas station attendant when we fill up the tank.
22:32 We think that we should have a higher standard of living
22:35 than someone who's flipping burgers at McDonald's or selling shoes at Dillard's.
22:41 We strongly want our children to reproduce
22:43 or have an even stronger social position than ourselves.
22:46 And so these drives are in fundamental tension though.
22:48 Like the drive to be an egalitarian and the drive
22:51 to be an elite don't sit easily with each other.
22:53 You can't really be an egalitarian social climber.
22:57 Right?
22:58 And and and this kind of tension um
23:01 has been with the symbolic capitalist from the beginning.
23:04 It it's it's attention that kind of defines
23:07 our our this elite constellation from the beginning through the present.
23:11 Um, so yeah, I don't think it's a lack of sincerity.
23:13 I think it's just that we have these other sincere drives and this desire
23:17 to be elite when they do come into conflict as they often do.
23:21 So, symbolic capitalist are aligned pretty
23:26 disproportionately with the political left for reasons
23:30 you you you can explain and you you certainly do it in the book.
23:34 But, you also write that at bottom the anti-woke
23:38 and the woke actually subscribe to the same fundamental worldview.
23:44 I'd love for you to explain why that is because I think it's important.
23:48 Yeah.
23:47 Um, so so one of the things that's true of both the woke and the anti-woke
23:53 crowd is that they um they both think that things like symbols and and rhetoric,
23:59 and beliefs, and hearts, and minds,
24:01 and um things like the names on buildings, and uh you know,
24:07 what kinds of things um are taught to like that these kinds of struggles
24:12 over culture and symbols and rhetoric and so
24:14 on are like the most important things.
24:17 More important than a lot of bread and butter issues
24:19 that normal people um have to deal with in their day-to-day life.
24:23 Um, like a lot of the anti-woke people describe wokeness
24:28 as this kind of major threat to the to Western civilization,
24:32 to the prevailing order.
24:33 Like they're they're also engaged in this kind
24:35 of cosmic struggle in their minds.
24:37 Um, and so their their ways of thinking about the world
24:41 and politics are not not much different than the people they're criticizing.
24:45 As I show in the and I also argue later
24:47 in the book that um one one thing that you see,
24:52 one of the big impacts of awakenings,
24:55 um they don't tend to change much in terms of allocations
24:58 of resources for the genuinely disadvantaged in society and so on.
25:02 They don't tend to help the wretched of the earth in a meaningful durable way.
25:06 Um, one thing that does tend to happen though is that uh these moments
25:12 of awakening tend to devolve into culture
25:15 wars and they result in these non-trivial gains
25:18 for the right typically at the ballot box and then often the creation uh
25:25 uh alternative knowledge economy infrastructures um and uh
25:31 kind of durable mistrust of mainstream institutions.
25:35 Okay, so why does this happen?
25:37 So during these periods of awakening um symbolic capital is shift a lot.
25:42 Like the ways that we engage in politics,
25:43 the way we think about things and so on shift in these really radical ways.
25:48 And so the gap between us and everyone else gets bigger than it normally is.
25:53 Um, and we we recognize that and we assume often that it's
25:56 because those people are growing more racist or sexist or whatever,
25:59 but actually when you look at the trend lines um they're not.
26:02 It's that we've shifted a lot while they've been pretty steady.
26:05 Um, but so the gap gets bigger and people care about it more.
26:09 And they care about the gap more because
26:11 we become more militant during these periods of villainizing
26:15 and demonizing and mocking and trying to censor
26:18 and so on anyone who disagrees with us.
26:20 So people notice this gap more because we're becoming
26:23 more confrontational uh towards people that we disagree with.
26:26 And so this this gap and the fact that people care about the gap more,
26:30 it creates an opportunity for like
26:32 right aligned political entrepreneurs to basically
26:35 campaign by running against us by bringing people like us under control.
26:40 Narratives start to circulate like oh well the mainstream media
26:44 is just a propaganda arm for the Democratic Party or uh
26:48 colleges and universities are in the business now of just
26:51 indoctrinating young people rather than
26:53 teaching them useful knowledge and skills.
26:55 And so, um there tend to be these kind of movements
26:58 by right-aligned political folks then to campaign against people like us,
27:01 and you usually see efforts to curb our autonomy,
27:05 cut lines of funding, and things like that.
27:07 Uh and you also see the creation of these alternative infrastructures.
27:11 So, after the awakening of the 1960s and '70s,
27:13 for instance, there was a perception that higher ed was lost.
27:17 Can't fix it.
27:18 It's just captured.
27:19 It's cap It's ideologically captured.
27:21 And so, what did people do?
27:23 Well, they launched these right-aligned think tanks starting
27:25 with the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation and so on.
27:28 And then, um in the late '80s, early '90s,
27:31 there was a perception that the media was lost.
27:33 Um and so, what did they do?
27:35 They launched Fox News in the aftermath of the Third Great Awakening.
27:37 Um and then finally, uh in the current moment, you see these moments to uh like
27:44 Elon Musk trying this anti-woke takeover of Twitter,
27:47 Donald Trump trying to launch Truth Social.
27:50 And the thing about it is, these alternative knowledge economy infrastructures,
27:55 they have an existential stake.
27:57 Like, the way they make money, the way they keep viewers,
28:00 is by sowing consistent mistrust in mainstream institutions.
28:03 So, Fox News, their bread and butter is all day,
28:07 every day telling people the mainstream media is lying to you.
28:10 They don't care about people like you.
28:12 They don't share your values.
28:13 They're not giving you the whole story.
28:15 Like, that's how they make money.
28:16 They're all day, every sowing trust in mainstream institution
28:19 in order to capture part of our market share.
28:21 And um And so, to the extent that we created an opportunity,
28:26 um a market for these alternative infrastructures because
28:30 of the ways that we conduct ourselves during awakenings,
28:33 um one consequence of that tends to be kind of durable mistrust
28:37 and kind of reduced influence in a in a in a long-term way.
28:40 We live with the consequences of that for a long time.
28:43 Right.
28:44 And another consequence is that um
28:46 the power structure basically remains the same.
28:52 Yeah.
28:52 Can you steelman the case for a minute at least for what we're calling
28:58 wokeness as something potentially more materially significant
29:01 than maybe we're giving it credit for, right?
29:03 Is there a politics is downstream of culture argument
29:07 that the focus on symbolism and representation and the and the rest
29:11 of it will create the kinds of cultural changes today
29:15 that will lead to concrete material improvements in people's lives tomorrow?
29:20 Or have you seen enough historical evidence to suggest that just doesn't happen?
29:25 By a lot of measures, like things like black-white income gaps,
29:29 mass incarcerate like a lot of these kinds of social problems that people
29:32 were uh upset about in the 1960s are the same or worse today.
29:37 Um Now, that said, I do think that there are some
29:41 ways in which society and culture change um that are just beneficial.
29:47 Um And that are sometimes these changes are kind of orthogonal to the In fact,
29:51 they're typically orthogonal to the great awakenings,
29:53 but they are sometimes changes that were done by symbolic capitalists,
29:57 sometimes in between awakenings, so not during the awakenings,
29:59 but like but like actual good uh things
30:03 that have happened in institutions that we should celebrate.
30:05 So, for instance, one of the things that bugs me out
30:09 in a lot of the conversations around DEI and uh uh you know,
30:15 merit in higher ed is that um there's this kind
30:19 of wild ahistorical narrative that seems to be at play.
30:23 So, people will say things like the implicit argument is like back in the day,
30:28 we used to make decisions based on things like
30:30 their people's merit for hiring and promotion in academia,
30:34 and today we pay so much attention to things like identity.
30:37 And it's like and that's kind of a ridiculous ahistorical argument.
30:42 So, until somewhat recently in in um US history, um,
30:46 pretty much the only people who could
30:47 be professors were like straight white men, especially WASP men.
30:53 Um, and there were, if you were black,
30:56 if you were a woman, if you were like explicitly gay,
31:00 if you were, uh, even Jewish in many cases, um,
31:04 then you you were not eligible, um, to be a professor.
31:08 And it wasn't even it wasn't even hidden, no one was ashamed of this.
31:11 Like these were jobs for for WASP men.
31:15 Um, a lot of jobs weren't even it wasn't until the 1990s.
31:19 The 1990s, um, when departments were actually forced to conduct
31:24 open searches and list their their open positions publicly.
31:28 Until that time, people would just give
31:30 lifetime appointments to people in their network,
31:33 um, and with no competition, meritocratic or otherwise.
31:38 And so, before during this period, the good old days, uh,
31:42 it was definitely the case where when the only people who
31:45 could even be considered for a job were straight white men,
31:49 that no one talked about race, gender,
31:51 or sexuality in hiring and promotion decisions.
31:54 Cuz why would you?
31:55 What was there to talk about?
31:56 Um, but that didn't mean that hiring and promotion wasn't identity based.
32:00 It was more identity based.
32:01 You had to belong to this very specific slice
32:03 of society to even be considered for the job.
32:06 So, to say that that's not identitarian is wild.
32:09 It was only when we stopped taking for granted
32:12 that the profess that professors were straight white men,
32:15 that the question of who does get to become
32:17 a professor and in virtue of what becomes a live question.
32:21 Well, well, can't we also say to the extent that what you just said is true,
32:24 and it is, that is, in fact,
32:28 a victory of these sorts of social and cultural movements
32:31 that did produce an actual change in society that was materially significant.
32:36 Yeah, I mean I frankly uh like the upshot is
32:40 that hiring and promotion today is actually much more standardized,
32:44 it's much more transparent,
32:46 it's much more um metrics focused than basically it ever has been.
32:51 But the thing about it is a lot
32:53 of these changes um again they weren't necessarily
32:55 the the product of awakenings and and you can
32:58 see this for a lot of other positive changes.
32:59 So Colleen Eren, a colleague of mine who's a sociologist,
33:04 she has this great book on the First Step Act.
33:06 So the First Step Act was um for for readers who are not immediately familiar,
33:11 it was one of the most significant pieces of criminal justice reform
33:14 that had been published in um that had been passed into law in decades.
33:18 And um as Colleen shows in this book,
33:21 the passage of the First Step Act was created
33:24 through this careful process of consensus building across Democrats,
33:28 Republicans, all these community organizations and legislators,
33:32 there's this kind of gradual consensus building effort that took decades
33:37 even before Black Lives Matter and the Great Awakening and all
33:40 of this kind of stuff in in conservative and Republican spaces there
33:44 was growing awareness that there were problems in the criminal justice system.
33:47 So it happened to get signed into law
33:49 under President Trump during the Great Awakening,
33:51 but it wasn't caused by the Great Awakening and in fact
33:54 um because it happened to get signed into law during
33:58 this period of heightened contestation over social justice um and there
34:04 were a lot of symbolic capitalists who were kind of hot dogging,
34:07 striking these really um extreme positions that were out of step both with what
34:13 most most of the people were trying to help what like defund the police,
34:18 close all the prisons and so on.
34:20 um that this this long period of decades long consensus building was
34:25 destroyed by the way that symbolic
34:27 capitalists conducted herself during the Great Awakening.
34:29 And so rather than the First Step Act being like the the um
34:33 a a a cornerstone upon which to build other criminal justice reform.
34:38 It it actually basically limped across the finish line and there hasn't
34:41 been much change other than that, which is to say there are
34:45 good things that happen that symbolic capitalists often take part in, uh
34:48 but but they tend to be orthogonal to these periods of great awakening.
34:51 If anything, often the periods of great
34:53 awakening end up messing up um social reform
34:57 movements that are already underway for a whole
34:59 host of reasons I discuss in the book.
35:02 You know as well as I do that anti-wokeism
35:05 has become its own little cottage industry on the right.
35:09 With the caveat that we obviously can't control what bad faith
35:14 actors do with our work once it's out in the world.
35:17 Do you worry about this book being misinterpreted
35:22 and perhaps adopted as a cudgel in the culture war?
35:27 Yeah, I talk about this in the in the book.
35:29 Um that that one of the perennial joys and terrors of putting ideas out
35:34 in the world is after a while they cease to be yours to control.
35:37 I worry about that as much as anyone else, but I you know,
35:40 my what I tried to focus on for this book
35:42 was trying to answer the questions that I had as kind
35:45 of fully and comprehensively and kind of fairly as possible
35:51 and kind of let the politics um play out how they do.
35:55 That I you know, that's not my job.
35:57 Um but I That said, I also tried I think the a lot of the anti-woke uh
36:02 kind of cultural warriors going to have a tough
36:04 time uh really uh mobilizing the book the way
36:07 they might hope uh both because um it has a lot of very uh critical things
36:13 to say about uh the anti-woke kind of people
36:17 and and the game that they're playing as well.
36:19 I apply a very symmetrical lens
36:20 to understanding them and their behaviors and actions.
36:23 Um and the book also um you know, the the reality is a lot of work like in queer
36:31 theory or critical race theory
36:33 or feminist standpoint epistemology or post-colonial theory.
36:36 Like these modes of scholarship, um, deeply informed my own thinking including
36:41 on these questions about power and, uh,
36:44 ideology and how they relate to each other.
36:46 In a deep sense, what the book is
36:47 doing is taking the arguments from these literatures,
36:51 um, to what I perceive to be their logical conclusion,
36:54 which should lead us to ask, uh,
36:56 of of our of our own ostensibly emancipatory ideologies,
37:01 whether or not they might also reflect our class interests,
37:03 whether or not they actually represent the values
37:06 and interests of the people that we're trying to help,
37:09 and whether or not like there's no there's no reason to think
37:12 that our own belief systems are exempt a lot of these other related literatures,
37:16 and not to villainize them or mock them or demean them,
37:19 but in fact to show how they can be valuable.
37:22 Um, and so in this and a lot of other ways, I think the book is,
37:25 um, not easily digestible into the cultural
37:29 wars in the ways that people might hope.
37:31 You said something a second ago and I'm glad you did.
37:34 Um, because I wouldn't normally mention this.
37:37 I This is not in my little prep doc I have on hand,
37:42 but it's relevant and you gestured to it just
37:45 a second ago and you also address it in the book.
37:47 So, I'm going to broach it here.
37:50 You're a black Muslim American challenging some of the orthodoxies on the left
37:57 and the right and there's this thing that often happens on the left and I don't
38:02 like it where whenever a black person has
38:05 views that aren't doctrinaire or or that aren't
38:08 the views a white progressive thinks a black person is supposed to have,
38:12 they get dismissed or attacked and I think you even say
38:15 in the book that you're emphasizing your blackness and the influence
38:20 of black scholarship on the book to push readers
38:23 to listen to you in a way they might otherwise not.
38:27 What is it that you want those readers
38:28 in particular to hear that they might otherwise not?
38:32 Yeah, so um so it's yeah, so the the thing that they need to hear
38:38 um is that the values and interests of of people
38:45 like us are often out of step with those of the people that we want to help.
38:50 Our our views of politics,
38:51 the solutions that we have to social problems, the you know,
38:55 are often out of step with what other people want
38:57 and and need in some ways and often ways that cause them harm.
39:01 So, quick example.
39:05 I was at a conference on political polarization.
39:07 They had four black people taking
39:09 part in this conversation alongside the whites.
39:13 And um uh the the four of us there was me who's half white.
39:19 There was two Afro-Caribbean folks and then
39:22 there was someone who was Kenyan and Nigerian.
39:25 So not one person uh in the out
39:28 of the four black people who were part of this panel,
39:30 not one person was a mono-racial non-immigrant black person.
39:34 They're the overwhelming majority of America of America's black population.
39:38 They were nowhere represented on this panel
39:41 setting aside the class dimension of it, but even just looking at ethnicity,
39:45 we were not even ethnically remotely representative of blacks in America.
39:49 And um in that panel while unrepresentative of black America was perfectly
39:57 representative of how almost all
39:59 of the spokespeople in symbolic capitalist spaces are.
40:03 Almost all of the black spokespeople in symbolic capitalist spaces
40:07 are either mixed-race or or or uh recent immigrant black heritage.
40:14 And um and the few exceptions to that rule tend to be people who are themselves
40:19 like from really relatively affluent backgrounds.
40:22 Um and so the and so the problem
40:25 with turning to people like myself to understand
40:30 like how all black America thinks is just
40:33 that we're not a representative of black America.
40:35 Our experiences are not the same.
40:37 Our challenges are not the same.
40:39 Our values and interests are often very different from the modal black American.
40:43 If you look at the modal black American, um you know,
40:47 black people in America vote overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party,
40:50 but not because they're super liberal.
40:52 They're some of the most culturally conservative folks in the Democratic block.
40:56 And in fact, this is one of the big problems that a lot
41:00 of institutions have when they try to promote diversity and inclusion is
41:05 that um we often create these spaces that are really hostile towards traditional
41:13 or socially conservative or religious views
41:15 in the name of diversity and inclusion,
41:18 but the people who are most affected by that are
41:20 people who are already underrepresented in these spaces.
41:23 The kinds of people who are already the dominant population,
41:26 so relatively affluent,
41:27 highly educated background, urban and suburban white people and so on.
41:31 The people who dominate these institutions demographically
41:34 also tend to share the dominant ideologies.
41:37 They're products of the same kinds of childhoods and institutions and and so on.
41:41 Um if you look at the Americans who
41:44 are most likely to self-identify as anti-racists, as feminists,
41:47 as allies to LGBTQ people, as environmentalists and so on, it's highly educated,
41:52 relatively affluent, urban and suburban white people.
41:56 Um and so if we create an environment that if you're not those things,
42:00 you're going to be suppressed
42:01 or villainized or socially sanctioned and whatever,
42:04 the people who are going to be most adversely
42:05 affected by that are going to be non-traditional students,
42:08 rural students, less affluent students, immigrants,
42:12 uh non-white students, religious minority students, and so on.
42:15 So, we do we we do all of these policies in the name
42:18 of diversity and inclusion that are often
42:20 devastating for the people we want to help.
42:23 Well, look, I'm not going to ask you to solve all of our political problems.
42:28 Um but I guess I am curious what you think
42:33 or what you see on the other side of this awakening.
42:36 I mean, our our politics feel pretty dysfunctional right now.
42:39 It feels pretty stuck and hopelessly polarized.
42:44 Um do you have any reason based on how these previous eras have played
42:50 out to think we might end up in a healthier place after all this?
42:56 So, in the book, I talk about how there are
42:58 these things that are very much the same across the awakenings.
43:02 Uh but there are also a couple of things
43:04 that are different um that are different in an important way.
43:07 Like, there's this for all the parts of the awakening that's cyclical,
43:11 there is actually this set of trend lines
43:14 that I think matters a lot for thinking
43:15 through what the legacy of this awakening might
43:17 be and what the next one might look like.
43:19 One thing that I think is importantly
43:21 different that has been increasingly different each awakening
43:25 is that the share of Americans who
43:27 take part in the symbolic professions has changed.
43:30 So, in the 1920s, at the time of the first great awakening,
43:33 symbolic capitalists were like 3% of workers.
43:36 Um uh and uh now it's about a third of workers.
43:40 And so, still a minority, not close to a majority, um but a really big minority.
43:46 And that matters.
43:47 That matters because when you're only 3% of a population,
43:51 you can't just write off the rest of America.
43:53 If you're a third of all workers though,
43:55 and you tend to be the most affluent workers
43:58 and you're concentrated in these very particular communities and you're
44:00 taking part in these really interconnected institutions like academia
44:04 and the the sphere and policy-making circles and so on.
44:09 Um then it actually is you can you absolutely can.
44:12 So you can just totally write off the values
44:14 of most of America and make money hand over fist.
44:16 You can be a political party that increasingly
44:19 alienates or is increasingly distant um from mainstream America.
44:25 And you can win lots of elections of national um city elections,
44:30 state elections um all across the country, be flush with funds,
44:34 and and even be competitive on the national
44:36 stage if you can just get enough normies um to kind of get along with you
44:40 in addition to to your kind of core constituency.
44:43 Um And so uh and so one of the things that's become
44:47 increasingly the case uh that's been different from a wakening to a wakening
44:51 is that um symbolic capitalists have been a larger share of the uh
44:57 overall workforce and uh more resources have been consolidated in our hands.
45:02 And as a result of that, we have a lot more autonomy um
45:05 from the rest of the public in a way that is sometimes pernicious.
45:10 And more broadly, I just think that some of the current um bifurcation we
45:15 see between us and most most of the rest of society is probably not sustainable.
45:21 I think um one of the things that you see very clearly is that growing
45:27 shares of Americans feel like they don't have
45:29 a voice or a stake in our institutions.
45:31 They think that their values are not represented in our institutions.
45:34 And in fact, they think that our institutions
45:37 are hostile to towards their interests.
45:39 And there's lots of research in the United
45:42 States and around the world that suggests
45:44 that when people feel that way what they
45:47 do is they try to burn down those institutions.
45:50 They try to marginalize them, defund them,
45:53 um delegitimize them, and and otherwise burn them down.
45:57 And that's a very rational response.
45:59 And and it it doesn't matter what the institution is.
46:01 If you don't have a voice or a stake in it,
46:03 and you think it's committed to the destruction of people like you,
46:06 why would you not resist it?
46:08 It would be crazy to actually conspire with that institution
46:12 towards the your own destruction and immiseration, right?
46:15 You would of course resist it.
46:16 That's the natural normal thing to do.
46:17 And it doesn't matter what that institution is.
46:20 So often symbolic capitalists, when we when we're met with distrust,
46:24 when we're met with this kind of resistance,
46:27 um we pathologize it as like for instance anti-intellectualism.
46:32 And um instead of uh really reckoning in a serious
46:36 way with the fact that a lot of people feel,
46:39 not wrongly in many cases, that they don't have a voice or a stake,
46:43 that people like us look down on people like them,
46:45 that people like us are actively hostile towards people like them,
46:48 that we write off their suffering, and we actually hope in many cases,
46:52 that their suffering continues or grows worse,
46:54 because they think the wrong things or say the wrong
46:56 things or vote for the wrong people, and so on.
46:59 And um and so I think this kind
47:01 of this this bifurcation is not sustainable in the long term.
47:06 Something's going to give one way or another, and I hope that um you know,
47:11 it it gives in a uh I hope that we can make
47:14 choices that allow something to give in a way that's not highly destructive.
47:20 I do want to say that I think this book is
47:23 as intellectually honest as a book on this topic could possibly be.
47:29 And for that reason, I think it's a it's a it's
47:31 a genuinely worthwhile contribution to this conversation.
47:37 So I I commend you for that.
47:38 Thank you so much.
47:39 Uh thank you.
47:41 Once again, the book is called We Have Never Been Woke:
47:44 The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.
47:48 Musa al-Gharbi.
47:49 Thank you.
47:50 It's it's been great.
47:50 Thank you for for having me.
48:03 All right.
48:03 I hope you enjoyed this conversation.
48:06 You know I did, but as always, we want to know what you think.
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48:25 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey and Travis Larchuk.
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