Wokeness – the gatekeeper of the new elite

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Musa al-Gharbi
Princeton University Press
Nov. 2024
440 pages
ISBN: 978-0691232607

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Political and social developments during 2024 have led some to speculate that the “Woke” era is over. Donald Trump’s victory over a Democratic candidate who owed her position to race and gender alone – and whose radicalism on transgender issues arguably cost her the election – was the best example of this. Woke is certainly not dead, but it is in retreat. In fact, one brilliant American academic argues that Wokeness barely even existed, given that this social phenomenon was never really about standing up for the disadvantaged.

Musa al-Gharbi’s biography is one of those “only in America” stories. He is mixed-race, raised in a military family in Arizona, a cradle Catholic who converted to Islam (via atheism) and has earned a PhD in one of the most leftist fields (sociology) in one of the most progressive universities (Columbia). His diverse background has probably contributed to the shaping of an outstanding book which hit the shelves in October: We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

This book is not about Donald Trump, but what al-Gharbi saw on the campus of Columbia University in the aftermath of Trump’s shock 2016 win left a lasting imprint on his thinking. Prior to this, he had been disturbed by the “racialised caste system” which existed in New York, where affluent progressives with all the right social views were served by low-paid workers who were usually either minorities and/or immigrants. Then, in November 2016, he witnessed Columbia students – overwhelmingly born of rich parents – arguing that trauma arising from Trump’s victory meant they could not sit exams or complete assignments.

While the university authorities bent over backwards to wipe away bourgeois tears, al-Gharbi perceived that neither the authorities nor the students themselves seemed to care about the low-income workers employed on campus, many of whom were immigrants potentially threatened by Trump’s policies. Rich liberal students were crying, but only for themselves, and nor were they campaigning for better conditions for those workers.

“Nor,” al-Gharbi writes, “were these ignored labourers, the people with the most at stake in this election in the students’ own narratives, saying they needed time off because they were too traumatised. They weren’t painting themselves as victims. Although the classrooms were full of tears on the days that followed, one never saw, say, the janitors making a scene sobbing uncontrollably about politics as they scrubbed rich kids’ mess out of toilets.” This helped to prompt the author to explore the connection between this new economic elite and the various causes which they tend to champion under the wide umbrella term of ‘social justice.’

While We Have Never Been Woke includes an overview of Woke thinking and how it has evolved in line with structural changes in the American economy, the author does not attempt to provide an analytical definition of Wokeness. His aim instead is to ask unsettling questions of his own class and contemporaries. “Symbolic capitalists,” as al-Gharbi calls them, are not the factory owning capitalists of old. In a modern post-industrial society, the rulers look very different.

“[S]ymbolic capitalists are defined first and foremost by how they make a living, non-manual work associated with the production and manipulation of data, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations, organisational structures and operations, art and entertainment, traditions and innovations and so forth. Think academics, consultants, journalists, administrators, lawyers, people who work in finance, tech and so on,” al-Gharbi explains, before adding that Wokeness “can be fruitfully understood as the ruling ideology of this increasingly dominant elite formation.”

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, between around 2010 and 2020, a “Great Awokening” took place in which socially radically views became common among that segment of the American population which is university-educated and left-leaning. From 2011 onwards, a dramatic change can be seen in how white liberal Americans answer polling questions relating to race (such as the degree to which they believed minorities were being discriminated against, or the degree to which they viewed others as racists).

Before the overturning of Roe-v-Wade, American liberals had become more extreme on the issue of abortion, with Democrats showing significantly more opposition to any restrictions on abortion in 2020 compared to 2010. In the cultural or artistic sphere, themes of discrimination became far more common, and there was a marked increase in the percentage of major films which featured LGBT characters, or which had non-white or female leads.

As the author explains, cultural Wokeness serves as a clear dividing line which separates the progressive from the regressive, and the commendables from the deplorables. “Through espousing Woke beliefs, symbolic capitalists – and aspirants to the symbolic professions – demonstrate that they are the kind of people who play ball…. That is, Wokeness is increasingly a means of identifying who is part of the club, and it provides a basis of deeming those who are not part of the club as unworthy of symbolic capital,” the author writes.

The Woke also have a tendency to demonstrate prejudice against those with differing views. As per Patrick Ruffini’s recent work Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP, the core American political divide is now between left-leaning college graduates and right-leaning non-graduates, and it is therefore easy to see why the new elite resents being challenged by those they see as their intellectual and cultural inferiors. All of this helps to explain the phenomenon of cancel culture.

And yet the self-professed Woke activists are not quite as radical in practice as they are in theory. While family structure in more economically deprived areas has grown less stable, marriage remains the norm among symbolic capitalists, who marry among their own class and prosper as a result. Vocal declarations of social liberalism by many in the middle- and upper-class go hand-in-hand with a certain unspoken social conservatism on their own part. “Symbolic capitalists bristle at restrictions on sexuality, insistence on marriage or the stigmatisation of single parents. Their secret, however, is that they encourage their children to simultaneously combine public tolerance with private discipline, and their children then overwhelmingly choose to raise their own children within two-parent families,” al-Gharbi points out. If the reader comes to view much left-wing social activism as hypocritical posturing, they can be excused.

A similar story is told about a range of social causes and protest movements, such as the Occupy Wall Street movement which came about in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. In that case, al-Gharbi suggests that affluent protestors obscured the economic realities of the day by presenting it as a battle of the 99% against the 1% in control, while ignoring the fact that there were major economic divides within that 99% faction.

He describes the various other Awokenings which have occurred in recent American history. The unrest on American campuses in the late 1960s was one major example of this: during this time, affluent American youths flocked to university as a means of avoiding military service in Vietnam, thereby ensuring that poorer youths with fewer options were conscripted instead.

The “Great Awokening” is a term which alludes to the various mass religious revivals which have taken place in America in recent centuries. As a student of religion, al-Gharbi is quick to explore this analogy, and he sees strong evidence that Wokeness is filling a void left by liberal Americans’ declining faith in Christianity, especially the mainline Protestantism which has collapsed precipitously in recent times. “Many of the attitudes and dispositions now associated with Wokeness are derivative of the anti-hierarchical, anti-traditional and anti-communitarian impulses of American Protestantism,” he points out.

Dissatisfaction with the elite’s position within their society is a recurring cause of these Awokenings. One major explanation for the recent upheaval has been what the academic Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction” – the tendency of the society to produce too many elite members (ie, college graduates) for the number of well-paid and high-status job positions which exist. This has likely led to many symbolic capitalists latching onto various fashionable social causes whose progression could conceivably lead to the replacement of the current elites with new ones. For the moment, no actual revolution appears to be on the cards, and so other means of gaining advantage have become common.

Symbolic capitalists are increasingly likely to embrace victimhood for selfish reasons. Senator Elizabeth Warren’s risible claim to be Native American is one example which al-Gharbi cites; the growing number of highly-educated Australians pretending to be Aboriginals is another; yet one more is the study which found that college applicants from families with annual incomes above $100,000 are significantly more likely than poor applicants to claim they had overcome disabilities, mental health challenges or discrimination in their admissions essays.

What triggered al-Gharbi’s interest originally was the economic dimension in all of this. The symbolic capitalists in America’s major metropolitan areas have their economic and social needs (like cheap transportation and food delivery options) catered for by poorly paid workers with few employment rights and scant job security. It disturbs him that so few within the hyper politicised elite are interested in campaigning for their rights.

Ultra-progressive California is highlighted as a classic example of the new socio-economic model: the richest state in the union where one in twelve residents is a millionaire, and simultaneously the state with the highest poverty rate. Other blue states and cities exhibit similar tendencies, and this helps to explain why so many disillusioned low-income workers have gone over to the Republicans.

Near the conclusion, Al-Gharbi rightly suggests that a similar process is at play in other countries and points to France and Britain as examples. Ireland would have been an even better one. It is an economically Americanised and highly-educated society where progressive values are more embedded than anywhere else. Many are employed in well-paid positions in ultra-liberal knowledge industries like tech and pharma. A disastrous decision in the 1990s to make university education free has led to Ireland having the highest rates of third-level education in Europe. While the degrees themselves are often functionally useless, they remain a much-prized status symbol.

Symbolic capitalists are in oversupply, but booming corporation tax receipts are allowing for the massive public spending which is just about glossing over the intractable housing crisis and the growing tensions over large-scale immigration – immigration being necessary to fill the professional vacancies which over-educated and under-skilled Irish graduates cannot or will not consider. Ireland’s next crash will not just be economic (as in 2008), but social and political as well, and understanding Wokeness as a concept helps to explain modern Ireland’s political economy perfectly.

Al-Gharbi’s book makes for essential reading. Without ever even seeking to provide a textbook definition of Wokeness, We Have Never Been Woke proves to be the most profound analysis of this social shift yet published.

It should be regarded as the best book of 2024.