The rightward shift in public opinion that carried Donald Trump back into the White House is being widely interpreted as a backlash against the "Great Awokening" of the past decade — a surge in radical progressive activism around social justice issues that featured a number of extreme and unpopular positions ("defund the police," "abolish ICE," support for Hamas after the October 7 attacks, etc.). In his new book We Have Never Been Woke, Stony Brook University sociologist and Niskanen Center senior fellow Musa al-Gharbi argues that this is only the latest in a series of "awokenings" over the past century. In each case, he contends, the focus was more on competition within the growing ranks of "social capitalists" (i.e., knowledge workers) than on the plight of the poor and marginalized — and the net impact consisted more in stoking backlash than in actually driving progress. On this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, host Brink Lindsey sits down with al-Gharbi to discuss his new book, reviewing the rise of "symbolic capitalists" to economic and cultural dominance and analyzing the dynamics that have led to the poisonous politics of the present day.
Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody. It's good to be back. For the past six months or so this site has been on hiatus as I've been busy writing a book. Not just any book, but a book called The Permanent Problem, based on the essays published on this Substack hopefully to be published by Oxford University Press in the fall of this year. You could say that the Substack was on maternity leave - it's been birthing a child – but maternity leave is over, at least for now. Today I'm delighted to be joined by Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University and a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center, and author of the excellent new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Although we're colleagues at Niskanen, you're not on staff and I'm on the other side of the planet, so this is our first time to ever chat together. Musa, nice to meet you and delighted to have you on the program.
Musa al-Gharbi: It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Lindsey: There's so much we could talk about. The book is very rich, there's a lot going on in it. There's a lot of different jumping off points for diving into different aspects of your argument and analysis, but I want to focus on how your book interacts with the themes of this Substack – the ironies and dysfunctions of mass affluence, of which what you're talking about, I think, is one component in a larger picture. I want to situate your book's argument in the context of the larger society and economy's development. We'll talk about what the title means in a bit, but I want to start with the subtitle, Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. The book is an extended and relentless puncturing of the moral pretensions and self-image of a major component of America's socioeconomic elite, a group you refer to as symbolic capitalists. This group has been given a bunch of different names over the years, the new class, the professional and managerial class, or PMC, symbolic analysts, knowledge workers. Why symbolic capitalists and what is symbolic capital?
al-Gharbi: I'm disinclined in general to coin neologisms. I would prefer, if possible, to just rely on existing terms for things. The problem is a lot of the terms, as you noted, refer to this elite constellation as a class. And they're not really a class in the traditional sense, in part because within almost all of these professions there's this major divide between some people who have just a ton of pay, autonomy, prestige, security, and so on, and then this other group of people who has much less pay, much less prestige, much less autonomy - they're mostly executing other people's vision and so on. In academia for instance, this would be the divide between a tenure-line professor and an adjunct, or in newsrooms it would be the staff and the interns, or in the tech world there's a lot that's done with seasonal help people who aren't full employees of the company but do most of the work.
Lindsey: Within this cultural formation, there's a great deal of economic and status inequality.
al-Gharbi: Yeah. Although it's important to note that even the people who are on the bottom rung of symbolic capitalists tend to make more money, have more prestige, better jobs, better working conditions and so on than the typical American worker. Oftentimes people who are in the bottom sector of the knowledge professions will look at people at the top sector and go, oh, well, I'm poor, because they're looking at people who are doing much better than them rather than how the normal worker lives. -
Lindsey: With whom they rarely interact…
al-Gharbi: Yeah. And they have very little knowledge or understanding about how the rest of America actually lives. And this is the problem, and so their comparison point is just an inaccurate comparison point for them understanding their social position correctly.
Lindsey: You wanted to highlight symbolic capital. Where does that term come from and why do you want to focus on that?
al-Gharbi: Symbolic capital is the term from a different sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu. And in his formulation, symbolic capital are the resources that elites draw on to make inequality seem normal or appropriate or fair. He came up with a few different types of symbolic capital, but for my purposes just as an abridged thing, the reason I call them symbolic capitalists, the reason I call us, I guess, symbolic capitalists is that the primary way we make a living is through what we know, who we know, and how we're known. That is by cultivating and leveraging various forms of symbolic capital on behalf of ourselves and other people.
Lindsey: Right. Although the idea that you have a higher non-commercial calling comes up regularly in this group of people, still this group of people is larger than that. You've got managers, middle managers in corporate America, they're symbolic capitalists, they're managing organizational capital, the corporation’s culture and processes, and frequently these days that can be a lot more valuable than plant and equipment. They are important symbolic capitalists, but they're maybe less prone to this, unlike professionals and academics and journalists, they don't have this non-commercial orientation towards a higher professional calling, but there's still similarities enough that you bunch them all together.
al-Gharbi: Just briefly for listeners, so symbolic capitalists as a shorthand, think of people who work in fields like media, academia, finance and consulting, management, HR and so on. People who are not providing physical goods and services to people.
Lindsey: Right.
al-Gharbi: It's the case that a lot of our professions, like journalists – journalists are supposed to speak truth to power and be a voice for the voiceless. Academics are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads and to tell the truth without regards to anyone's political and economic interests and so on. So a lot of our professions are explicitly defined in terms of altruism. But even some of the other ones for which that's less common, or where the associations less immediately come to mind. If you look at the Annals of Management journals or some of the codes for management associations and things like this, they also tend to really define themselves in altruistic ways. Although one slight difference is that it's widely understood that the purpose of a manager is typically to help firms make more money, which is a little bit different than some of the other professions.
Lindsey: But it can get sugarcoated a lot?
al-Gharbi: Yeah, absolutely.
Lindsey: You've got the rise of this new elite, it's a function of economic development of capitalism as the economy and gets richer. It complexifies the division of labor, gets more specialized. It creates more occupations. A number of these occupations, more and more of these occupations, feature mastery of specialized bodies of expertise. That's what's happening. We've had this creation of this new elite growing out of economic processes and-
al-Gharbi: Starting in the period in between World War I and World War II and this accelerating after the 1960s.
Lindsey: Sure, yes, that's right. You can go back to the late 1800s with the emergence of big corporation and the first managers, and then in the early 20th century you start seeing the wave of professionalization and the creations of law schools and medical schools and all of that. And so these people have real economic value. Since the switch in the '50s and '60s away from a manufacturing-based industrial economy to a service and information-based information economy, that has further accentuated the relative value of people like us. That the relative economic rewards for nerds and for people who know a lot of stuff and for people who are good with abstraction and with symbolic manipulation, the market has rewarded those skills in this new economy, the new post-industrial economy.
On top of that, you have a fair amount of rent seeking and opportunity hoarding, and we can talk about that. But still, there's an underlying economic elevation that is justified by the contribution to economic production. But everybody's got a will to power, everybody wants to feather the nest further. And there's great attractions to professionalizing your occupation, to setting standards, to distinguishing your elite group of professionals from the riff-raff who are selling junk. And ultimately maybe you can get a professional licensing scheme legislated so you can control entry into your occupation and further boost your income. There's all kinds of higher status and rewards that go with professionalizing. Even if you don't do licensing, you just create a brand image that justifies a higher fee. And a big part of that professionalizing is these strategies of self-justification or also for rationalization. You have a real interest in cultivating a social conscience and connecting your occupation and its privileges with a higher good. And so that's the dynamic that you chart?
al-Gharbi: Yeah. And there are a couple ways, as you noted, that you can see that the current position of symbolic capitalists is not purely a function of market forces, although it's heavily a function of market forces. One way in which you can see exceptions is that, in part, these professions were created as sinecures for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant men and a lot of people who weren't that were explicitly excluded from a lot of these professional organizations and professional jobs until somewhat recently. But even setting that aside, one of the things that's striking is when you look at some of the data, it looks like the number of people who are interested in becoming knowledge economy professionals who have credentials and so on, are growing pretty rapidly even as the share of the jobs have not grown as rapidly. And so typically what you might expect if you have a really high supply of workers and a relatively low number of opportunities for them, then you would see their salaries and wages going down because it would be a buyer's market for this labor.
On the flip side, when you look at service jobs, so people providing care for seniors or working at McDonald's and things like this, a lot of companies are actually having a hard time even hiring enough staff for those jobs. What you might expect, given the dynamics on that side is that the pay and salary for service workers would be increasing rapidly, certainly more rapidly than knowledge economy workers. In fact, what you see is the opposite. Our pay and salary is increasing much more rapidly than other workers, despite an overproduction of people who are interested in these fields, whereas service workers wages seem to be being artificially suppressed to our benefit so that we can consume those services, but in a way that's out of step with the fact that there are in fact labor shortages in a number of these fields. And so you can see that there are these distortions in the market that seem to be a product of how we conduct ourselves…
Lindsey: Steve Teles and I wrote a book, The Captured Economy, which I think you might cite in your book, which is-
al-Gharbi: I do, absolutely.
Lindsey: ... like your book, a sustained attack on the book's likely audience. We have these four case studies, which we thought of as escalating aggression against our audience. We started with finance and IP, and of course there would be some readers in those fields. Then we moved on to licensing, and you got a lot of doctors and lawyers who read books like this. But then finally was land use, and so everybody in a NIMBY suburb that reads books like this. Likewise, you've set out to talk unflatteringly about the very people who are going to read your book –so hats off to pulling that off.
I want to get into this association between this elite strategy of self-justification and what we call wokeism. What you refer to as woke. A fairly radical and censorious commitment to social justice, a tendency to see almost everything through the lens of oppression, a view of oppressor and oppressed as a central category for understanding how society works and that a whole lot of other things going on, ideologies and principles, and so forth are really just masks for the people on top to keep their boots on the neck of the people at the bottom in various different ways. And in particular, a focus on invidious discrimination against people who are in one way or another outside of the early 20th century socioeconomic mainstream, women, minorities-
al-Gharbi: Disabled people, LGBT people.
Lindsey: The marginalized in any sense are the special objects of concern for this group, for your symbolic capitalists. Tell me, what's your theory for how that came about? You're telling a story that's happening in the 20th century, but this Rousseauian idea that humans are naturally pure and instinctively good, and that everything bad in the world must therefore be the result of some oppressive social structure. That idea has been around in philosophy and literature since the 18th century, but it was during the 20th century, and particularly the second half of the 20th century, that it really got a mass constituency. And you've got an elite that looks very askance at the fundamental institutions and mythologies of its own society, an elite that while serving power does so in a way, with this corrosive antipathy to the institutions of society as profoundly and irretrievably racist and homophobic and patriarchal.
al-Gharbi: This is one of the core puzzles that the book tries to explore is of all the ways that this formation of elites could justify their struggles over power and status and resources and so on and opportunities, why on earth do they focus so intensely on social justice narratives to advance their ends in this way? And the answer that I provide in the book is a story that unfolds in a couple phases.
First, again, a lot of these professions were themselves defined in terms of altruism and the common good. We have this extraordinary pay compared to other people, this extraordinary prestige and autonomy compared to other people. And we've said from the beginning of our professions that the reason you should give us these things, it's not for our own benefit, but because if you do this it'll be to the benefit of society as a whole, including and especially the least among us.
And as Randall Collins shows in his book The Credential Society, when you look at this period when a lot of the professions were formed, there was this massive wealth transfer down that happened as a result of passing the income tax and the creation of big philanthropy as we understand it today. And he shows that when you look at where the money went though, the primary wealth transfer that occurred in this period-
Lindsey: It went to-
al-Gharbi: Yeah, it went to us. It went from the gilded age elites to the upper middle class. But we've justified starting in that period and proceeding through the present. One of the things that changed though-
Lindsey: A lot of sector which has grown at a fair clip over time, that has been funded by corporate wealth creation and then philanthropy and the creation of these large foundations, which usually, in short order, deviate completely from the worldview of their funders and are these wonderful islands of completely unaccountable wealth that can do their own thing. And so that's going on and that's part of the picture that's creating this larger ideological dynamic.
al-Gharbi: That's the first thing. From the beginning of these professions, for 100 years now, to the extent that people are able to successfully portray themselves as being deeply committed or especially effective at advancing the will and interests of the less advantaged in society, they were seen as being especially worthy of status and wealth and resources and holding elite positions and so on. And on the flip side, for 100 years now, to the extent that you were successfully painted as someone who had the wrong motives or the wrong values or who was really bad. Then you might find your position within these professions to be jeopardized or even lose your status or your job. And that's been true, again, for 100 years now, that's not something that started with Twitter. But that's this germ, the initial phase that set up this unique form of status competition.
And then one of the things that changed after the '50s and '60s was that, as I mentioned before, a lot of these jobs, even though they were committed to social justice, they were also really exclusionary. They're created as sinecures for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant men basically, and anyone who wasn't those things was excluded. For a lot of colleges and universities you couldn't even go to that college or university if you were, say, Black and/or a woman. And a lot of the professional associations like the American Bar Association or the American Medical Association or the American Psychiatric Association explicitly excluded African-Americans and women. And when women or African-Americans tried to create their own associations, the predominant ones aggressively tried to crush those. But this changed-
Lindsey: Tony Wall Street law firms were very WASPY. The investment bank, very WASPY.
al-Gharbi: Yeah, and this changed after the... Well, and actually one thing that's relevant about this point, about White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, is there is a deep sense in which a lot of the social justice commitments of these professions are derivative of certain strains of Protestantism in the US, the social gospel movement and so on. But I'll bracket that.
Lindsey: This is a distinctively American phenomenon, and we have a distinctively capacity for regular bouts of enthusiasm. We called them great awakenings, the big ramp up in church attendance, and then changes in the nature of American Protestantism. The first two great awakenings were big church building exercises and creation of the distinctively American Protestant culture. And then you had what often is called the third great awakening, the social justice movement of the late 19th century. Some people have referred to the '60s as a fourth great awakening.
But our Niskanen colleague, Matt Yglesias, coined the term for this recent wave over the past decade or so of social justice activism. He called it the Great Awokening, which is clever because he's a clever guy. But you note that this isn't the first time this has happened, that this is maybe the fourth of these awokenings since the first one in the 1930s.
Take us back, and it seems like we can talk about each of the episodes, but a common feature in all of them is this is a period of time when people in this economic group are suffering relatively tough times or diminished future prospects, there's therefore more intense intra-group competition. But anyway, go back to, tell us about the first awokening.
al-Gharbi: Real quick though, to just close the loop on that earlier question. One of the things that changed after the '50s, just real quick, was that we had more women and minorities being folded into these professions that were formerly excluding them. And this changed the status competition because now you had this group of people who could not just say, I advanced the will and interest of the marginalized and the disadvantaged, but that I directly embody various marginalized and disadvantaged constituencies, I directly represent them and so on. And so you saw a lot of people who couldn't claim minority status based on race or gender, trying to find other ways to identify as some member of a historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups. There's been this arms race of identification within the symbolic professions.
Okay, so the Great Awokening. I identify four of them over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. There was one that started in the 1920s through the early '30s. There was one in the mid-60s through the early '70s, one in the late '80s through the early 90s. That was the last time we had these big blowups around political correctness as they called it at the time. They call it wokeness today. And then we saw another one after 2010. And what I argue in the book, especially in the second chapter-
Lindsey: Basically culminating in the red decade of the '30s, you've got the '60s and the counterculture and all of that, you've got the PC era of the late '80s and '90s, and now you have the woke era of the most recent episode of intense social justice activism on the part of people in these groups.
al-Gharbi: And I think one thing that's important to underscore is that actually a lot of these dynamics that we think of as new actually go back a century. As I showed in a review of Orwell's Wigan Pier, that's on my Substack, and as I also show in the book, the 1920s and '30s awokening had the first wave of feminism, they had the first wave anti-racism, they had the creation of the first gay rights and gay liberty organizations. A lot of ideas of intersectional struggle in the weird professional managerial culture that was focused on symbols over substance and alienating workers. All of that stuff goes back a century, it's not new. And one of the things that was actually disturbing doing the research was actually how much these different episodes have in common. There are differences, we can maybe get into those, but there's just so much in common it's really wild.
Lindsey: This adversary culture, this critical stance towards the society in which you live, really you see it in the '20s in modernism in literature, and that's becoming popular. And there's a big growth in college attendance during this time because we're getting richer and we need more of these professionals and so you're getting more people who are exposed to the particular character formation of the university experience.
al-Gharbi: And then as it relates to the causes of these awokenings, so as I show in the book, when you compare and contrast these cases, you can get leverage on questions like why did these things happen? When and why did they end? And so on. And so based on my analyses of these cases, it seemed to be there were 2.5 predictors that seemed to hold across awokenings. The main thing is that they tend to occur in moments of crisis for elites. And there are two crises, that's why I said 2.5, I guess. Two crises that elites tend to face. In the first two awokenings, one crisis that a lot of elites faced was being deployed into war. If you had this idea of having this elite lifestyle and having this comfortable position and so on, if it turns out that you end up dying or being wounded and things like this, that really puts a cramp on your elite vision.
And so anti-war activism was an important part of the first two awokenings. That ended after the draft was ended. That became an irrelevant consideration for a lot of the elites and so in the '90s and 2010s, anti-war activism was a less salient part of the awokenings. But the main predictor that holds across all four of these cases is that they tend to occur in moments of elite overproduction. And so that's a term from a sociologist, Jack Goldstone, and a historian, Peter Turchin, and it's basically a condition where society is producing more people who have an expectation, a reasonable expectation to be an elite than we have the capacity to give them the elite lifestyles that they aspire towards.
You have growing numbers of people who did everything right. They got good grades, they stayed in school, they went to college, they got into the right colleges and majored in the right things, and they were expecting a six figure salary and to be married and have kids and be able to own a home that was comparable or superior to what their parents had. And they find that when it's time for them to live that life that they envision for themselves-
Lindsey: Is not panning out.
al-Gharbi: ... it's not panning out. When you have growing numbers of elites and elite aspirants who find themselves in that position, what they often tend to do is indict the social order that they think failed them and try to condemn the existing elites and tear them down to make room for themselves. But the elite overproduction is only one factor for predicting the awokenings, because it's often insufficient. And that's because typically there's a counter cyclical nature to the fortune of non elites, which is to say times that are good for ordinary workers tend to be lean for elites and times that are really good for elites tend to be rough for ordinary workers.
Lindsey: I understand the crunch for everybody in the '30s, but what was the crunch for symbolic capitalists in the '20s?
al-Gharbi: That was the point I was going to get to is that there are points when this trajectory has collapsed and things have been bad and growing worse for ordinary workers for a while, and then all of a sudden they're bad for a lot of elites too. And those are the moments when awokenings happen because you have this disenfranchised and annoyed elite, but they have more leverage over the system because there's a lot of other people in society who are also really mad at the way things are going and really committed to trying to have a bone to pick with the existing elites and so on and so forth.
Lindsey: And so the question was, in general, it's when expectations, you followed the rules, you've done everything right, expectations aren't panning out. That's when these flare-ups of moral enthusiasm and intra-elite bad-mouthing and competition start up. The '20s were a boom time generally, and the '60 were a boom time, generally. The '60s were scary for college kids because they could get drafted, so that was going on. And then in the '70s, for sure, the economy slowed down and with the huge ramp up in baby boom, college admissions had totally eroded the college wage premium in the '70s and so there were books about the over-educated American. Things then turned all around in the 1980s, but in the '70s it looked like a college degree was a ticket to nowhere and so there was a lot of disillusionment then. In the '80s and '90s, what was the downturn? There was a white collar recession in the late '80s and early '90s.
al-Gharbi: Set off by mergers and acquisitions and then changes to immigration policy and all of this stuff, there was this major white collar recession.
Lindsey: And then most recently we had the great financial crisis and the decade of stagnant growth and high unemployment that followed that, with a lot of people graduating college into a cratered economy and not being pleased about that.
But at least in the '20s and '60s you also have a dynamic where the boom aspect of the time is producing a cultural exuberance and it's pushing people out of materialist concerns and towards more self-expression and more self-expression value,s so you see a lot of flare-ups of social liberalism, generally. And as Ronald Inglehart talks about it, it's an aspect of our getting richer and more economically secure. That the richer we are, the more we can take our basic material needs for granted, the more free we feel to not focus on getting and spending, but we focus on being all we can be and realizing our true potential and all of that.
al-Gharbi: The argument of the book is that... I think that that's happening in some of the lead-ups, but in the '20s and early '30s, in chapter two I walk through the crunch that started in the late '20s, and then of course accelerated through the Great Depression after 1929 and so on, into the '30s. But it started actually in the mid to late '20s for white collar workers, you started to see these signs of overproduction. And the same is true in the mid-60s and by the '70s it was very clear. But I think this point about post-materialism is very important, both because part of the reason why there was fertile ground for some of these narratives about social justice and whatever, is that society as a whole is on a pretty consistent liberalizing trajectory, as the work of James Dimson and others have shown, independent of these awokenings. And that, to me, seems to be most likely the consequence...
Lindsey: The symbolic capitalists’ contributions, which are fairly meager. But there is a larger dynamic that's pushing things and it's being pushed by really, ultimately by our getting richer and feeling more materially secure.
And also maybe less flatteringly, by ever larger groups of people who never really have to interact with the hard edges of objective physical reality and are so insulated from consequences of folly that a whole lot of folly can gin up and flower without anybody really stubbing their toe on it. We've got so much wealth that there's a lot of padding in which a lot of dysfunction and craziness can occur. That's going on, I think.
al-Gharbi: Yes. Like I said, there's a lot that holds consistent across these periods of awokening, but one of the things that's changed, and that's really relevant for, I think, this point about post-materialism is that, so in the 1920s period of the Great Awokening, about 3% of workers were symbolic capitalists. Today it's more than a third. And so we're still not anywhere near a majority, but that's 10 times as many. It's a huge minority of workers. And not only that-
Lindsey: But we're big enough where we can hive off and live in our own bubbles in a way that was not possible earlier.
al-Gharbi: Yeah, we've been increasingly consolidated in a small number of communities. We take part in these increasingly interlocking set of institutions like the media, the nonprofit sector, the education and the federal government. We have this robust interlocking set of institutions that allows us to be able to basically have a lot of influence and wealth and whatever while ignoring the vast majority of America in a way that wasn't possible before. When you're 3% of the public and you're, not fully, but more evenly distributed across the country, and you don't have this interlocking institution thing set up the way it is today, then you can't afford, if you try to ignore and disparage and disdain and whatever the conditions and needs and values of ordinary people, you'd have a tough time making a living and sustaining your position and so on.
That's not the case anymore. Corporations, not just individuals, but even corporations, you can have whole businesses that make money hand over fist while completely ignoring the values, need,s and priorities and actively alienating, in some cases, large swaths of America. And that can be a profitable decision because you have so much more wealth and power consolidated in our hands, and we ourselves are consolidated in these mass markets and in this interlocking set of institutions and communities and so on. And so the symbolic capitalists have, again, from the beginning, as Orwell and others illustrated, like I said, almost a century ago, we've been detached from the conditions and challenges of normie workers and normie citizens. But that gap has grown bigger over time because we've just been able to emancipate ourselves from the concerns and fears and priorities of ordinary people ever more over time.
Lindsey: The 20th and 21st centuries have seen big strides in social and cultural liberalization. Your argument is that these episodes of the awokenings don't have a lot to do with that. Let's walk through them then. We've got a lot of social liberalism in the '20s and then a whole bunch of left-wing socialist radicalism in the '30s. That radicalism comes to naught. In the '60s we've got the counterculture and the anti-war movement. The anti-war movement probably was a negative in terms of ultimately ending the war. It didn't work well, certainly got Nixon elected. Go through them. And then in the '80s and '90s we had the PC era that didn't cash out in terms of great strides and social progress. And now in the last decade…
al-Gharbi: In the '60s, '70s, one of the things I show in the book is that before you started seeing this massive uptick in protests on college campuses and symbolic economy hubs and so on, tied to the Black Power movement and Stonewall and all of this kind of stuff. Before any of that, the civil rights movement had already notched pretty much all of the victories it achieved. You had the passage of the Civil Rights Acts, you had Cesar Chavez and the Labor Movement.
Lindsey: There were young symbolic capitalists and older symbolic capitalists types involved in the civil rights movement.
al-Gharbi: But the one difference was that the civil rights movement was a broad-based movement that included and was actually heavily driven by…
Lindsey: Directed by others, but they joined in...
al-Gharbi: What happened is, during this period of awokenings, to the extent that symbolic capitalists continue to engage on civil rights, two things really changed that you can see that are pretty clear. First, the movement stopped being as focused on society as a whole. Before you had the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC during the '50s. They would organize on campus, but to do protests off campus with normal people to advocate for concrete civil rights goals. That stopped being the case. SNCC and other organizations became really inward-looking, really focused on doing things like creating ethnic studies programs in their departments. Today, what you see this as is-
Lindsey: Specifically the campus anti-war movement started, the Berkeley Free Speech Movement started because there were restrictions. The only permissible political activity on campus was College Republicans and College Democrats, and you had people wanting to sign up folks for SNCC. And that's what authorities clamped down, and the students rebelled. 1964 is the first campus unrest at Berkeley. That's a convenient starting point for this awokening.
al-Gharbi: Well, I don't think it is though, in part because as some others show in the book, the Berkeley movement was, for one, it didn't spark actually a national... You actually didn't see mass movements for a couple of years after the Berkeley movement. It was after there were changes to the draft and the war in Vietnam starting in late '65 that you started seeing on campus unrest.
Lindsey: The counterculture was also happening, and it was doing its own thing, but it was not strictly political, although associated.
al-Gharbi: Well, that's the point. And so similar, the second awokening really starts when you see this shift in the focus of organizing, you also see a shift in what people are calling for. Rather than being broad-based ecumenical movements that are calling for civil rights for everyone and stuff, you see this shift to Black power and Black liberation and Black nationalism, and this really pessimistic, cynical, separatist extreme violence endorsing things that becomes really popular in colleges and universities and amongst symbolic capitalists to show how much more committed they are to this cause than all of their peers. You see this status competition for taking really extreme views. But one of the things I show in the book is that, there's just not-
Lindsey: Like Tom Wolfe essay on Radical Chic about Leonard Bernstein's party for the Black Panther folks...
al-Gharbi: Yeah, absolutely. And so one of the things that I show in the book is that, so when you look at when the mass protests began in symbolic capitalist hubs and institutions and stuff starting in, again, the mid to late '60s, after '65, you can see that there's not, in that case, and actually across the cases, there's just not a significant relationship between these protest movements and changes in law or massive changes of reallocations in resources that help the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society. There's just not a meaningful relationship between these periods of awokening. And in fact, there's not even durable changes in mass public opinion in terms of values and stuff.
For instance, during this latest awokening, if you ask people about their fundamental views about gay people or Black people or women or something, there's a trajectory that they were on before 2010. They pretty much have stayed on that trajectory constantly. If you ask people more ephemeral questions like, how big of a problem is X right now? Then you can see that because the media is talking about X right now, the public thinks, oh, well, X must be a big problem. And then as the media stops talking about that so much, then the public goes, oh, it's less of a problem. But there's not really a change in fundamental values or views. And in fact, one of the things, one of the consequences of awokenings, far from creating any meaningful changes in resources and opportunities for the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society, is that you actually tend to see backlash that does tend to be pretty durable. Backlash against institutions of knowledge production, backlash against left causes, the creation of alternative knowledge economy infrastructures.
Lindsey: We're living that backlash today, right?
al-Gharbi: Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that happens after most of the awokenings, you see durable mistrust, durably reduced trust in mainstream institutions. And the reason for that is that even under ordinary times, the people who become symbolic capitalists tend to have weird ways of talking and thinking about politics compared to most other people. But during these periods of awokening, the gaps grow bigger because we shift a lot, and everyone else, again, basically stays on the same trajectory they were on before. And so the gap between us and everyone else grows bigger, and it also becomes more salient in people's minds because of how we conduct ourselves.
We become a lot more militant about mocking and censoring and trying to marginalize and deride and shame anyone who disagrees with us on views that we ourselves only adopted in some cases like 10 minutes ago. And as a result of that, people notice the gap between us and them more, they care about that gap more. And this creates an opportunity for political entrepreneurs, usually associated with the right, to campaign on bringing people like us under control. You hear narratives like, the universities have stopped teaching your kids useful knowledge and skills. They're just indoctrinating the youth, or the mainstream media is lying to you. They don't trust you, they don't value you. They're not telling you the truth. They've become a propaganda machine for the Democratic Party. These kinds of narratives become popular in the aftermath of each of the awokenings.
And again, one of the main consequences is that they give rise to alternative knowledge economy infrastructure. In the '60s and '70s there came to be this perception that higher ed was lost. And so you saw the creation of right-aligned think tanks, starting with Heritage and Cato, and then expanding. In the mid-late '80s to early '90s, after that awokening there was this perception that the media was lost and so you saw the creation of Fox News, and they eat everyone's lunch in terms of cable broadcasting ever since they were created. And then currently you're seeing the-
Lindsey: And the talk radio boom that preceded Fox, Rush Limbaugh and others. That arose cutting its teeth on PC.
al-Gharbi: Absolutely. And then in the current moment, you see moves like Peter Thiel trying to acquire Rumble or Donald Trump acquiring Truth Social or Elon Musk's anti-woke takeover of Twitter, so you're seeing alternative knowledge economy infrastructures in that way. And the thing about it is these alternative infrastructures, they have an existential stake in sowing doubt in mainstream institutions. the way Fox gets viewers is by telling their audience all day every day that the mainstream media is lying to them and doesn't respect them and so on. That's how they differentiate themselves.
Lindsey: The adversary culture migrated across from left to right, so we've got it on both sides now. We've got both sides deeply alienated from American institutions in a way that just can't be healthy. You've got these episodes of social justice activism by symbolic capitalists. They focus a lot on attitudes and symbolism, they focus a lot on what's going on within their own ranks. And so as a result, because they're focused on symbolism rather than actual objective circumstances, a lot of times the result of all their sound and fury is just empty symbolism. And because they're focused on what's going on in their own ranks, which are ranks that are increasingly isolated from everybody else, then securing greater diversity or whatever within the elite isn't really doing anything to help the larger marginalized communities in American life. That's the story you tell. And then often-
al-Gharbi: And sometimes…
Lindsey: .... what you do is just reap the whirlwind and generate a backlash.
al-Gharbi: Well, sometimes actually, various forms of inequality actually increase after the awokening, which makes sense. If there are struggles for elites to enhance their elite positions, then to the extent that they're successful as a result of their actions during the awokening, then what you might expect is that their position increases relative to ordinary people, and that's actually what they're most concerned about. Not only are there not positive trends, sometimes there's, like I said, negative trends, both in terms of backlash and in terms of... For instance, if you look at new opportunities on corporate boards that were created for African-Americans. If the only people, in order to get a seat on the board of Goldman Sachs or something like that, you have to have graduated from an Ivy League school, you have to have worked at an elite firm for many years and acquired a huge sum of money so the only people who are going to benefit from the creation of new spots for African-Americans on the board of Goldman Sachs are Black people who are already super rich and successful.
Lindsey: Were born on third base.
al-Gharbi: And this is true down the line. In fact, one of the things I show in the book is that, we'll just stick with this case of African-Americans for right now, the main beneficiaries of most of these programs that are on paper intended to help working class and poor American descendants of slaves, in fact they're the people who benefit the least from any of these programs. They're overwhelmingly capitalized on by people who are of recent immigrant backgrounds, so people who are Afro-Caribbean or first or second generation African immigrants, not American descendants of slaves at all, or people who are mixed race. And regardless of their ethnic background, and again, their ethnic background is completely unrepresentative of most Black people. In general, if you look at the Black people who occupy knowledge economy hubs, the Black people who are professors and journalists and so on, almost all the prominent spokespeople of Black culture, there are very few of them that are actually monoracial American descendants of slaves, very few.
And so the main beneficiaries are not even the main ethnic group, even though more than 70% of Black people in America are monoracial American descendants of slaves, they're the people who benefit the least from these programs. And regardless of ethnicity, the people who benefit the most from these programs tend to be relatively well off. They tend to be people whose parents were highly educated, who are themselves highly educated, whose parents are relatively affluent, and who themselves are relatively affluent or are on the path to being relatively affluent. Working class, poor African-Americans benefit basically zero from any of these changes that have occurred. Within the knowledge sectors and beyond the knowledge sectors there's basically very little that changes...
Lindsey: Let me push back a little bit. I agree with you in broad brush, but let me try to mount a tepid defense of symbolic capitalists’ contributions to social progress through these awokenings. Our attitudes and symbolism, they're not the most important thing, but they're not nothing, right? The marginalization and stigmatization of casual public racism and sexism, that's a good thing, and so the world is better because of that. Feminism, a lot of its gains have been for professional women, but opening up the top of society to a half of society was a big deal. And so that's something to be celebrated, and it is a real achievement, even if it is restricted to the elite. The gay rights movement, that's been pushed by symbolic capitalists all along. And that's had a lot to do with, it started with just changing attitudes from seeing gays as somehow or another scary to being just normal like you and me. That change in attitudes laid the ground for actual policy change. There's some good that's come out of all this, wouldn't you admit?
al-Gharbi: Well, no. Well, so I would say actually the gay rights movement is a prime example, actually, of how the ways that symbolic capitalists often engage on these issues can be counterproductive. The gay liberation movements and stuff of the '60s and '70s, what they were mostly talking about is things like abolishing gender roles altogether, abolishing the nuclear family. And the reason why the gay rights movement, part of the reason it was able to become successful was because you had right-leaning people or normie moderate people who were pushing for gay marriage and who struck compromising positions, basically. And so the maximalist posture that we strike during awokenings often alienates people, not brings them on board. And you can actually see this, if you look at the trans right issues, if you look at-
Lindsey: After all the victories on gay rights, just very soon after that we saw the emergence of this gender radicalism and trans activism.
al-Gharbi: Well, my point is that the specific ways that we engage in activism around transgender rights has actually alienated the public. You can see the public trend lines, public support for a lot of polling questions involving transgender Americans has actually seen declines. They're going in the opposite direction of what most symbolic capitalists would want. And the reason they're going in the opposite direction is because of the... And so I suspect that as we moderate and disengage on this issue or engage in a different way-
Lindsey: …and that's been profoundly alienating. For sure, the recent trans activism is absolutely in sync with the rest of your analysis of being counterproductive.
al-Gharbi: And then even with respect to gender, so it's been the case that most women have always worked, in the US, as I highlight in some quotes in there-
Lindsey: They didn't work in whole bunch of different professions until the '60s, '70s, and '80s, so there was a big change.
al-Gharbi: One thing that you saw is you saw this growing share of women who are entering the professions, and this has been great for a lot of upper middle-class and wealthy women. But one thing that has happened over the same period is that a lot of inequalities have grown, in part because highly educated and relatively affluent women want to marry someone who earns the same or more as them. And so you've seen assortative mating increase substantially. You've seen reduced social mobility, in many cases a calcification and growing inequalities between knowledge economy professionals and everyone else that's actually driven a lot by dating and mating preferences as I show in one of the chapters of the book. This is a case where, sure, you can say it's not bad that women are entered, but it's also not a pure unalloyed good either. It's a complicated story in terms of the consequences.
Lindsey: That's right. My Substack is just filled with stories about the dark side of progress and the ironic and negative blowback from progress. It doesn't mean the progress wasn't real, it just means life's really complicated.
al-Gharbi: Yeah. And I talk about this in a section in chapter four called Woke Capitalism about how there have been these real changes. At the time that my father was growing up, my father was Black, and he grew up at a time when segregation was a thing. He's a little over 70, and so the actual segregation was a thing. Brown v. Board happened while he was a child. And then even until 1973, at the time he started college, he was going to apply to colleges in '73, and until that year, 19 states had officially segregated colleges and university systems until Adams v. Richardson, because Brown v. Board only applied to K-12 schools. And so my father's whole life, basically, the thing that I'm doing, to see his son regularly in the Atlantic and the New York Times and R1 research university, tenure line professor, and all of this kind of stuff, that was not really in the realm of easy possibility for Black people of my father's generation. And so that's a significant change, but it's also the case that-
Lindsey: There’s a recent paper somewhere with the calculation that a decent chunk of post-1970 economic growth has been attributed to just better allocation of talent. The opening up of opportunity to groups that were previously excluded has been a big win-win.
al-Gharbi: To women, minorities, and other people who have been excluded in the past, these forms of irrational prejudice and discrimination actually undermined productivity. It made it so that businesses weren't recruiting the best and the brightest and the most talented and creative and so on. And so it's been a net positive in many respects, but it's also the case that, for instance, if you look at Black/White incarceration rates are actually a little worse than they were before the 1960s. If you look at Black/White income gaps, they've actually not changed very much over the last 50 years and so on.
And so this is a case where, again, for some of these changes, although and again it's worth emphasizing that with respect to the civil rights movement in particular, the civil rights movement notched all of its victories before the second Great Awokening even started. But it's the case that there has been a positive social change in general. Like I said, it doesn't actually bear a close relationship to these periods of awokening. A lot of the changes that occurred occurred orthogonally to these awokenings. And in fact, again, as a result of how we conduct ourselves, we often see blowback against a lot of these causes.
Lindsey: Right now we are in the midst of a huge backlash against the most recent and still ongoing awokening, the whole-
al-Gharbi: Yeah, I'll note real quick-
Lindsey: ... political turn has to be seen as a reaction against and is fed by growing inability to tolerate the sense of these busybodies who think they're better than you, and they've got all the economic power, they've got all the cultural power, they think they're morally superior to you. That whole response has been toxified through Fox News and through ideological entrepreneurs into this populist movement. But here we are. How do we get to healthy class relationships in an information economy? If we can weather this current backlash, what do better times look like? How can symbolic capitalists move beyond this hypocrisy and self-deception? And how can professions’ overreaching be wound back some? What does that healthier symbolic capitalist sector look like?
al-Gharbi: Real quick, I want to make one quick example also about how our activism often... A colleague of mine has a book called Reform Nation, which looks at the passage of the First Step Act, which was the most significant piece of criminal justice reform that had been passed in decades. It got signed into law under President Trump. Well, what she shows is that the creation of the First Step Act, it was the result of this careful consensus building over decades, decades. Before the Great Awokening, before Black Lives Matter, before any of that, growing numbers of Republicans, for instance, were convinced that there were problems in the criminal justice system, we needed significant reform to things like sentencing and so on. This was before the emergence of Black Lives Matter or anything like that.
Lindsey: Steven Teles wrote a book about the conservative criminal justice reform movement.
al-Gharbi: Absolutely. And so what happened was, as a result of the ways that symbolic capitalists conducted themselves over the course of the Great Awokening, striking these really extreme positions about defunding the police and abolishing prisons and all this kind of stuff, you started seeing this consensus that had been built up around criminal justice reform over decades just fall apart. And so the First Step Act, rather than being the cornerstone of even more significant criminal justice reforms down the line, basically barely limped across the finish line, and then that was it, there was nothing else that... We destroyed this careful consensus that had been built over decades because of how we conducted ourselves in these irresponsible grandstanding ways. We destroyed this consensus, this social consensus. We didn't successfully advocate for criminal justice reform, we actually inhibited the ability of the criminal justice reform movement to continue. And this is a kind of thing that we do a lot. What would a healthier... The nice thing is-
Lindsey: Can you see a path to a healthier symbolic capitalist sector?
al-Gharbi: Yeah, it's tough. It's tough because on the one hand, again, we are becoming more and more insulated from everyone else in terms of where we live in terms of the institutions that we're part of, in terms of our values and commitments in a way that just increases linearly over time. That's a challenge. But the nice thing is that we have been through these periods of awokening and backlash before. The backlash also doesn't last forever. And you can see some positive changes that were underway for a couple of years now. As I showed on in an essay that went viral called The Great Awokening is Winding Down, it's available on my website, you could see that using some of the same empirical measures to see that something changed after 2010, you can see that something changed again after 2021.
Lindsey: 2021?
al-Gharbi: Yeah, 2021. You started seeing these moderating trends in terms of things like protest activity, media coverage, the types of articles that media outlets were producing, or the types of articles that scholars were producing or cancel culture incidents on campuses. Looking at, in terms of public attitudes, a whole broad range of things, you can see that symbolic capitalists and our institutions and communities seem to have been moderating. Years before the election of Trump, years before the current stuff that Trump is doing. Unfortunately for us, it was too little, too late to prevent the right-aligned backlash that we usually see at the ballot box. We saw more of a right wing swing.
Lindsey: Perhaps the ferocity and broad-based nature of the current backlash can provoke some constructive reflection in our ranks. When Trump came to power in 2016, it just seemed like such a fluke, and he lost a popular vote, and there was all this stink about election interference. And so it was easy to think that this was just some weird, bad dream that we were going to wake up from. But now he won every swing state, he won the popular vote, and it's-
al-Gharbi: He won because of shifts of the very people we lead ourselves as champions for.
Lindsey: …from Hispanics and Black men.
al-Gharbi: Working class people.
Lindsey: Yes. This idea that it's just a bad dream that we're going to wake up from is just, that's gone now. This is a period, I think, of deep self-reflection on the part of people on the center left and amongst the symbolic capitalist ranks that are left leaning because things aren't working out the way they want them to. And I think there's a fairly wide realization that there has been whole bunch of self-defeating conduct on that side of the aisle.
al-Gharbi: Yeah. I think there's moderation, but it's important to engage more productively on a lot of these issues and we've been doing. If we want to persuade people, for instance, take the issue of transgender rights. If we recognize that a lot of the public is out of step with us on this issue, it's actually important to persuade. And persuasion means we go to the people who don't already agree with us, we talk to them in a way that they will find persuasive and compelling in the kinds of venues where those people congregate. And that's obvious, but it's not a thing that we do often.
And actually, again, you can see that this worked with gay rights. You had people like Andrew Sullivan who we're talking about how, as a Catholic, as a Christian, but who's also gay, he was able to advocate for how you can adopt support for gay marriage in a way that wasn't antithetical to Christianity, that wasn't antithetical to being a conservative. And the request, the demands of the gay rights movement shifted from these radical things to treating everyone the same so that they can have the same marriage rights and the same... Which is very different. And so this kind of persuasion is very important, but it's just something that we haven't really bothered trying to do for a decade now.
Lindsey: But, again, the tide has shifted as you've noted. There is a broad recognition of the self-defeating perversity of a lot of this activism in no small part due to your fine book. I'm pleased to see the reception it's getting and the audience is finding. And so I wish you every success in selling a whole bunch of them and getting your arguments out before a broad public. Musa, I just want to thank you so much for coming on and having a really stimulating and fun and interesting discussion.
al-Gharbi: Thank you. This was great. Thank you for having me.
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