Transcript: Musa al-Gharbi

An interview with the author of We Have Never Been Woke

The period often referred to as The Great Awokening is winding down now, and we’re starting to get a better understanding of what happened. My guest on this week’s program argues that we have seen these kinds of social justice-styled movements before in American history — and that they are in fact driven by, as he puts it, “frustrated erstwhile elites condemning the social order that failed them and jockeying to secure the position they feel they deserve.”  

Musa al-Gharbi is an American sociologist and an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His new book — out this week — is We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. 

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

---

TH: Nice to have you on. I've been following your work for some time. I was excited to read this book, so it's a great pleasure to get to speak with you today. The title of your book is We Have Never Been Woke, and the subtitle is The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. The book offers a kind of anatomy of a particular class of society — a class to which you and I both belong. I want to begin today with what got you started writing the book. You were living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan during the height of what is often referred to as The Great Awokening. You moved there in 2016 from Sierra Vista, Arizona. And you were struck by what you describe as a caste system that everyone seemed to take as natural. Describe for us what you were seeing.

MAG: Before I became a fancy East Coast intellectual elite at Columbia University [Laughs] what I was doing immediately before that — literally basically up until the time — was that I was selling shoes. I was selling shoes at a store called Dillard's, which is like Macy's but for the South. In fact, I met my wife selling shoes. I sold her shoes. So maybe it was the fact that I was doing service jobs relatively recently that I paid attention to this, maybe more than other people might have. I don't know. 

But in any case, when I moved to Manhattan, one of the things that struck me that was very different from the context I lived in — in Sierra Vista and in a lot of other places around the country — the socioeconomic gaps and the racial and ethnic divides between a person buying a pair of shoes and the person selling the pair of shoes are not super big. They can be kind of big, but they are not huge.

But things work very differently in Manhattan. The gaps between people who are consuming versus the people who are providing the services are large, in socioeconomic terms. There is also this kind of systematic skew along the lines of race and ethnicity and gender, depending on the job. Where you have certain slices of society who belong to particular racial and ethnic groups who are consuming a lot of these services. Having other people watch their kids, or taxi their burrito over to them — like, carry their individual burrito to their house from the restaurant, because God forbid they just go eat at the restaurant themselves or cook their own food — or other people who are driving them around. There are people from particular racial and ethnic groups who are providing all of these services that “symbolic capitalists” take for granted. People from completely different racial and ethnic blocks tended to be providing those services.

This systematic variance between the producers and the consumers of these services, and just the sheer size of the gap between them, the socioeconomic gulf between them, was something that jumped out at me pretty immediately. Also, there's just a lot of suffering in places like Manhattan that you have to get callous to in order to live your life. Places like Manhattan, San Francisco. In New York State, for instance, one out of every 12 residents of New York state is a millionaire. But you also have really high concentrations of poverty and suffering. So, acclimating to that was tough. 

Then I had the unusual experience of moving from the community that I lived in — which was a military town, decisively Republican, although growing less so over time because a lot of people from California have been moving to Arizona. But the community that I lived and grew up in was decisively red. The community I moved to was 95/5 for Clinton. And even that is shocking. That means one in 20 people in my voting district in Manhattan voted for Donald Trump. Which is wild! I can't imagine them. But I want to meet them. I want to know them. I'm intensely curious about them. But still, 95 percent of people in that district voted for Clinton. There was a political whiplash, a cultural whiplash.

So I'm here at Columbia, and it's an elite school in a couple of senses. Not just that it's prestigious and well-respected, but it's literally a school whose primary purpose, frankly, is to identify people who deserve to be elites and credential those people so that they can go on to function as elites in society. The primary base of students who attend schools like Columbia are people who are themselves from elite backgrounds. They have really well-educated, affluent parents. They did all the right things, they went to the right schools and did all the right extracurriculars. It's an elite school, and so I was in this elite space, trying to figure out: What are the right norms? How are people here thinking about issues? What's the right way to be? What is the right way to act and so on? I was working through all of that in the aftermath of the 2016 election, when a lot of people on the left, especially people in spaces like Columbia, kind of lost their minds a little bit — if I'm going to put it not diplomatically. [Laughs]

For instance, in one of the classes that I had my first semester — just a couple months after I started there — it was a class on social theory and we were supposed to be talking about Du Bois, who was the only Black theorist we were going to be talking about all semester. But instead of doing that, we spent the class talking about our feelings about the election. There was a number of grown adults who were crying, openly weeping. There was this one lady — she is white and she's married to a Korean dude — and she was like, “Trump is going to put my kid in a camp.” [I thought,] “Yeah, he was campaigning on rounding up all the half-Korean kids. This was the central plank of his campaign. Especially the half-Korean kids of Ivy League people who work professional jobs. You are the one who is really at risk here.”

At schools like Columbia, there was this intense narcissistic focus. These people were themselves elites and were poised to have nice, elite careers. The people who were, in their own narratives about the election and its consequences — their own narrative was that, “With this guy in office, the elites are going to be better than ever. They are going to be richer and more powerful than ever, and the poor little guy is going to get crushed underfoot and exploited and oppressed.” Well, guess what? We are the elites! We are the winners in your own story about what's going to happen. Us students at Columbia University are the people who stand to benefit. But there wasn't any recognition of that. They weren't like, “I stand to benefit from this, and that's terrible. I'm going to be the winner. I feel so sad about the next several years when I'm going to be crushing the little guy underfoot.”

Instead, they were painting themselves as the little guy, as the victims, as people who were especially vulnerable to Trump and his regime. In a way that I found confusing, and frankly galling. Because all around these students, there was this whole range of other workers who were doing things like taking out the trash, cleaning the toilets, serving them food in the cafeteria, trimming the hedges. Whereas the Columbia students were overwhelmingly from relatively affluent backgrounds, the people doing these other jobs were mostly of less affluent backgrounds. They were mostly Black people, Hispanic people, a lot of them were immigrants. They were the people who the Columbia students view themselves as allies for, and advocates for. 

They were the people who the students and the professors — because, actually, I don't want to just focus on the students, there was no meaningful difference in these regards anyway — they were the same people that the students viewed as being most vulnerable to Trump's regime. But there was no movement to help the janitors and the landscapers and the cafeteria workers and the construction people. There was no movement to increase their pay, increase their benefits, let them take some time off in all of this. We were focused on ourselves. The students and the professors were focused on themselves. On the flip side, you also didn't see these other workers sitting there sobbing about politics. You didn't see grown men weeping as they scrubbed rich kids poo out of the toilets. They just showed up the next day and did their jobs. This juxtaposition between the people I was surrounded by and the causes that they said they were for — and then these other workers and how they were conducting themselves — was really sobering and disorienting. I was trying to figure out: What is going on here? How do I fit into this puzzle? In a deep sense, working through that post-election period was one of the things that helped give rise to the book. It had me asking certain questions that the book tries to answer.

TH: Let's get into a little of your analysis now. You put forward a term, “symbolic capitalists,” to describe this class. How do you define that term — and why is this a class that is still in the process of being formed?

MAG: Here, I'm cribbing from a sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, who developed this concept called symbolic capital. Symbolic capital is the social resources that people draw on to justify inequality, to make it seem like inequalities are appropriate and normal and good, basically. He identified three forms of symbolic capital in his work. One of them was academic capital. That is when you defer to someone else because of the credentials they hold, or because they have specialized knowledge or expertise. If I'm like, “I have a PhD in sociology from Columbia University,” that is me wielding academic capital. Or if I'm like, “I'm an expert in microbiology,” or something like that, these are all examples. It's not just academia. Also, if you're tied to a corporation, or if you're a journalist writing for The New York Times and you emphasize the fact that you're a journalist or that you write for The New York Times, these are all examples of academic capital — having people defer to you because of your association with knowledge-producing industries and your credentials and so on.

Then there is political capital, which is when people do what you want — they pursue your interests, follow your goals, defer to you — based on the position you hold in an organization. “I'm the manager, that's why you're going to do what I want you to do, because otherwise you're fired.” But more importantly, “I'm the manager, so you should do what I say, literally because I'm the manager. Your job is to do what I say.” So, political capital is based on the role you hold in an organization. And also your reputation. If you have a reputation for being someone who is competent, who gets stuff done, who is effective and so on, other people should defer to you because you know how to make things happen. These are all examples of political capital. 

Then finally, there is what Bourdieu called cultural capital. Which is when you get other people to defer to you, to follow your plan, to advance your interest, to go with what you want, because they are really eager to ingratiate themselves with you and impress you. They think you are cool, or interesting, or sophisticated. They want to be in your good graces, so they do what you want. I call the subjects of my book “symbolic capitalists,” because the primary way that we make money is by producing and leveraging symbolic capital, on behalf of ourselves and other people. We are mostly distinguished by what we know, who we know, and how we're known. So, this is the core of Bourdieu’s notion of symbolic capital. 

Symbolic capitalists have been called by a lot of other names in other work. They have also been known as the Professional Managerial Class, the Creative Class, the New Class, Class X. I tried to avoid using one of these terms, or referring to them as a class. One reason is because there are these big divisions. There are a lot of things that unite symbolic capitalists: They have shared interests, shared backgrounds, shared cognitive dispositions. Which is why they're sensible to talk about as a group. But they don't necessarily occupy the exact same class position. There is this vast difference. In academia, for instance, you have professors who work at Harvard and professors who work at University of North Dakota. You have tenured professors and you have adjunct professors, and they are not in quite the same boat in terms of prestige and status and wealth. It is the case that even people who are contingent faculty at non-prestigious schools — on the lowest rungs of the academic ladder — even they have a lot more in common with say, Steve Pinker at Harvard, than they do with the shoe salesman at Payless. In terms of their values and cultural dispositions, their aspirations for life, even in terms of the kind of work they do.

As I illustrate in the book, people like contingent faculty members, they are exploited in the sense that they don't get paid nearly as much as tenured professors. They don't really have academic freedom to speak of, in a meaningful way. They don't have a voice in faculty governance. It's a bad situation. I think it shouldn't be the way it is. But it's also important to bear in mind that even adjunct professors aren't exploited workers in the way that Walmart workers are exploited workers. You don't have someone hovering over you managing your productivity constantly. You're not straining your physical body. What is your job as an adjunct professor? A few times a week, you stand in front of a room of people and talk about things that you find interesting and enjoyable. And in the intervening time, you have a comfortable life. You pursue your interests and you have a lot of unstructured time, a lot of flexibility in terms of what classes you take on in the first place, and so on and so forth.

The kind of work that faculty members do — no matter where they fall in the ladder — is not meaningfully the same as the work that people who traffic in physical goods and services do. They just don't live in the same employment world. So even precarious and low-pay, low-prestige jobs in the symbolic professions are just of a different order, in a deeply important sense, than the kind of work that normies do. We also, again, tend to reason about the social world in different ways, think about the world in different ways. We live in different kinds of communities and cluster together in a way that makes it useful to talk about symbolic capitalists in broad terms. But at the same time, these divisions within the symbolic professions do make it difficult to talk about us as a class in the way that that is traditionally understood.

TH: That makes a lot of sense. I want to talk about the Great Awokening that we have just lived through, which you argue is not particularly unique. You write, “This is what Great Awokenings are fundamentally about: frustrated, erstwhile elites condemning the social order that failed them and jockeying to secure the position they feel they deserve.” What is elite overproduction — and why does it, in your view, create social justice-styled unrest?

MAG: One of the things I argue in the book, especially chapter two, is that after 2010 there was this big shift among symbolic capitalists, among these knowledge-producing workers and professionals. There was this big shift in how we think about social justice issues, how we talk about social justice issues. There was a big shift in our political alignments and our behaviors. So we became much more politically-engaged, much more left-oriented. Which started putting immense pressure on the Democratic Party to change its messaging and priorities in ways that often alienated a lot of other constituents that have traditionally been aligned with the Democratic party, such as African-Americans and Hispanics and so on. 

So, there were these big changes that happened after 2010. But as I show in the book, looking at those same kinds of measures that you would look at to show that there was indeed something that changed — it's not just vibes, it's not people having a moral panic, you can empirically measure there was a significant change — looking at those same kinds of measurements, you can see that what happened after 2010 was actually a case of something. And there were three previous periods of Awokening. By comparing and contrasting them, we can get insight. Why did they come about? Why did they end? Do they change anything? What do they change? And so on. That is the project of chapter two — this question about why they come about.

I say that there is basically two things that predict an Awokening happening. The first one is, as you said, elite overproduction. Here, I'm drawing from Jack Goldsmith and Peter Turchin. What elite overproduction is, in a nutshell, when society starts producing more people who have a reasonable expectation that they will be elites, but we just don't have the capacity to actually give them the lives that they are hoping or expecting to have. So for instance, in the more contemporary context, a lot of people who graduate from college assume that if you did the right things, you got good grades, you showed up every day, you got into college, you got good grades in college, you went to the right college and majored in the right things and so on and so forth, then you should be entitled to something like a six-figure salary — or close to it. You should be able to have your own home relatively easily. You should be able to find a good partner and settle down and produce a family that has a standard of living that is comparable to, or better than, what you experienced yourself growing up. 

When you have growing numbers of people who did all the right things but are just not able to live that life that they envisioned for themselves, what they tend to do is grow really frustrated with the prevailing order. They start condemning the system that they think failed them. And they try to basically tear it down. Or they purport to try to tear it down. Basically try to indict the people who are successful — the people who are currently in charge — and try to remove some of those people and create space for people like themselves. That is the tweet-length version of what is going on in Great Awokenings. But the elite overproduction can't itself predict Awokenings. Because there is this other problem. The elite overproduction provides a motive. It gives these elites a reason to want to tear stuff down, but they don't necessarily have the means. And this is because, as my advisor Shamus Khan and others have shown in the research, typically there is this countercyclical nature between the fortunes of elites and non-elites.

Times that are really good for elites tend to be bad for everyone else. On the flip side of that, times that are lean for elites tend to be pretty good for everyone else. Wages tend to be higher than usual, which is bad for elites because they have to pay more for the goods and services that they consume more of than most other people. Workers tend to have a lot more leverage over employers during those periods, and so on. So, precisely because there's this countercyclical dynamic, a lot of times when things are tough for elites it's hard for them to get anyone to care. No one is breaking out their tiny violin and playing a sad song for the poor elite aspirant who has to get a regular job like everyone else and live a regular life like everyone else.

But there are these moments when the trajectories get collapsed, when things have been bad and growing worse for a lot of people for a while, and then all of a sudden they are bad for elites too. Those are the moments when Awokenings tend to happen. Because you have the frustrated elites, but then there is also this much larger swath of other people who are also really angry and frustrated and they want change. This gives those frustrated elites a lot more power or leverage and influence than they would normally have. Those are the two predictors for when you might see an Awokening.

The last thing I'll add real quick, if I can, part of the reason why these power grabs take on this particular social-justicey flavour … Of all the ways that these elites could try to seize power, why do they do it in the name of anti-racism and feminism and LGBTQ rights and environmentalism and socialism and so on? The answer to that question, that I provide in the book, is that it is because our professions, the symbolic professions, from the beginning have defined themselves in terms of their altruism, in terms of serving the common good. So, journalists are supposed to speak truth to power. We're supposed to be a voice for the voiceless. Academics are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads, without worrying about if it's serving anyone's political interests or economic interests. And from the beginning, the extraordinary pay, the extraordinary autonomy — we have so much more freedom in our jobs than most other employees — the prestige that we enjoy from the beginning of our professions, from the beginning of journalism, from the beginning of academia as we understand it today, we have said that the reason we should have these things is because it's good for everybody. 

If you give us this autonomy, this pay, because we're so committed to the common good and helping the marginalized, and the disadvantaged, the least among us, everyone will be better off. If you give us more power and resources and autonomy, it will be for the good of everyone, especially the least advantaged. And so, the fact that our professions are justified in this way creates a unique form of status competition and power competition and career competition among symbolic capitalists. We seem like we're more worthy of holding elite positions and getting elite power and getting respect and having other people listen to us to the extent that we can show people that we're the best advocates for the marginalized and the disadvantaged. 

On the flip side, if we can successfully paint someone as being in the pockets of big money, or corrupt, or too cozy with the rich and the powerful — or if we can paint them as holding the wrong views about race or gender or sexuality — then those people are viewed as being unworthy of being listened to, unworthy of even holding their jobs. A lot of times you'll end up losing your job if you're successfully painted as racist or sexist or something like that. This mode of competition in the symbolic professions is also not something new. It goes back more than a century. As I said in the book, in some quotes from Orwell and others writing in the 1920s and 30s, you can see a lot of these dynamics are not the result of social media or Gen Z or kids these days or anything like that. I mean, these conflicts have been playing out the way they have been for a long time now. For roughly a century.

TH: It's fascinating. You point out in the book that there is this perception that the Great Awokening was driven by Gen Z and Millennials. In fact, it probably wasn't. It probably was the older cohort leading this. You also point out there is a gendered nature of this; a lot of women have been drawn into participating. I want to touch on the issue of public trust, which is something I've been really interested in. You write that trust in institutions tends to decline after Great Awokenings. And in the aftermath, attitudes tend to polarize. What does that look like in the wake of this Great Awokening?