In the last 12 years, academic language about structural inequality made its way to media and popular discourse, leading to conservative critiques of “wokeness.” But how much really changed beneath the surface in our elite institutions? Musa Al-Gharbi finds that wokeness has peaked after it was the product of socio-economic trends in the professions. But he says it was mostly surface-level, visible in social norms that distracted from underlying economic realities.
Guest: Musa Al-Gharbi, Stony Brook
Study: We Have Never Been Woke
Matt Grossmann: How woke are we? This week on the Science of Politics for the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. In the 2010s and accelerating in 2020, academic language about structural inequality made inroads into media and popular discourse, leading to conservative critiques of wokeness. How does this chapter of liberalizing cultural norms differ from other historical examples? Has wokeness rescinded, or are we not going back? And how much really changed beneath the surface in our elite institutions? This week, I talked to Musa Al-Gharbi of Stony Brook about his new Princeton book, We Have Never Been Woke. He finds that wokeness has peaked after it was the product of socioeconomic trends in the professions, but he says it was mostly surface level visible and social norms that distracted from underlying economic realities echoing prior eras. We explore the political divides that this reflected and what might shift in this election. I think you’ll enjoy our conversation.
So let’s start with the key findings and takeaways from We Have Never Been Woke.
Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah. So what We Have Never Been Woke is fundamentally trying to explore, or what it argues is that starting in the period between World War I and World War II, and then especially after starting in the 1960s and into the seventies, there were these significant changes to the global economic order that favored industries like tech and finance or law, or medicine, consulting, and so on, so basically people in industries that traffic in things like ideas and information and things like this instead of producing physical goods and services to people. And one of the things that’s interesting about that shift, or really important about that shift, is that the professionals who work in fields like journalism, consulting, media, entertainment, education, and so on, the people who have been growing the most in affluence and influence over society, the sectors of the economy that have been kind of increasingly eclipsing the others, these professionals, the people who work in these fields are also the same Americans who are most likely to self identify as anti-racist, as feminists, as environmentalists, as allies to LGBTQ people, as liberals or progressives, it’s the same people who are most likely to work in these professions, so highly educated, relatively affluent people who live in suburbs and urban areas, and so on. People who work in these professions are overwhelmingly and increasingly aligned with the Democratic Party. And from the outset, a lot of the professions themselves are defined in terms of altruism and serving the common good. So for instance, to use my own profession, journalists, for instance, are supposed to speak truth to power and be a voice for the voiceless, and academics are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads without regard to economic interests and political interests and things like this. And the fact that we promote the common good and that we serve the least advantaged in society from the outset has been how we justify the autonomy that we have, the pay that we have, the prestige that we have. You should give us those things because it’s to everyone’s benefit if you do.
And so what you might expect and what we argued would happen, what you might expect is that as people like us have more power in society, more influence society. As more resources are consolidated into our hands, what you might hope and expect is that a lot of longstanding social problems would be ameliorated, a lot of inequalities would be shrinking, you’d see growing trust in institutions because of all the great work that we’re doing, and so on. Instead, what you see as the opposite, you see growing mistrust in institutions, growing polarization, rising inequalities, economic stagnation, and so on. And so what the book is fundamentally trying to figure out is, what the heck is going on here? Why do we see this stuff happening instead of the things that we might have hoped or imagined?
And how this syncs up with wokeness is that one of the big arguments of the book is that these stories, that these professionals, who I call symbolic capitalists, these stories that we tell ourselves about how we’re allies and advocates for the marginalized and the disadvantaged, how we’re on the right side of history, and so on, these stories obscure who actually benefits from a lot of social problems, who’s perpetuating them, and how. And when we take a step back and try to analyze, we can see that actually, there are these really interesting tensions. So for instance, the people… I argue in the book, the people who benefit the most from what sociologists call structural or systemic inequalities are the people who are most concerned with inequality per se. And so the people who are most concerned about racial inequality, or gender inequality, or misogyny, and racism, and so on are also the people who benefit the most from racialized inequality and the most from gendered inequalities.
And we can’t see that in part because we’re so convinced that we’re advocates for those same populations. I argue that wokeness is increasingly used to legitimize a lot of the inequalities that are growing today. So when you look at the people who are left out from the knowledge economy, the people who are suffering, people in fly over country, people who feel left behind, and so on, a lot of the narratives we tell about wokeness actually justify why those people deserve their suffering. They believe the wrong things. If they’re suffering, good. They deserve to suffer. I don’t pity racists. I don’t pity sexists. I don’t pity authoritarians. In fact, let them be marginalized. Let them suffer. Let them be poor. They’re privileged, and so on. And so it’s the case that plurality of poor people in America are white. When you look at social misery indexes, men tend to rank pretty at very…
Compared to women, men are much, much worse on most of the social misery indexes, and the trend lines are pretty negative for us, but these narratives that we tell about privilege allow us to write off the suffering of men, allow us right off the suffering of whites, even though they’re the ones who are losing the most in the contemporary. By a lot of metrics, we are experiencing adverse effects from some of these social transitions. And then I argue lastly, for now, I guess, that increasingly elites identify with disadvantaged groups. They paint themselves as not just advocates for disadvantaged groups but themselves say, emphasize that they are LGBTQ, or they’re disabled, or they’re neurodivergent, or they’re racial and ethnic minorities, or religious minorities. We try to make ourselves… We emphasize that we ourselves belong to historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups, even though in principle, we wouldn’t want to do that because it’s just supposed to be stigmatized identities that disadvantage people.
So the question that the book tries to explore is, well, why is that we’re so eager to affix these very labels onto ourself? And one of the key things that I argue is that painting ourselves in this way allows us to seem less elite than we are. It allows us to, in some cases, seem more deserving of what we have than we otherwise might. It exempts us from scrutiny. And so these are the kinds of things that you can see if you attend to what I call the social life of social justice discourse, but is to see how to explore how things function in practice regardless of what people might intend or want.
Matt Grossmann: So you identify three previous episodes of similar to the great awokening in the 2010s. What is similar to and what is different in the latest chapter?
Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah, so I’ll go in reverse order. I think I’ll start with the differences. So one thing that’s different, of course, is that we live in a time now with cell phones and computers and social media, and those significantly changed the way awokenings play out. We can now surveil each other constantly. We can take people’s inane moments that they say, and they’re forever memorialized. We can recall them on an instant and disseminate them worldwide in seconds. And so that is a non-trivial change, the way that previous episodes of the awokening happened, but you can see that the technologies themselves are not the cause of the awokenings as some have argued. So a lot of the narratives about what shifted after 2010 are stories about Gen Z, kids these days, right? And there is a lot of evidence that Gen Z people have non-trivially systematically different ideas about a lot of things than older cohorts, but that clearly doesn’t seem to be what’s driving the awokenings.
Because if they were, if those were the differences, then we wouldn’t expect to have seen awokenings prior to Gen Z. And also, the timing just doesn’t line up because the shifts started happening at time when the oldest members of Gen Z were like 11. And the same is true for technological changes. If it was technological changes driving it, then there wouldn’t have been similar things before. And so what I show is when you look at a lot of the same kinds of empirical measures to show that something shifted after 2010, so shifts in knowledge economy outputs like academic research and media articles, or shifts in voting alignment and voting behaviors, or changes in protest activity. And so you can look at a lot of these same empirical types of measures and you can see that actually the shift after 2010 is a case of something.
There was the first clear analog to the current moment I highlight, is in the 20s and 1930s. And there was one in the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, one in the late 1980s, the early 90s, and then one that started after 2010. And I argue in the book that by comparing and contrasting these cases instead of treating it as the current moment as unprecedented or something like that, we can actually get a lot of insight into questions like, under what circumstances do these periods of awokening come about? When and why do they end? How does one awokening inform the next? Or does it? What do these awokenings tend to change, if anything? And so that’s the project of chapter two of the book. And so some of the things they have in common… Well, there’s a lot of things they have in common actually, but I’ll settle for just briefly putting my finger on two factors that seem to predict this question of when do they come about, and then by implication, why do they fizzle out?
And so I argue in the book that there’s basically two predictors that seem most important for predicting when they’ll come about. One of them is that they tend to happen during moments where elite overproduction is particularly acute. So this is… When society is producing more people who feel entitled to a certain kind of elite lifestyle, then society has the ability to actually give them the life that they’re hoping and expecting. So people who grow up and they do all the right things, they went to the right schools, they got good grades, they got a college degree, for instance, and then they suddenly find that not only are they not getting a six-figure job, but they’re getting actually… Sometimes they’re working at Starbucks, or they find themselves completely unemployed, or they can’t buy a house, they can’t get married, they can’t give their children the lifestyle that they…
And so when this happens, when you see growing numbers of elite aspirants living in that kind of a condition, what they tend to do is indict the existing order that they think failed them and try to basically create room for themselves by getting rid of some of the people who are currently occupying the positions that they want. But that elite overproduction, if you will, provides a motive for awokenings, but they don’t necessarily have a means. And this is because as Shamus Kahn, my advisor, and some others have illustrated in their research, the fortunes of elites and non-elites tend to operate counter-cyclically, which is to say times that are good for elites, booming times for elites tend to be pretty bad times for everyone else, and especially people who are genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.
And on the flip side, times that are really good for normal people, when wages are booming and things like this, tend to be kind of leaner times for elites. They have to pay more for the goods and services they consume, so on and so forth. They can’t coerce people into terrible jobs because people have more exit options, et cetera. Okay. And so precisely because of this counter-cyclical nature, oftentimes when you have these moments of elite overproduction, it’s hard to get anyone else to care about it.
No one’s breaking out their tiny violin that a poor elite person has to get a regular job like everyone else, live the same kind of life as everyone else. But there are certain moments when these trajectories collapse and things have been getting kind of bad and getting worse for most people for a while, and then all of a sudden they’re bad for elites too. And those are the moments when awokenings come about, because not only do you do the elites have the motives, but there are large numbers of other Americans who are also really fed up with the way things are going. They’re really frustrated with the existing order. They also want dramatic change to the system, and so on and so forth. And so those two factors are what I identify as the kind of core ingredients for when an awokening might come about. And so the last one we saw after basically the 2008 financial crisis in the subsequent economic shocks, starting with Occupy Wall Street, I argue, is kind of the beginning of the current awokening.
Matt Grossmann: So what’s the evidence that we’re out of the current awokening? And what would be the signs that we’re in another cycle?
Musa Al-Gharbi: What I’ve showed in some of my public facing essays, and also argue in the book, is that looking at some of these empirical measures, you can see that the shifts that started after 2010 seemed to be winding down. So for instance, when you look at media focus on… For instance, co-authors and I produced a paper where we analyzed 27-
Musa Al-Gharbi: I produced a paper where we analyzed 27 million news articles from 47 media outlets over the past 50 years. And what we see is that starting after 2011, there was this major shift in media news outputs. In particular, they focused on prejudice and discrimination, all types of prejudice and discrimination. So sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism, Islamophbia, anti-Semitism, you name it. Basically all forms of prejudice and discrimination seem to rise at once in print media, in television media, in liberal media, in conservative media, just across the board. And these shifts didn’t seem to be driven by anything that had happened in that year. So it didn’t seem to be a response to anything in particular.
And we see analogous shifts like preoccupations with prejudice and discrimination and so on in academic… As I’ve shown, elsewhere in academic research papers that have been… Published academic papers or in books and so on. You see these shifts in political behavior, increases in protest movements, and the like. By all of these empirical measures, they do seem to be winding down. So the media, for instance, has lost focus now on prejudice and discrimination than they were over the last decade. It’s a clear trend line down. A lot of the kind of campus, culture worry, cancellations, protests, all of this, you can look at data from FIRE or the National Academy of Scholars or Heterodox Academy and so on, that kind of track these cancel culture trends and you can see that they also peaked around the same time and seem to be declining. So there does seem to be a lot of empirical evidence that… And you can actually see this, for that matter, even in the kind of messaging of the Democratic Party, which is increasingly the party of these professionals.
So when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are running for office… Or even actually for that matter, when Hillary Clinton was running for office in 2016, she really leaned heavily into race and gender and things like this. Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, when they ran in 2020, if you did a drinking game every time they said “systemic racism,” good luck to you. But when you look at Kamala Harris’s plot, she’s the first African-American female president. She would only be the second African-American president. She’d be the first female president. But you don’t see her leaning into this kind of identitarian stuff for the most part. If anything, she tries to kind of falsely portray herself as a normie person from middle-class backgrounds when one of her parents was a professor at Stanford and the other was a prominent scientist at McGill and before that, Berkeley.
But so you see kind of the opposite trend from what you might’ve expected in the years before, or even when you look at things like on corporate calls, how often do people mention things like ESG considerations on corporate calls or how often do they talk about diversity on corporate calls? Declining rapidly after. And so you can just go on and on. Okay. So those are some of the things that you might look at to see that the same way something shifted after 2010, something else shifted starting around 2021 and kind of has accelerated in recent years. As far as, “How would we know we’re in another one?” The nice thing is or one contribution that I hope the book makes is that in identifying some of these indicators that we use to measure this one, hopefully we could use these same kinds of things to see, again, that something seems to be shifting.
A lot of times though, as Stimson and others from Tides of Consent and others have mentioned, people don’t even… How these things play out is people start measuring something often after they realize something changed. So people get a sense that there’s been some shift in attitudes, and so they add new polling questions to… And so you don’t see the full trajectory of the change. You just see the part where they started measuring it. And in the same way, for some of these shifts in news media outputs and stuff like that, by the time people started to recognize that something had changed, it had already been underway for a little bit. So all to say, I don’t anticipate that when an awokening happens next time, we’d be able to recognize it ahead of time necessarily, but hopefully what I think this book and the affiliated research by myself and colleagues who have been working on this over the last… That hopefully what it does is provide people with kind of a set of tools so that next time something like this has happened is happening, we can start measuring it earlier and better.
And we can avoid some of these tired tropes about “kids these days” or whatever the analog to the next big thing in technology is or whatever. And we can see that there’s probably this bigger structural story that we can be telling and looking for instead of the kind of shock present day kind of.
Matt Grossmann: So you’ve described a lot of cyclical kinds of stories, economic cycles, cultural cycles, and cycles of wokeness, but some of these trends are steadier and longer term. We’re seeing increased educational attainment. We’re seeing increased knowledge workers. The cultural issue attitudes on things like race, gender, gay rights just basically show straight lines to the left for decades. So to what extent is this a cyclical back and forth versus kind of bumps in a long time trajectory that is moving us kind of culturally leftward?
Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah. So one of the things that’s interesting… So one of the questions that I ask in the book is, “Do awokenings tend to change anything?” And the answer is basically yeah, but not much. So what awokenings don’t seem to be responsible for, for instance, is this long-term liberalizing trend. If you look at those trend lines… And I saw a lot of research that maps that very point. There’s this kind of very consistent pattern. But the fact that there is this consistent pattern that doesn’t seem to be exacerbated during these periods of awokening and also doesn’t seem to be undermined when the awokenings fade out suggests that the awokenings themselves are basically a sideshow. They’re orthogonal to this other… That’s just a completely different thing. The awokenings aren’t driving that. People can’t take credit for that in their social justice advocacy and whatever. They’re clearly not responsible for it.
And instead, the attitudinal changes that do seem to correspond to an awokening tend to peter out when the awokening happen as the awokening does. So for instance, if you look at public concern about racism… “How big of a problem is racism right now?” If you ask that question, then you do see spikes with… When the media talks a lot about racism and discrimination, the public goes, “Oh, racism and discrimination is a big problem.” And then when they stop talking about that, the public stops thinking it’s a big problem. So you do see that kind of correlating pretty cleanly with things like coverage in the news.
And so those do seem to be driven by the awokenings, but again, that’s not a deep change in anyone’s attitudes or beliefs. That’s just a question about the current state of affairs, and these kind of deeper trends about what do people fundamentally value, what do they believe in, how willing are they to date or marry someone who’s of a different race than them or of the same sex as them, these kinds of questions, they don’t seem to be driven in a meaningful way by the awokenings. One thing that you do see often is you see the creation of new opportunities and new jobs, new types of jobs, even in some cases, to help companies and institutions more conspicuously demonstrate their magnanimity. So you see growing DEI apparatuses and things like this a lot of times corresponding to these awokenings.
But those jobs… One, a lot of those programs that are created don’t benefit ordinary people much, let alone the least disadvantaged in society. I mean, a lot of diversity training, as I’ve shown in some of my work, just doesn’t work or is even counterproductive. But then also a lot of the new opportunities that are created are often restricted to degree holders or they occur within the context of these symbolic professions. And so they don’t actually trickle down to most workers or most Americans in any meaningful sense. The people who benefit the most from them are people who are already relatively well-advantaged. So it helps elites from historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups enhance their own position or reproduce that position for their children. And maybe you could tell a story about how that’s in some way resonant with social justice or something like that. But it doesn’t really help the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society and doesn’t change much for most people and how they go about their lives and the realities that they have to contend with. It’s just primarily elite spaces that change.
Matt Grossmann: So you tell stories that are kind of consistent with there being a trade-off sort of between cultural and economic liberalism, or at least the symbolic capitalists pushing this symbolic or cultural liberalism, seem to have economic interests that are not necessarily aligned with moving leftward economically. So I wonder about that potential trade-off. First, how kind of inherent is it? At least in the public, we are actually seeing the most educated people once they affiliate with the Democratic Party on cultural issues actually move leftward on economic issues as well. And I guess, I don’t necessarily take it as bad faith as you seem to imply, that is maybe these people just are cultural liberals. They’re not concerned with the broader economic structure that you’re concerned with. They happen to be concerned with whether women in the professions get equal access. They’re concerned with environmentalism, but that doesn’t necessarily bring along the rest of the agenda of the traditional left.
Musa Al-Gharbi: Well, I think one problem with that posture is that if you’re only concerned about the cultural stuff but not the structural stuff, then it actually prevents it. So for instance, if you’re concerned about racialized inequality, but you don’t really care that much about economic distribution and the way institutions actually work and things like this, then your concern about racial inequality is never actually going to do much to help African Americans or Hispanics or indigenous Americans. If you’re just focused on the culture stuff, then the ground of solutions that you’ll propose are things like helping people feel better, like let’s recognize them, let’s applaud, let’s uplift, let’s send some validating messages to people and all of this. But that doesn’t necessarily solve the concrete problems that the populations you’re concerned about have to face. And it certainly doesn’t do anything to actually change the dynamics of who’s winning in the economy, who’s losing, and so on and so forth. So that’s one problem.
But I will say one thing that I try to argue in the book is that I actually don’t think that people are cynical. I actually agree with you. I think most people who espouse social justice views do believe them. They believe them sincerely. They’re deeply committed to them. I don’t think that symbolic capitalists are insincere in wanting oppressed people to be liberated and wanting the people who are suffering to not suffer and wanting marginalized people to enjoy lives of dignity. I don’t think that’s cynical. And I think actually one of the ways the conversation goes awry sometimes is there’s this kind of bifurcation in a lot of people’s minds and in the pop culture where either someone is pursuing a set of goals, is saying something to pursue their interests, or they really believe it. But I don’t think that’s actually the best way to think about thinking. There’s a lot of research that suggests that our cognitive perceptual systems, so the way that we perceive the world at a fundamental level, the ways that we reason about the world are fundamentally geared towards advancing our interests and furthering our goals.
And if we accept that story, which I think the balance of evidence strongly suggests that we should accept that story about how we think and perceive the world… If we accept that story, then there’s not actually a tension in someone believing something sincerely and also using that thing to advance their interests. If someone has an interest in believing something, they would actually be more likely to believe that thing sincerely and they would be more likely to encourage other people to believe that thing too. There’s not a tension here in holding views and mobilizing them in ways that advance your interests while also being sincere. And I think the real source of the tension, the real source is that while symbolic capitalists, while these professionals are sincerely committed to social justice, they’re also sincerely committed to being elites. They want other people to defer to them. They want to have a higher standard of living than most people. They feel like they deserve it. They want their children to be able to reproduce their own place in society or even do better.
And these tensions, these beliefs, both are sincere, but they’re in fundamental conflict. You can’t really be an egalitarian social climber, right? You can’t. And so this tension between two sincere beliefs, the sincere and very committed desire to be an elite and the sincere and very committed desire towards social justice, these two drives are in fundamental tension. And this tension has basically defined these professions from the beginning and continues to define them today. And one consequence is what I argue in the book is when these priorities come into do directly clash with each other as they often do, it’s typically the desire to be an elite and to enhance our own position. That’s the one that tends to win out typically. And so that transforms, it kind of supervenes on how we pursue social justice. It kind of transforms how we do that, pushing us to look at these largely symbolic things that don’t actually require us to change anything about how we live, about what our aspirations are, about what we want for our children.
It leads us to do these kinds of approaches to social justice that don’t require us to sacrifice anything ourselves or even expropriate blame to other people. And so for instance, one thing I highlight in the book is that symbolic capitalists really like to focus on the millionaires and the billionaires as Bernie Sanders put it until he became a millionaire and then announced it’s just the billionaires, I guess. But you can’t actually understand, as Richard Reeves and others have highlighted, you can’t actually understand a lot of the trends about declining social mobility, growing inequality and so on. You can actually understand a lot of these trends only looking at the top 1% or the top 5% or something like that. You actually need to zoom out to include the upper middle class. So for instance, one example that I highlight in the book is that when you look at the beginning of these professions, along the same time that you saw the creation of big philanthropy, as we understand it today, along the same time that you saw the passing of the income tax, which allowed us to start taxing the Gilded Age elites.
And okay, as Randall Collins pointed out in his book the Credential Society, the main wealth transfer that actually occurred during that period was from the rich to the upper middle class. Symbolic capitalists basically took to the rich and gave to ourselves in the name of giving to everyone else. And you see the same kind of thing happen a lot. This is one of the reasons why communist revolutions rarely work out as planned is because the whole movement is predicated on there being this group of people who are intellectual, who are kind of technocratic elites, who will take the resources from the rich and then reallocate them evenly according to people’s needs. And then taking not one extra dime for themselves, not one dime for their children, not one dime for the communities that they live in and then just abolish, like resign from their position and live amongst everyone else’s equals.
That would never happen because these institutions are filled with people. And in fact, as I argue these, the people who get drawn into these professional roles in some cases tend to be more of status-obsessed with others, more extreme than others and so on and so forth. And so some of these problems that are human nature that are just part of human nature are even worse with us. They are with most people. And so this fantasy that somehow if we just tax these millionaires and billionaires enough that this will solve all the world’s problems and we don’t need to change anything that it’s just that, it’s a fantasy. In so many senses, we are actually a big part of the problem for the social problems that we’re concerned about.
Matt Grossmann: Talk about how this plays out differently in non-white communities versus white communities. Obviously from a political perspective, we’re seeing big divides within the white communities and some threats that those same divides would extend to minority communities. And if they did, it would work out poorly for the Democratic Party. And we might be in the midst of some of those changes. But also the rise in a more diverse elite seems to be part of the process by which we get these kinds of revolutions. So what is their role in your process?
Musa Al-Gharbi: Well, I mean, I think one thing that’s important to recognize is that by a lot of measures, if you look at, for instance, black-white wealth disparities or the share of African-Americans who are in prison and so on and so forth, by a lot of measures, things are not much better or in some cases are worse than they were in the 1960s at the time, in some cases they’re better than they were in the late ’80s and early ’90s. So you do see some progress, but still the baselines today are the same or worse than they were in the 1960s when the shift really got underway.
And part of the reason why we see this lack of progress is because the shifts to focusing on things like credentials, especially credentials from elite schools, as it’s no longer the case that people can just exclude women or exclude non-whites from professional jobs. And not only can’t they, in most cases, they wouldn’t want to. In fact, they would be horrified. A lot of most contemporary people would be horrified if they found compelling evidence and did come to believe that they made a decision about hiring or promotion that was sexist or racist in some way. If they came to believe that about themselves, they would be horrified. So it’s not even that they’re secretly racist or something like that.
But because of the ways, because of how history has played out in the United States up to now, there are these systematic differences and who has access to education and who doesn’t, who has access to elite education and who doesn’t, who tends to flourish in educational institutions when they get folded into them and who doesn’t. So for instance, black men drop out at much higher rates, and overall about 40% of people who start college drop out. Those rates are much higher with African-Americans, especially African-American men. And so as a result of the fact that we increasingly use degrees now, college degrees to decide who’s worth listening to, who’s worth hiring, whose perspectives are worth taking seriously, as Bertrand Cooper put it, George Floyd, if he was alive, could never be right for the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Atlantic. He could never produce an HBO show after he died because he didn’t have a college degree.
But after he died, all of us are making things in his memory. But were he alive? No one cares about him. No one’s going to give him a perspective because he doesn’t have a degree. And so to the extent that college degrees are increasingly used as a way of sorting in this way, who gets to have good, well paying stable jobs and who doesn’t? Who’s worth taking seriously and who doesn’t? Because those educational attainment tracks closely on things like race and class and things like this. The consequences, the kind of meritocratic system we have today ends up reproducing a lot of the racialized inequalities that we saw before. It’s no longer the case that those inequalities are the product of explicit racial willful discrimination against non-whites. But the practical consequence is basically the same. And so this is one of the unfortunate aspects. Now that said, as you noted there, it is the case that the elite strata of society, even as things are not changing much for a lot of kind of normie African-Americans or normie Hispanics, in fact in some measures are getting worse.
It is the case that the elite strata of society is getting more diverse. But even there, one thing that I highlight in the book that people don’t talk about a lot, but is actually it’s important for understanding some of these trends that you talked about and things like voting alignments and stuff like that, is that when you look at which African-Americans specifically tend to be folded to the symbolic professions, who’s actually filling these elite jobs? It isn’t non-immigrant, mono-racial black people. It isn’t Americans who are descendants of slaves. It’s mostly people who are half white like myself, or people who are of recent immigrant backgrounds, people who are Afro-Caribbean, people who are of recent African background and so on and so forth, sort of non-mixed mono-racial African, non-immigrant African-Americans are not really being folded into elite spaces in much higher numbers than they used to be. And so these differences matter, and they kind of manifest.
And as you noted, growing numbers of African-Americans, growing numbers of Hispanics, growing numbers of other racial and ethnic minorities, especially people who work in jobs where they’re providing physical goods and services to people or people who live in communities that are more distant, like sociologically and socioeconomically distant from the knowledge economy. A lot of racial and ethnic minorities and those who fall into those categories have been… It seems like they’re shifting towards the Republican Party for the same reason that less educated white voters are shifting to the Republican Party and because they feel alienated in many respects from the Democratic Party, either as a result of their policy platforms, as a result of their messaging. Increasingly the Democratic Party is adopted messaging that’s supposed to appeal to people like us symbolic capitalists. But that’s not messaging that tends to resonate with normies typically. But as a result of myriad factors, it seems that less educated Americans, Americans who work in the physical industries, Americans who are more sociologically distant from us, do seem to be shifting towards the Republican Party across racial and ethnic arts.
Matt Grossmann: So you look at this not just as an individual level phenomenon, but also look at institutions in geographic areas that are becoming more rich, white and blue, and thinking about how people are affected by their context and your own shift in context from very different cultural areas. So I talk a little bit about the cultural or collective aspect of this and differentiate it from the view that we hear from the right that this was a planned and successful long march through the institutions.
Musa Al-Gharbi: One of the things that frustrates me about some of the narratives on the right today, and actually one way that I hope my book is a useful intervention into the public discussion about a lot of things is that, for instance, Christopher Rufo’s new book, what is it? America’s Cultural Revolution or Richard Hanania’s book, the Origins of Woke, both of them in different ways, trace what you call wokeness today to the 1960s. So Hanania argues it was civil rights law, Title 9, things like this. Rufo argues, it was kind of activists who folded themselves into the academy and started this long march through institutions that… Okay, so one of the things that I show is actually the story is older than that.
These trends actually didn’t start in the 1960s. And so therefore the explanations that you’re using about why these trends are happening are probably wrong or insufficient. And then similarly, the solutions that you’re putting forward to address this, to the extent that people think wokeness is a problem, are not likely to actually mitigate the problem. And some of the stories that… So for instance, Rufo… So one of my advisors and one of the people on the dissertation committee for this book, Fabio Rojas, he’s at Indiana Bloomington, he’s a sociologist. He studies social movements. He has a great book called From Black Power to Black Studies that looks at how a lot of activists as the civil rights movement started hitting a brick wall and kind of petering out. A lot of activists did try to fold themselves into the academy and launch these new centers and institutions and all of this.
That’s true. But what people like Rufo miss is that for one, from the beginning, a lot of these centers were created as basically intellectual ghettos that are kind of quarantined off from the life of the academy as a whole. If you ask anyone who works at a gender and women’s studies department, if they’re the ones calling the shots at their university, they’re not… Universities care about the departments and institutions that are having high enrollment and they’re bringing in tons of external money and things like that, the business school, the law school, and so on and so forth. It’s not gender and women’s studies that they’re like, “Oh, how can we accommodate you?”
And a lot of the, in virtue of working in these subfields and publishing in these journals, they actually end up marginalizing themselves basically getting quarantined off and not affecting so much the kind of broad narratives and economics or sociology and so on and so forth, as much as they would if they were just part of regular departments taking part in regular conversations. So that’s one part of the problem. The second part of the problem is that he lumps all this stuff together. Like he says, “DEI also comes from the activist protesters,” but it’s not. The creation of diversity training programs predates the 1960s. It goes back to T-groups back in the ’50s and ’40s, and in some cases the ’30s. There were efforts to pilot what became known as diversity training, so there’s just like… Okay, so one thing that I hope is that by taking this longer historical view and by focusing on these kind of structural drivers, we can actually kind of recognize the shortcomings of some of these narratives on the right.
And then another thing that I think is important to recognize is that the idea that the awokenings are some kind of a… Like Vivek Ramaswamy also argued basically, in his book, Woke, Inc, his argument is that the Great Awokening was basically a plot cooked up by Wall Street to derail the broad-based cross-class movement that was Occupy Wall Street. So they cooked up the Awokening to take the focus off the top 1%, basically.
And there’s a lot of problems with that narrative. One of them is that the people who did Occupy, the primary drivers of Occupy were also symbolic capitalists, The same people who took part in the Awokening. They’re the same people who were participating in the March for Science, who were driving Black Lives Matter, who were driving Me Too. It’s actually the same slice of society, there’s not a meaningful difference. So that’s the first problem.
And the second problem, well, the second tension with Vivek’s own argument is that he, himself, is a capitalist and he’s unapologetically opposed to socialism, but he’s also opposed to wokeness. But if wokeness is preventing the rise of socialism and helping the capitalists do capitalism, then what’s the problem exactly? There’s this kind of deep tension in his own argument.
Anyway, what I hope, what I do hope is that this book, looking, taking the longer historical view, focusing on these structural things can help provide a different way of thinking and talking about these issues. So things like the Civil Rights Movement and Title IX mattered. It was the case that a lot of people who were former activists did become scholars and launch some of these programs. But that doesn’t really explain as much as, these things don’t really explain as much as people on the right seem to think they do.
And as a result of misdiagnosing the cause of these things, they also, again, their solutions, you can cut all the DEI programs in the world, but that doesn’t change the fact that symbolic capitalists have this profound drive to distinguish themselves from others, to outcompete them and so on by appealing to social justice. Their whole professions are oriented around social justice. Unless you fundamentally change the structure and legitimation of these occupations, you can eliminate this program. But you’re going to see the same thing happened later, just in a slightly different way, as it has over and over and over again since the beginning of the professions.
Matt Grossmann: So the most recent Great Awokening and some of those before it drew from campus politics to become part of our wider politics. I know you’ve been following the Gaza encampments at Columbia closely. What is the current kind of status of the relationship between campus politics and these national political trends? There was this original survey of faculty that said that they’re liberals nationally, but they’re conservative on campus, they want things to kind of stay the same. Is that still true?
Musa Al-Gharbi: Well, one of the things that’s interesting, when you look at the difference between students and faculty is actually students are a lot more ideologically diverse than faculty are. So if you look at the political alignments of college students or the ideological alignments of college students, you have a lot more of them who identify as conservative or Republican. You have a lot more of them that identify as moderate or centrist compared to college professors. So the sense in which college professors are conservative isn’t in the traditional ideological or political sense. It’s in the sense of we’re the ones who are currently in charge and calling the shots. We like that arrangement. We would rather that not change. So yeah, in that sense, sure, they’re conservative, but that shouldn’t be conflated with conservative in the…
One thing that I do highlight in the book, in a lot of ways, I think the… And I wrote an article about this for Compact Magazine. In a lot of ways, I think the Gaza encampment protests and the kind of cultural tumult around them are actually a perfect illustration of a lot of the things that I highlight in the book, a lot of the trends that I highlight in the book.
For instance, at Columbia and NYU and other schools, they brand themselves as places for social justice, as committed to social justice and activism. The brochures say, “We have proud traditions of activism here, proud traditions of protest. Come here and be part of these big social movements and transform the world.” Yale, in their… A Yale admissions officer wrote this whole essay during the George Floyd protests about how not only are they not going to punish people who have criminal records as a result of participating in the George Floyd protests, they’ll probably be advantaged because here at Yale, they expect and demand that people who take part, who want to be part of the Yale community are well-versed and committed to social justice and so on and so forth.
But then they responded in a very aggressive and authoritarian way to the protests that were happening and in many cases, refused to even meaningfully engage with or what the student’s demands. And I think a lot of the demands were misguided or not well thought through, as I illustrate.
For instance, a lot of students were saying their tuition shouldn’t go paying for investments in companies that are promoting war. They don’t. Most students’ tuition doesn’t even cover… The share of students who pay full tuition is very small. Most students, tuition doesn’t even cover their own costs of attending. The endowments are not created by tuition. The endowments are what they use to allow students to not pay full tuition. So they actually have the relationship kind of reversed, like the reason why they can actually afford to go to the school is because of the endowments, not their tuitions.
But for all of that, so I think some of the protest demands were misguided or whatever. But I think me personally, I’ve written a lot, just to put my own cards on the table, about how I think that the Biden administration’s current policy in Gaza is, frankly, contemptible, is unfortunate. It’s not achieving its own goals, it’s not achieving Israel’s stated goals. It’s just bad for everyone and should change.
But I think that the way that these protests played out on college campuses is a nice encapsulation of how you have this kind of weird melange of people engaging in various forms of activism for clouts without meaningfully putting skin in the game and institutions signaling their commitment to social justice. But then when it comes to making any kind of substantive, meaningful change, or even, for that matter, just engaging with the students that they encouraged to do protests, they declined to do that.
But as far as the question about the broader political change, the relationship between us and everyone else, I think that’s also an important thing to… So one thing that I argue in the book is that the gap between symbolic capitalists, so the gap between these knowledge economy professionals and everyone else in society is already tends to be big during all times. Just in general, we have very different ways of talking and thinking about the social world. We have kind of different priorities, we have different political leanings than most other Americans. That’s true most of the time.
But during these periods of awokening, so like starting after 2010, in the most recent case, the gaps between us and other Americans grow because we shift a lot while most other Americans don’t. And we often misperceive what’s happening here. We see the gaps between us and other people growing, and we assume it must be because those people are getting more radical and authoritarian and racist and whatever. Even though when you look at the data, they’re clearly not. Republicans have been getting warmer on race, warmer on gender, warmer on so many things. And the reason the gaps between Democrats and Republicans are growing is because Democrats are shifting in the same direction, but much, much, much faster. So the gaps between us and other people grow bigger during these periods.
And they also grow more salient because we become much more militant and confronting and demonizing and denigrating and censoring and trying to purge people who disagree with us. So people pay more attention to the fact that we are not aligned with them, so the gap is always bigger. It gets bigger and people pay attention to it more during these periods of awokening. And that creates an opportunity for political entrepreneurs on the right to basically campaign by trying to bring people like us, by bringing knowledge economy institutions and professionals, to bring them to heel, to bring them back under control, to have them focus on what they’re supposed to be doing and so on and so forth.
So you see that in the Contemporary Republican Party with the rise of people like DeSantis, with growing distrust in science and expertise, growing polarization around institutions of higher learning or around scientists, not necessarily science. Americans still overwhelmingly trust science per se, but they don’t trust the people scientists as Matt Motta and others have illustrated.
Yeah, so that is one unfortunate consequence of the, or unfortunate for us, consequence of the awokenings, is that they do tend to create greater alienation and mistrust among Americans as a whole with respect to us and our outputs and our institutions. They do create an opportunity for political entrepreneurs to create opportunities for themselves by basically trying to find ways to censor us or cut our stuff or slash our budgets, erode the freedoms that we take for granted because we’re not ostensibly fulfilling our responsibilities.
And also, they do tend to actually give rise to parallel infrastructures of knowledge production in some cases. So for instance, in the aftermath of the 1960s Great Awokening, there was a perception that academia was lost. It’s irredeemable. So you saw the creation increasingly of right aligned think tanks, Heritage, Cato, others later. And then in the aftermath of the late ’80s, early ’90s awokening, there was a perception that the media was lost. So you saw the creation of Fox News and other kind of right-leaning media outlets in the aftermath of that. In the current one, you see these moves to create right-leaning social media spaces like Rumble or the anti-woke takeover of Twitter or Donald Trump’s purchase of Truth Social.
And the problem for us is that those institutions have basically an existential stake. The way that they get eyeballs and viewers, the way that they continue to get funding is by undermining and villainizing mainstream institutions and trying to foment the culture wars indefinitely. So the way Fox News gets eyeballs and viewers is to constantly paint mainstream media as corrupt and out of touch. And they’re eating the mainstream media’s lunch. They’re the dominant, the number one network compared to CNN or MSNBC in terms of total viewership.
So to the extent that we create this mistrust, to the extent that people do have the perception that our institutions are out of control or corrupt or lost or whatever, that actually tends to have non-trivial, largely negative consequences for our institutions, both in the short term, because there are these budget cuts and attempts to erode our freedoms and liberties of out of control knowledge, but then also because there’s often the creation of these parallel infrastructures who exist primarily to sow mistrust in us and take away people’s eyeballs and attentions and stuff from our outputs to focus on theirs.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center. I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website. How Misperceptions and Online Norms Drive Cancel Culture. The Influence of Twitter on Journalism and Politics. How Debates Over Diversity and Equity Came to Dominate University Politics. Are We Overproducing Elites and Instability? And Has American Business Turned Left?
Thanks to Musa Al-Gharbi for joining me. Please check out We Have Never Been Woke, and then listen in next time.