Most attacks on wokeness come from the right. To conservatives, the woke are dangerous because they’re sincerely committed to bad ideas—make every decision based on identity instead of merit, defund the police, speak in insufferable jargon to top it off—and push them through their positions in HR departments and government bureaucracies throughout the country. Columbia sociologist Musa al-Gharbi comes at the issue from a different angle in his intriguing new book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.
To al-Gharbi, wokeness is little more than a spectacle, a way for "symbolic capitalists"—educated folks who earn their living with symbols such as words and numbers, rather than with their hands—to enhance their elite status without tangibly addressing the inequality they act so upset about (yet benefit from). Woke elites don’t consciously think of their motives this way, of course. But it’s a helpful lens through which to analyze their behavior.
The book’s second chapter provides al-Gharbi's most direct diagnosis of where wokeness comes from. Echoing my Manhattan Institute colleague Eric Kaufmann, he points out that "Great Awokenings"—sudden onsets of intense concern about prejudice and discrimination, concentrated among educated professionals—have happened at numerous points in American history. They go at least as far back as the 1920s and ’30s, and are measurable through trends in media, entertainment, voting, and more.
One such spike occurred in the mid-1960s (mostly after the major civil-rights victories occurred), for example, and another in the late 1980s and early ’90s (the days of "PC"). The current Awokening showed its earliest signs with the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, continued via the rise of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, peaked in the summer of 2020, and has only recently begun to peter out.
The common thread among these periods isn’t that bigotry intensified and socially conscious young people rose to address the problem. The common thread, al-Gharbi contends, is that symbolic capitalists felt threats to their social position and adopted radical views in response. Poor economic trends, including recessions, collided with the "overproduction" of elites with fancy degrees who couldn’t find jobs they felt were worthy of them, and sometimes also with the threat of being drafted and sent to war. They dropped their activism not after accomplishing anything for the oppressed, but when their own worries abated.
In the 1960s, for example, huge numbers of students enrolled to avoid the draft (an exemption that was limited in 1965, making the war even more salient to the elite demographic), leading to a large supply of college graduates expecting jobs appropriate to their credentials shortly thereafter. The PC wave around 1990 was less severe than the others, but also accompanied economic hiccups, cuts to university budgets, and intensifying competition from international students. The most recent Awokening, of course, has its roots in the Great Recession and the attendant spike in college enrollment (since going directly to work is a bad option in a bad economy), a growing gap between the number of graduates that colleges churn out and the number of jobs that actually require a degree, and widespread complaints about student-loan debt.
Woke protesters may sincerely believe in their causes. But educated elites are less eager to dismantle the system when their positions in society are assured.
Through the rest of the book, al-Gharbi explores the phenomenon of wokeness in many other ways, drawing on both big-picture social theories and empirical research. There’s no way to do justice to every last topic in a brief review, but of special note is the chapter outlining the concept of "totemic capital," in which those who can even dubiously claim to be part of oppressed groups—Native American, black, queer—gain status in elite circles from doing so. It is, in essence, a victimhood Olympics.
Oddly enough, the weakest point of We Have Never Been Woke is that al-Gharbi can be relentlessly harsh on the woke, and on symbolic capitalists more broadly—jumping to explain away any genuine sacrifice they might make while casting even their shopping habits as deeply problematic. Hardly a conservative, al-Gharbi would clearly prefer a non-woke brand of leftism, one more directly focused on improving material conditions for the less well-off. One gets the sense it would be very difficult to rise to his standards.
For all their performative nonsense, one might ask, don’t woke people vote for the party of sky-high federal social spending, and also live in states and localities that charge high taxes to fund a more generous safety net? Agree or disagree with their politics, they’re putting some money where their mouths are. As al-Gharbi explains, woke obsessions can also distract the Democratic Party from bread-and-butter concerns, everyday people might prefer higher wages to raw redistribution, and local taxes aren’t as progressive as federal ones.
What about if they donate to charity? Well, symbolic capitalists probably don’t as much as other groups do, and they're more likely than the less well-off to recoup some of that money through a tax deduction. How about my woke friend who works for pennies at a nonprofit? Often, such people can do that only because they have rich families or partners, and maybe they’re trying to leverage the position into a high-paying job later, which isn't a path available to the less fortunate. Is it really so terrible for a wealthy urbanite to protest something like the murder of George Floyd? Getting drivers to honk won’t reform the police—and did you hear about the libs on the Upper West Side, who, despite all their sign-waving about Floyd, didn’t want the hotels in their neighborhood converted to homeless shelters to slow the spread of COVID? Doesn’t sound woke to me!
Al-Gharbi also spends a considerable amount of space emphasizing that symbolic capitalists are heavy users of low-wage labor through companies such as Uber, GrubHub, and Amazon. That’s a problem because these arrangements are exploitative—a concept repeatedly invoked here but never quite defined. It seems to translate roughly as "any economic transaction involving someone who makes less than you do," because just about everyone is exploited to a degree in al-Gharbi's framework: Higher-ranking symbolic capitalists exploit the lower-ranking ones whose job is to execute their vision; even contingent college faculty are "exploited relative to tenured and tenure-track professors."
Living up to the standards of wokeness would be exhausting. But al-Gharbi's standards seem to recommend a vow of poverty. Maybe learning all those goofy pronouns wouldn’t be so bad after all!
Yet one needn’t subscribe to al-Gharbi's entire worldview to gain a lot from We Have Never Been Woke, which provides a fascinating analysis drawing from both philosophy and empirical research. No one has done a better job of pointing out the chasm between the educated left’s behavior and its alleged goal of equality.
We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
by Musa al-Gharbi
Princeton University Press, 432 pp., $35
Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.