Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist with a unique, albeit controversial, take on the idea of "wokeness," which is laid out in his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Essentially al-Gharbi argues that among elites, a kind of social justice language has come to be important for maintaining and enhancing their status but has little to do with meaningfully advancing justice in the real world. He points out the contradiction between the embrace of "woke" language among many elites and their behavior. They are not, he says, and have never been, woke in any real sense, and conservatives are missing what is actually going on when they treat these people as dangerous radicals. Instead, al-Gharbi argues, there is nothing radical at all about the strands of "wokeness" found in the Ivy League.

Al-Gharbi joins today to answer some probing questions, like: how do we know that the use of this language is an effort at self-advancement rather than a good-faith presentation of a set of ideas that should be judged on their merits? While al-Gharbi is a critic of much contemporary social justice discourse, he is a constructive critic who shares the goal of achieving a society free of racial and economic injustice. This makes his criticism all the more interesting and worth engaging with.

Nathan J. Robinson

I actually want to start with the election. You recently wrote on your Substack a long dissection of the election called "A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives." And the reason that I would like to ask you a couple of things about the election is first, one of our writers, Alex Bronzini-Vender, who's about 18 years old, went to a presentation you gave recently on the election and said it was the best breakdown of the election he had seen anywhere, by anyone. And also, the thing that happened in the presidential election is closely related to what you write about in the book. There's all this commentary on the fact that Kamala Harris won among rich people, and Donald Trump made a lot of inroads among working-class people, including among working-class Black and Latino people, and all of this talk of, my god, but if Trump is a racist and the Democrats are the party of the people and Trump is the candidate of the billionaire elites, what the hell is going on here? So, give us your answer to, what the hell is going on here? and also what is being talked about as the realignment in this election.

Musa Al-Gharbi 

I published this essay on my Substack just yesterday or so. But I've actually written the same essay three times. I wrote the same essay after the 2020 election and after the 2016 election, producing the same kinds of charts to push back against the same kinds of narratives and so on. And so I mention this only because one of the things that's clear in a lot of the graphs I show on the chart is that the trend lines that we see with working-class people, with non-white people and so on, is they're not actually unique to this cycle. They've been going on for a while, for about a decade. And for this reason, the fact that we see these same patterns in basically every midterm and general election since 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024, when they had very different candidates on the ballot each time with very different kinds of issues that people were talking about in each of these races—the fact that we see these same trend lines suggests to me that the story of what's going on here will not be best explained by pointing to something unique to this cycle, like the attributes of Kamala Harris, inflation, or whatever. Instead, it seems like there's some bigger structural thing happening. 

Robinson

And what is the big structural thing? 

Al-Gharbi

I think there are two factors at play. One of them is that the Democratic Party in recent decades has reoriented itself around knowledge economy professionals in many ways, including its party messaging, its priorities, the kinds of issues it emphasizes and doesn't, what its platform looks like, what kinds of candidates it fields, and who they talk about. So the Democratic Party has reoriented itself around knowledge economy professionals. This matters because, as I show in chapter four of the book, especially for this group of elites that I call symbolic capitalists, we talk and think about politics in ways that are very different from how most other Americans talk and think about politics. And so, as the Democratic Party has reoriented itself around symbolic capitalists, many other Americans have started to feel like their values and perspectives and interests are not well aligned with the Democratic Party, and they've been migrating the other way.

And I think this is actually a story of alienation from the Democratic Party, rather than a story about some kind of unique attributes about Trump and his policies. Because again, this migration started before Trump was on the ballot. So it's not about Trump. It's about the Democrats. And so that's, I think, the first story.

And then the second story is that there's this kind of backlash against the great awokening of the 2010s, which is to say, after 2010 there was this big shift in how symbolic capitalists engage in politics and talk and think about politics. As I show in the book, you can measure this change in a lot of ways. There was this dramatic change, and this period of shift that we see after 2010 is actually not new. There were three previous periods of awokening like this. So by comparing and contrasting, we can get a lot of leverage on why this happened.

One of the things that you see in the aftermath of each of the previous awokenings as well is that as they die down, they're usually followed by these significant gains for the right at the ballot box. And the reason this happens is because, again, even in ordinary times, the gap between us and other people is pretty big. During these periods of awokening, the gap grows a lot bigger because we shift radically while other people don't. But the gap doesn't just get bigger. People care about the gap more because we become more militant in policing and villainizing and demonizing and trying to censor and confront people who disagree with us. And so not only is the gap bigger, but people notice the gap more, and they care about the gap more because of how we conduct ourselves. And this creates an opportunity for political entrepreneurs usually associated with the right to basically campaign against us, saying, look, educational institutions are no longer teaching your kids useful knowledge and skills, and they're instead trying to indoctrinate them with propaganda; journalistic outlets aren't telling you the real truth, they've become a propaganda machine for the Democratic Party; there's these crazy ideologies that are being shoved down to you by these elites who don't respect you. And so this kind of narrative is not something that's unique to this moment. It's something that emerges in the aftermath of each of these awokenings, and it is usually followed by significant right-aligned gains at the ballot box.

I think these two stories—the alienation from the Democratic Party as the party has reoriented itself around a new core constituency and backlash against the awokening—are what explain some of the patterns we've seen over the last 10 years.

Robinson

Okay, I got a ton of questions for you. I want to break this down and understand it better. You talk about a reorientation itself, appealing to a new and different kind of constituency. The listeners to this program who have heard us talk several times to Thomas Frank, who wrote Listen Liberal, will be familiar with the story of the Democratic Party. His narrative is there was the New Deal coalition; this is a Democratic Party that's oriented around giving material gains to working people and the kind of neoliberal shift in the Democratic Party. When you describe the Democratic Party speaking to, appealing to, proffering policies that are designed for a different constituency and then alienating working class people, what does that look like? What are the types of policies and the ways of talking that you're referring to?

Al-Gharbi

Sure. So to start with, I think there's a great study called Commonsense Solidarity that was by Jacobin in partnership with YouGov. And one of the things that they show, for instance, is that there's this presumption that a lot of working-class people just hate gay people, hate minorities, and so on, and so the only way for the Democrats to make gains with working class people is to throw these other minorities under the bus. So what this study shows is that that's not the case, that people are misreading what the issue is. It's not the case that working-class people are hostile towards gender and sexual minorities, towards religious minorities and so on. The issue is the kinds of narratives—for symbolic capitalists, we really care a lot about leaning into these different identitarian categories we want to focus on. So we want to talk about not just injustice, but racial injustice, not just inequality, but gendered inequality. And we really want to center these identitarian framings of different social problems. And if people don't do that, if they don't talk about race per se, gender and sexuality per se, we say they're not being real, they're not being honest. When we design policies, we try to design policies around helping people from particular groups—designing policies specifically for gay people, for Black people, and so on.

Okay, working class people don't like this kind of approach at all. They are keen to see messaging and policies that try to lift everyone up, that are oriented towards common goals, shared values, and superordinate identities, what we have in common, not what's dividing us. And so to the extent that the Democratic Party has stopped doing that second thing—is doing that second thing a lot less—and is instead focusing on kind of niche constituencies and identitarian politics, that's the kind of thing that's a turn-off to working-class voters, not because they hate gender and sexual minorities, racial minorities, and so on, and they want to see them suffer and don't care about that these issues—not because of that reason—but because their idea of justice is something like equality and dignity for everybody and trying to lift everybody up through identity-neutral kinds of policies. And so this is an example of one of these differences between symbolic capitalists and normie voters.

Another one is that we aren’t the kind of people who get motivated, get jazzed up, to go to the polls and vote for symbolic stuff. A lot of symbolic capitalists were really excited about Kamala Harris and went to the polls to support Kamala Harris because she's a woman and wanted to see a woman president. That kind of symbolic crap is not a kind of thing that most other voters go to vote for. In fact, for more normie-oriented voters, one, they're less likely to vote at all, whereas we tend to vote basically no matter what—even if we hate both of the candidates, we just vote for the lesser of the two evils. That's not the way that most other voters participate in politics. They vote less because if they don't like either of the candidates, they just find something else to do on that day. And to the extent that they do participate in politics, in elections and stuff, it's usually because there's some problem that they want to see addressed, or some thing that they want to see accomplished—some practical thing. They don't engage in political action for the purpose of achieving symbolic goods. That's just not what motivates them to the ballot box. And so there are all sorts of differences like this between our psychology and our preferences and our priorities and the ways that we talk about politics versus the way that Americans who are not symbolic capitalists tend to talk and think about politics. And so as the party has become more focused on talking about issues that we care about, foregrounding the kinds of issues that we care about, and focusing on the kinds of political interests and priorities that we view as important, that's often come at the expense of support of less affluent people, racial and ethnic minorities, and so on and so forth.

Robinson

There's an important distinction in what you've been saying that I want to emphasize here. I think it might be easy for people to mistake the argument that you're making, and it's one of the reasons why those who are right-leaning and pick up your book expecting a coruscating takedown of wokeness might be unpleasantly surprised. As you've said there, you are not making the argument that working-class people don't care about gender and sexual equality, so Democrats need to go full Trump in anti-trans demagoguing if they want to win. You are not making that argument.

In fact, the argument that you're making seems to be aligned more closely with what the sort of thing that Bernie Sanders would say when he would be asked about race and gender equality, where he would pivot to universal policies that benefit everyone. You recognize that there are particular injustices that affect people based on these categories, that racial inequality is obviously very real, the racial wealth gap is real, but you try and build a broad solidaristic coalition around universal programs. And so it seems to me that what you are critiquing is not the belief that racial injustice is a serious problem in society.

You've used the word symbolic a lot, and you've also used this term symbolic capitalist, this class of people who view the correct response to that as talking about it more or changing our language. Theirs is the idea that justice is achieved in the realm of perfecting the morality of our language.

Al-Gharbi

An example of another scholar whose thinking and work influenced my own a lot is Barbara Fields. She wrote a book called Racecraft that looked at things like race-targeted programs, and she has this great argument in the book. Because of systematic disadvantages and historical disadvantages and so on, if it's the case that Black people are disproportionately likely to be lower income or poor. So if you do a policy that helps low-income and poor people across the board, guess what? Black people will disproportionately benefit from that. So you can actually address some of these identitarian things in a race neutral way. And Fields argued that not doing that is actually a form of injustice. If you're concerned about poor people, but you only help poor Black people and not poor white people—if you only target disadvantaged people based on their racial identity—what you're doing in practice is excluding many other people who are desperate for help. And as Fields argues, that doesn't seem like justice.

To look at two people who are struggling and say: you, you're Black, I'm going to help you out; you, you're white, figure it out. That doesn't seem like justice. She said that taking terms like justice and modifying them with antecedents like “racial” turns them into the opposite of what they're supposed to be. And in this case, it allows you to look at poor white people and ignore their suffering because they're white.

One of the arguments that the book makes is that, perversely, symbolic capitalists often use social justice discourse to justify inequalities and to point at the people who are losers in the system, who are suffering, who are struggling to get by, and to say, you deserve your suffering, you deserve your disadvantage, we don't owe you anything.

You can actually see it with some of the narratives around white privilege. There have been studies that show that when you teach people about white privilege, it doesn't cause them to think about or treat non-whites any differently than they used to. The main thing that happens when you teach people about white privilege, the main shift that occurs, is that they start to look at poor whites as being even more deserving of their poverty. So you were born with all this privilege—you're white and poor, well, you must really deserve your poverty. And this is a really convenient narrative for elites to hold because a plurality of poor people in the United States happen to be white, and so you can subscribe to an ideology that lets you look at the lion's share of poor people and say, actually, we don't owe them anything, we don't have to reallocate to them anything. In fact, they just squander it. They were born with all this privilege, and what did they do with it? In fact, they probably have more than they deserve because of their racial privilege. If anything, we should grind them down more and take still more for them. That's a really convenient position for elites to hold. This is an example of how a narrative, a framework of thinking and talking is, on its face, about social justice, and in practice, often gets used to justify inequalities. This is an example of one of those cultural contradictions that the book tries to explore.

Robinson

Let me not necessarily challenge that, but let's take white privilege. You're right. If you see white people as inherently privileged, and you see whiteness as making you an elite, then homeless white people who are suffering begin to seem like—well, maybe they're not fine, but certainly they've got some great asset, when in reality they don't really have much asset. On the other hand, to me, it has been very helpful to examine and think about the ways in which the fact that I am a middle-class white man gives me all sorts of interesting and kind of disturbing advantages in society. When I walk into a fancy hotel, the clerk at the desk is probably more likely to assume that I'm a guest than they would someone who isn’t white. I live in New Orleans, and I can tell that when a Black man who is not wearing the same kind of clothes I’d wear walks in, there's instantly a little bit of suspicion, a little bit of “I need to check whether this is a homeless person who belongs here or not” kind of thing that happens. White privilege seems to be a real thing. The wealth gap is real.

Al-Gharbi

Yes. The book spends a lot of time, for instance, looking at systematic inequalities that track along the lines of race and gender. In fact, one of the things the book shows is that racialized inequalities are actually more pronounced in the symbolic professions, in these professions where almost everyone subscribes to left-leaning ideology. These are actually some of the most hierarchical and parochial spaces in the entire world. That is to say that I think racialized disadvantages and advantages are real. To the consternation of especially some of the right-leaning critics, I don't argue in the book that white privilege isn't a thing, this is all dumb, it's all fake, or anything like that. I'm more looking at, what are the practical effects? How does this stuff work in the world, in theory?

One could think, oh, well, white privilege, educating people about these advantages they have might lead them to behave differently—if they understand these advantages they have that other people don't have, maybe they would behave differently towards non-whites and would reallocate more towards non-whites, to equalize things more, or something like that. In theory, we assume that's what would happen when you teach people about white privilege. In practice, that's not what happens. What ends up happening in practice is that people who internalize these narratives about white privilege don't change much at all about how they actually behave and interact in the world, about their allocation of resources, or anything like that. They don't change anything at all about what they do. They just look at poor whites and go, oh, well, those people deserve it. And so, yes, in principle, I agree. I agree that people have different advantages.

I spend a little bit of time talking in the book about these advantages that people have on the basis of their attributes. Often the narrative about racial privilege is that all white people have the same privilege in virtue of their race. So if you're a white professional who lives in a city like Atlanta with a large Black population—you're an affluent white person in a city with a large Black population—then you have the same benefit based on your race as someone who's a poor person living in a community that's basically all white, where you have no one to even exert your privilege over. In reality, these kinds of unearned advantages—the level of advantage you have based on these attributes—actually are, importantly, context dependent. It's just not the case that there's this uniform privilege.

Sometimes, even to the extent that there's truth in a lot of these narratives, we often choose to talk about them in these really ham-fisted ways that, if anything, can obscure important differences. In reality, it's the case that the kind of people who become symbolic capitalists, white people who live in major urban areas and have relatively affluent incomes, actually have more white privilege than most other white people in America. That is to say, they actually benefit from their race. They have more overt advantages, in practice, based on their race than most other Americans do because of the communities that they live in and the kind of income that they have and the fact they're surrounded by other people who are less affluent and desperate that they can exploit. But they have the capacity to exploit in a way that other people just don't, regardless of what's in their heart and mind. And so, yes, I think that the white privilege as an analytic frame can be useful if we're thoughtful and apply it in a more nuanced way.

Robinson

You've used the term symbolic capitalist a number of times, and I think some of our listeners will need a little more explication of what you mean. They may not have ever heard that term before in their lives.

Al-Gharbi 

The “we” in We Have Never Been Woke refers to symbolic capitalists. And so this is an elite constellation. Symbolic capitalists have been called other names. They've been called the professional managerial class, the creative class, the new class. I'd be happy to talk about this, but why I didn't use one of these class-based terms is because, as a sociologist, I don't think this elite constellation is a class. But they've been known by other names. And basically, symbolic capitalists are people who make a living based on manipulating data and symbols, ideas and rhetoric, narratives and so on. So people who are not providing physical goods and services to people. You can think about people who work in fields like consulting, finance, law, education, media, science and technology, or human resources, and so on and so forth. People who make a living based on what they know, who they know, and how they're known. So those folks are symbolic capitalists.

One unusual thing—well, there are a lot of things that are unusual about symbolic capitalists—but one of the things that's most interesting for the purposes of this book and its arguments is that a lot of the symbolic professions, from the beginning of these professions, have defined themselves in terms of altruism and the common good. So journalists, for instance, are supposed to speak truths to power and be a voice for the voiceless. And from the beginning of these professions, the kind of unusual pay, autonomy, and prestige that symbolic capitalists tend to enjoy compared to pretty much all other workers is something we've justified on the basis of this altruism. We said, the reason you should give us this pay, this prestige, this freedom that we have that other workers don't have is not for us. It's because, well, everyone will be better off if you give us these things, especially the marginalized and disadvantaged in society.

And when you look today at who in America is most likely to self-identify as anti-racist, as an environmentalist, as an ally to LGBTQ people, as a feminist and so on, it's symbolic capitalists. And so what you might expect is that as people like us have gained more power and influence over society, a lot of long-standing social problems would be ameliorated, and we'd see growing trust in institutions because of all the great work that we're doing. But that's not what we see. We see increasing institutional mistrust, increasing institutional dysfunction. A lot of these social problems have persisted or grown worse. We see increasing affective polarization in the United States, growing inequalities, and so on.

And so the kind of main puzzle that the book is trying to figure out here is basically like, what's going on with that? Why do we see what we actually see, instead of what we had hoped or expected we would see? As symbolic capitalists, we said, if you give us more power and influence, all these good things would happen. We got more power and influence. Things went the other way. And so what the book is trying to figure out is, why is that?

Robinson 

One of your explanations is that this group of people is not particularly  interested, actually, in ameliorating serious inequality. They are more interested in their own social status, or at least certainly put it first. I'll quote a quite strong statement from you on page 14:

“Liberals exploit social justice advocacy to make themselves feel good, but ultimately offer little more than symbolic gestures and platitudes to redress the material harms they decry and often exacerbate.”

So this class of people that you're identifying professes to care about serious inequalities but ultimately is more interested in the professing than in the correct thing.

Al-Gharbi 

Yes. I think that most symbolic capitalists, when they say that they want the poor to be uplifted, they want the marginalized in society to be included and to live lives of dignity, I don't think we're lying about that, per se. I don't think that we're saying that in a cynical way, although we do use social justice discourse to advance our own ends. There's this tendency in the discourse to basically say, look, if you can prove that someone has an interest in believing something, if you can show that they're mobilizing something in the service of their own advantage, then you go, aha, I've got you, you've been exposed, you must be a cynic. But I think that that's actually kind of a bad way to think about it.

There's all this research in the cognitive and behavioral sciences that suggests that our cognitive and perceptual systems are fundamentally geared at a really foundational level towards helping us advance our interests and further our goals. At any given moment, I'm confronted with a whole ton of stuff, and I can't pay attention to it all. I have to make decisions about what to focus on or not. I can't remember everything I'm presented with. I have to make decisions about what to retain or not. I have to organize all the stuff I'm seeing into some picture. And we don't do this in a random or disinterested way. We organize the world. We choose what to focus on, what to remember. We organize this stuff. And it happens like this, but we do it in a way that helps us advance our self-interest, further our goals, flatter our self-image, help other people think better of us, and so on. That's just how we think. That's how we perceive the world and how we think about the world. And it takes a lot of effort, both with ourselves and other people, to even be able to step outside of that.

And if we take this literature seriously, which I think we should, then we can see there's actually not a contradiction between believing something sincerely and using it instrumentally to advance your interests. If you have an interest in believing something, you'd actually be more likely to believe it sincerely and passionately and to try to get other people to believe it, too. And so in the case of social justice discourse, the problem is that our sincere commitments to social justice are not our only sincere commitments. We also really want to be elites, which is to say, we think that our perspectives, priorities, and preferences should count more than the person who's checking out our groceries. We think that we should enjoy a higher standard of living than a person delivering our packages, and we want our kids to reproduce our own position or do even better. And this set of commitments, which is also super sincere, is in fundamental tension with the other. It's hard to be an egalitarian and a social climber at the same time. Those are two drives that are in fundamental tension.

And so what the book argues is that when they do come into conflict, as they often do, it's the desire to be an elite that ends up winning out, and it transforms how we pursue social justice, leading us to basically try to pursue social justice through ways that don't cost us anything or risk anything on our part or require us to change anything, or make painful risks or sacrifices for us, our children, our families, or our own aspirations. Instead, by trying to take things from other people and expropriate blame to other people, we try to pursue these social justice goals in ways that end up being mostly symbolic. We don't want to give up anything or risk, sacrifice, or change anything. So we end up largely generating a sense of progress that we're on the right side, that we're doing something to address these problems by focusing on symbolic gestures.

Robinson 

There's a lot of generalizing there about this group of people, but you've made me think of specific examples. For example, at a place like Yale, there would be new initiatives to start an Office of Student Diversity or whatever. But nobody's really pushing to fundamentally restructure the relationship between, say, Yale and New Haven—New Haven being a working-class, mostly Black, city. If you were seriously concerned with inequality, and you looked at the relationship of New Haven and Yale, you might say, Yale should be an open enrollment university for the people of New Haven; it should essentially function as a community college for New Haven. They've got all these assets and should double their class size, and you should basically say, anyone in New Haven who graduates from high school can come to this place. But of course, that would fundamentally transform Yale and the value of a Yale diploma to the people.

But as we know, probably the overwhelming majority of people who graduate from there vote Democratic. If you ask them if they're concerned with wealth inequality and race inequality, they would say that absolutely, they're very seriously concerned with these things. And then you think, but you are enmeshed within institutions that are inherently unequal, and you don't seem interested in changing them. You open up talking about the class of wealthy liberals who have maids and nannies who are all underpaid and the relationship of these people with the actual people in their lives. And you say that that's not just to point out their hypocrisy but also to illuminate something fundamental about the nature of their commitments.

Al-Gharbi 

Yes, absolutely. I don't think hypocrisy is actually interesting. And from an analytic standpoint, I don't think hypocrisy is interesting. The reason I focus on these cultural contradictions is basically for two reasons. One, because when you show this gap between what people say and what they do and how institutions actually function, it helps push the reader a little bit off kilter—a little bit off center—allowing them to see something that they wouldn't ordinarily be able to see. And then second, again, hypocrisy—I don't think it's interesting, but this gap between what we say and what we do, the ways that symbolic capitalists actually behave, the ways our institutions actually function and so on, is substantively important for other people. Because we're elites, how we behave actually matters. It matters not just for us but for a lot of other people. We shape the opportunities and life chances and possibilities that are available for a lot of other people based on how we act and how our institutions function. So it's of immense practical consequence for other people, whether we live in accordance with— whether our behaviors and our institutions reflect—these commitments or not.

And so, I'm less interested in hypocrisy to make someone feel bad or to point out and laugh at the liberals. And for any conservative who wants to do that, this is a point that I make in the book: if you believe in something, you're a hypocrite. But that's not to say that, again, the gap between behaviors and actions doesn't matter. It matters not for the sake of hypocrisy or culture war crap, but it matters just for practical reasons, for people who are less advantaged than ourselves.

Robinson 

Now, you mentioned conservatives. One thing I wanted to ask you is,  you talk a lot about symbolic capitalists and their ruling ideology, but aren't people like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk also symbolic capitalists under the same exact analysis? How does the analysis turn on those who don't share the consensus that you're talking about?

Al-Gharbi 

Absolutely. In fact, this is one of the things that people on the right hated about the book. It's precisely that I did this kind of symmetrical analysis. I think there are two things that are important to note. In general, there are some right-leaning symbolic capitalists. They're a minority. But the important thing to note is that they share the same set of psychological dispositions and live similar lifestyles and in similar communities in many respects and share a lot of the same premises. The reason why they think, for instance, of wokeness as this important thing, this kind of existential struggle for America or Western civilization for which the desires and concerns of normies have to be subordinated for this bigger struggle, shares the same kind of basic mentality of the people they're criticizing, which is that this struggle over words and ideas and symbols is actually the thing that matters. It's the thing that's most important. There's no difference between them. And so that's the first point.

And then the second point is that these periods of great awokenings—when there are rapid changes in how mainstream symbolic capitalists talk and think about social justice, like as happened after 2010—are usually followed and also joined by anti-awokening. So as most symbolic capitalists move in one direction, there is this other group of people who try to distinguish themselves, to show and to create opportunities for themselves, by moving in the exact opposite direction of their peers. And the people who take part in the anti-awokenings, basically, are the same kinds of people who drive the awokenings. Which is to say, you have some folks who are at the very top of success in these organizations, and for them, they strike this anti-woke posture to show how unaccountable they are, how above the fray they are, how they can do whatever they want. So it's a power move. It's a flex, a status demonstration, this kind of anti-woke move.

And then for other people near the bottom—so if you look at, for instance, the grievance studies scandal or hoax thing, whatever, if you look at the authors of that—you had someone who had a PhD in mathematics but no academic job or other job for that matter, really at that time, a non-tenure line professor, and someone who was a PhD student in a field for which there are jobs. So you have this constellation of folks who have weak and tenuous ties to the institution, and for them, moving in the opposite direction of their peers, trying to distinguish themselves and make a name for themselves and so on. There’s very little downside. What are they going to do, lose the job they don't have? There was lot of potential upside. And these are the same two blocks of people who drive the great awokenings among mainstream symbolic capitalists.

So there's actually no difference in the structure, in the behaviors, in the psychology. One last quick example. A lot of the people in the anti-woke camp will say things like, forget Ibram X. Kendi and Black Lives Matter. All of that is garbage. You know what? I'm not down for any of that. You know who had it right? Martin Luther King Jr. had it right.

Okay, well, are these folks organizing or participating in Martin Luther King Jr.-style social movements to address long-standing social problems around race or poverty or war or anything like that? No, they're not. They're not doing anything like that. They're just sitting in their armchairs criticizing the “wokes” and using that as a stand-in for taking action in the world. Which is to say, again, they are also just taking these kinds of symbolic gestures in this culture war crap as a substitute for any kind of direct political action. There is no difference at all between the wokes and the anti-wokes in this respect. None. They think about and participate in politics in the same way. They have similar lifestyles and [belong to] similar institutions. And so everything that I have to say about mainstream symbolic capitalists applies just as much to conservatives and to anti-wokes, much to their chagrin.

Robinson

Now, I think your book is a challenging and worthwhile experience for people and can be very eye-opening. It gets you to think about things we might call "the culture war" in a new way. You point out that a lot of people who are driving our understanding and our conversation on many of these topics themselves have a powerful self-interest in driving a conversation without actually adjusting the fundamental structures of power and wealth in society. However, let's conclude here by giving what I think would be the strongest criticism that could be produced in response to your argument. And I want to just quote something that you have here on page 274. You quote approvingly from Rob Henderson, a social psychologist, and he says, 

“When someone uses the phrase cultural appropriation, what they're really saying is, I was educated at a top college. Only the affluent could afford to learn strange vocabulary, because ordinary people have real problems to worry about.” And he calls these “luxury beliefs, whose chief purpose is to indicate evidence of the believers social class and education. When an affluent person,” he says, “advocates for drug legalization or anti vaccination policies or open borders or loose sexual norms or uses the term white privilege, they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you, I am a member of the upper class.” 

Now, something like that is a more extreme formulation than you put it yourself and seems to almost entirely dismiss the possibility that they're saying it because it's true and right. The argument of your book appears to in part be, and people may take it as, People are saying these things for reasons of status or self-interest. Now, you say they might be sincere, but doesn't it take us away from the question of whether, in fact, there is something to it? Because if I responded to Rob Henderson, I might say, excuse me, I am not using the term cultural appropriation to indicate to you anything. I don't care what you think about me. I am using it because I have conducted an analysis, and I think this is a helpful concept for understanding the world. I advocate drug legalization because I think it benefits society. You may point out that a lot of people don't share my belief and that there are class divides in whoever holds these beliefs, but surely, we should be having conversations about whether beliefs are true and well-grounded and well-argued, and the fact that there is a correlation between, say, environmentalism and wealth is irrelevant because the question is, is the climate crisis happening? It’s a fact that there’s a correlation between belief in disinformation and fake news and class. But the question is, is there disinformation? Are these things true?

You were trained as a philosopher rather than a sociologist, and you've gone into sociology mode. And the thing about sociology mode is that you kind of analyze beliefs as a function of social structure, which is interesting. But in philosopher mode, don't we analyze beliefs and determine them on the basis of whether they're factual or not?

Al-Gharbi 

So there's a lot there that I think—

Robinson 

Sorry, I just wanted to give you my theory of the rant that someone would give you.

Al-Gharbi 

In the same way that it's wrong for affluent, highly educated people to dismiss the views of other people who don't have the right degrees or credentials or who are kind of déclassé or whatever, it's incorrect to say, elites believe this, so it must be bad or wrong or untrue or something like that. So I agree with you there. Again, I wrote a section in this book towards the end called “Babies in Bath Water,” and I think that actually there's a lot about these social justice-oriented beliefs that is just true and important and useful. In fact, one way of understanding the project of this book is to take the arguments of postcolonial theorists, critical race theorists, queer theorists, and feminist standpoint epistemologists—these are literatures that deeply influence my own thinking—and taking those arguments to what I view as their logical conclusion, which should lead us to investigate and to take seriously the possibility that our own emancipatory ideological frameworks might themselves reflect our class interests, might themselves not necessarily represent the perspectives and values of the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society.

There's not actually a good reason to think that our preferred ideologies are somehow unique from these broader social patterns that we apply to every other mode of talking and thinking about society. And so what I see this book doing more than anything is taking the arguments from these literatures to their logical conclusions. I don't see them as being incompatible with the arguments.

And then the last point, and actually this is a big argument of these very literatures: often our social location can blind us to important realities. So, for instance, as it relates to things like crime and criminal justice, there's this research in political science on what they call racial dog whistles. So these are supposed to be statements that are formally race neutral but are supposed to wink and nod at white supremacist ideology. The problem with this literature is the way they determine what counts as a racial dog whistle. Basically, it's scholars thinking in their armchairs, Well, if I were a white supremacist trying to engage in discrete white supremacy, what would I say? And then they come up with these things, and they see if white people like them, and if white people respond to them, they go, aha, racial dog whistle. What they don't do, ironically, is typically see how Black and Hispanic people respond to these messages. So they just presume that their messages uniquely resonate with whites without actually testing that premise.

There's a scholar, Ian Haney López, and he presented Black, white and Hispanic people with canonical examples of racial dog whistles. And what he found is that, for instance, Trump's message on law and order resonated the most with African Americans, more with Black people than with white people, and more with Hispanics than with white people. At most, it resonated most strongly with non-whites than whites. So not only weren’t these narratives uniquely appealing to whites, they uniquely appealed to non-whites. And the reason why they uniquely appeal to Black people, why black people responded to these messages so strongly, is in part because a lot of Black people have actual safety concerns. They have legitimate concerns about safety and public order. A lot of times you'll have symbolic capitalists make strong presumptions about what other people's interests are. And when other people, the people we're trying to help, don't seem to share the beliefs that we think they should have, we assume that they just don't know their actual interests and that we do, rather than thinking, maybe I'm misunderstanding what their actual interests are.

In the case of things like law enforcement, it is the case that it's relatively easy for relatively elite people to say, let's close the prisons and abolish the police. And the reason why it's easy for us to say that is that we have private security. We have gated communities. We have doormen. If we close the prisons, the prisoners aren't coming to our communities. We'll make damn sure of that. The places they are going to go are poor and minority communities. If we close the prisons, it's those places that will be filled with ex-cons who are struggling to get by and all of this kind of stuff, not our communities. So we're not the ones who have the kind of risk exposure. It's really easy for us to say that this is the thing that should be done. And so the reason why other people resist it is in part because when they think about this issue, they understand that if you release all of these people from prison, guess where they're going? They're going to my neighborhood.

And the book opens with an example of this at that I observed on the Upper West Side of Manhattan earlier during COVID. So one of the things that they did during COVID—they had a lot of these hotels that were vacant because no one was traveling to New York City at that time, and they had all of these homeless people that they were trying to get out of packed shelters, which were like vectors for spreading it, and so what they wanted to do was to put the homeless people up in the hotels. And so they tried doing that on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which is where Columbia is based. It's an affluent place that went 95.5 [percent] for Hillary Clinton. How did the Columbia people respond to this social justice concern that helped the marginalized and the disadvantaged get off the streets and stop the spread—all of these good things? How did we respond? Well, we responded by organizing aggressively to push those people out of our communities and push them instead into lower-income and minority-dominated communities. And we often did this in the name of social justice. We came up with social justice oriented narratives that allowed us to justify not having the poor and minorities in our neighborhoods.

And so this is a kind of move that we do a lot, where we take these positions in part because we're sincerely committed to them, but we're sincerely committed to them in part because we're not the ones who actually have to face the risks or externalities of these policies in general, and especially if they go sideways. I think the way Henderson framed that was, as you said, not the way that I would frame it necessarily. But one of the things I think he's kind of right about, in a way, is that class does matter for how we often think about social problems. In particular, one of the ways that class matters in a very practical way is that, again, we shouldn't just dismiss a belief because elites hold it, but it is the case that if elites are wrong about something, we're not usually the ones who pay the cost for our error. It's other people, less advantaged people, who end up paying the cost when we're wrong. That's the case and allows us to be wrong, to persist in error longer than other people. Because we don't have skin in the game, we're not getting the kind of feedback that other people get when they make mistakes in life. And so I think that's something that symbolic capitalists should be aware of, should be cognizant of, as they think about social issues. That's the kind of kernel in Rob's account that I think is actually important and true.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.