[T]he most significant and enduring material legacy of the Great Awokenings has been the proliferation of what I have taken to calling ‘social justice sinecures’ — well-remunerated symbolic capitalist jobs explicitly oriented around helping organizations conspicuously conform with the latest fads in social justice signaling (thereby reducing their vulnerability to subsequent attacks by frustrated elites and elite aspirants).
That is from Musa al-Gharbi’s stinging post-mortem of our most recent national craze of social justice warriors fashioning themselves as the Woke. If you are old enough to recall when the Soviet Union collapsed, you will recall people coming out of the woodwork to declare that the USSR was never truly a communist state and thus the communist paradise is still a viable goal. Al-Gharbi is here to tell us something quite similar. We Have Never Been Woke is the title. The subtitle: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Al-Gharbi documents that what we all just lived through was bad, but he insists we shouldn’t blame the Left for the actions of a large set of self-serving bureaucrats.
Who is Woke?
As a work of cultural taxonomy, al-Gharbi’s book is impressive. The center of his argument is that Wokeness was a handy bit of cultural capital (“demonstrating oneself as interesting, cool, sophisticated, charismatic, charming and so on”) for “symbolic capitalists,” who are:
professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services). For instance, people who work in fields like education, science, tech, finance, media[,] law, consulting, administration, and public policy are overwhelmingly symbolic capitalists. If you’re reading this book [or this book review], there’s a strong chance you’re a symbolic capitalist. I am, myself, a symbolic capitalist.
We have always had symbolic capitalists. Think of Michael Novak’s description of Democratic Capitalism dividing power between political, economic, and moral-cultural realms. Al-Gharbi’s “symbolic capitalists” are equivalent to Novak’s leaders in the moral-cultural order.
Symbolic capitalists are elites in a constant struggle for power and prestige with elites in the political and economic realms. They know with absolute certainty that they, unlike everyone else, could wield wealth and power without being corrupted by it. The weapon of the symbolic capitalists is words, and thus their primary base is industries whose primary traffic is in words, most obviously education and journalism. Periodically, those industries are captured by a subset of the Left, which al-Gharbi notes is likely to “skew young, white, highly educated, and urban-dwelling and to hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds.”
We Have Never Been Woke is an extended examination of “how liberals exploit social justice advocacy to make themselves feel good.”
The most recent wave is the fourth Great Awokening, following similar phenomena in the mid-1930s, the late 1960s, and the early 1990s. The similarities of these movements indicate their source. (It isn’t Trump.) Symbolic capitalists need patronage to provide their incomes. As the number of symbolic capitalists rises, the need for greater levels of patronage inexorably increases. Eventually, a crisis hits in which the possibilities for patronage are no longer sufficient to support the symbolic capitalist class. That crisis generates the Woke movement; symbolic capitalists wield their weapon of words to demand that society increase its support for symbolic capitalists. It is a fight for the survival of the ability to remain a symbolic capitalist and avoid the fate of having to find another occupation.
It should come as no surprise that the Woke are pursuing their own self-interest. It perfectly explains why the primary practical changes demanded by the Woke are more jobs in the DEI Industrial Complex. But, as al-Gharbi notes, material interests are not the only motivation. As many studies have shown, symbolic capitalists have particularly high levels of depression and anxiety and suffer from imposter syndrome. As a result, symbolic capitalists are also “seeking ideal interests, like convincing themselves and others that they are good people who deserve what they have (while their opponents are bad people who deserve to have bad things happen to them).”
The way self-interest shapes the agenda of symbolic capitalists is perfectly illustrated in the example al-Gharbi uses to open the book. After Trump was elected in 2016, many students at Columbia University were so upset that they wanted time off from their academic studies. Their trauma arose from the idea that under Trump, the poor and downtrodden would be crushed by the elites. But, as al-Gharbi points out, Columbia students are the elite. Moreover, while the students needed time off to manage their pain, there was no similar demand for time off for all the people who do the physical work at the university, the very people whom the Columbia elite said were their main concern. Similarly, when COVID-19 hit, the symbolic capitalists demanded that people should be forced to work at home, while increasing their use of Amazon, DoorDash, and other services provided by relatively poor members of society who cannot work from home and still earn an income.
The Current Wokeness Craze
This is clearly a strange state of affairs. How did our recent bout of Wokeness arise? In the first two decades of the 21st century, the number of people with a bachelor’s degree increased by 22 million. But the number of jobs requiring a college education only increased by 10 million. The recession arising from the financial crisis of 2008 was the breaking point. Suddenly, there was also a surge in the number of people seeking jobs in law, government, journalism, and academia, while the number of jobs in all those areas was nowhere near high enough to meet the new supply of workers. People who wanted jobs in the symbolic capitalist realm were incurring large amounts of debt with lower prospects for lucrative employment. The opening salvo of the modern Woke Movement was Occupy Wall Street, five years before Trump was elected. Recall that the complaint was about “the top one percent” of wealth, thus conveniently lumping together someone who aspired to be at the 95th percentile and someone at the 5th percentile as being equally disadvantaged.
The rhetorical focus, though, quickly moved away from talking about income directly. Instead, the symbolic capitalists of this era “ended up settling on culture and institutions of cultural production as the most important fronts in the struggle. That is, symbolic capitalists identified themselves, their institutions, and outputs — not the workers, not the business owners — as central agents in creating a better world.” It is on the metastasizing of this aspect of the Woke that al-Gharbi unleashes his most scathing critique.
The most potent rhetorical device in the symbolic capitalists’ quiver has been defending the victims of societal oppression. Being a victim seems undesirable, yet symbolic capitalists have been the most eager to identify themselves as victims. The goal is to acquire what al-Gharbi defines as “totemic capital”: “the epistemic and moral authority afforded to an individual on the basis of bearing one or more of these totems — that is, on the basis of claimed or perceived membership in a historically marginalized or disadvantaged group.”
The difference between reality and the rhetoric of the symbolic capitalists is nowhere more obvious than in admissions to elite colleges, the most obvious gatekeepers to becoming one of society’s elites. The rhetoric from elite colleges is that they are seeking to help the disadvantaged. The reality?
A recent study analyzing college admissions essays found that students from families with household incomes of over $100,000 per year were significantly more likely to tell stories about overcoming challenges related to physical disability, mental health, or discrimination and harassment on the basis of their race, gender, or sexuality than students from lower-income backgrounds. That is, the people most likely to tell dramatic stories of overcoming totemic adversity — and the people best positioned to profit from these stories — are people who are well-off. Rather than helping give needy people a leg up, a preference for tales of striving in the face of adversity tends to stack the deck in favor of elites. While claiming the existence of massive discrimination against assorted groups is endemic in society, symbolic capitalists are the most likely to claim that being a member of such groups is central to their identity, and the most likely to reap the rewards from programs designed to mitigate the harm caused by their status.
Notice, however, that in defining their own flourishing within the “system” as a means of increasing their capacity to help the desperate and vulnerable, symbolic capitalists provided themselves with a powerful justification for climbing as high up the ladder as they could and accumulating more and more into their own hands: the more resources they controlled, and the more institutional clout they wielded, the more they would be theoretically able to accomplish on behalf of the needy and vulnerable (and the less capital would be in the hands of the “bad” elites).
“Doing well” was redefined as a means of “doing good.”
Whither the Left?
The most common explanation of Trump’s reelection is that Americans were revolting against the power and excesses of the symbolic capitalists. Al-Gharbi’s book thus comes across as a post-mortem of a movement that failed. But al-Gharbi wants to rescue Leftism from the rubble. We were never actually Woke, he asserts. What everyone perceived as Leftism run amok was really just a bunch of elite white liberals trying to amass power in cushy jobs where they can wield words and accusations to gain even more wealth and influence. Al-Gharbi ends with a clarion call to the Left to remember the disadvantaged in society. He would clearly prefer a world in which good, old-fashioned socialists pushed the hypocritical Woke movement out of political discourse.
I wish I shared his optimism that the Left can be so easily divided. From where I sit, the Trump reelection has merely hardened the rhetoric of the Left’s symbolic capitalists. They may have been on the losing side of a national election and they may have lost ground in the battleground of corporate DEI offices, but their stranglehold on their fortresses in academia and other such places shows no sign of loosening. Moreover, it isn’t at all clear that the Democratic Party is now less likely to embrace exactly the sort of rhetoric al-Gharbi skewers in this book. While We Have Never Been Woke is framed as examining a movement from the recent past, it may sadly also be an excellent guidebook to understanding the near future.