Twilight of the Woke, or How to Historicize with a Hammer

A review of Musa al Gharbi's "We Have Never Been Woke: the cultural contradictions of a new elite"

The introduction to We Have Never Been Woke describes how Musa al-Gharbi became aware of a paradox in twenty-first century America, starting before he was a book-writing academic. Al-Gharbi grew up in a small Arizona town, studied at a community college and a state university, sold shoes at Dillard’s for a while, then in 2016 left home to pursue a PhD at Columbia University in New York. Of his political evolution, he says:

I cast my first presidential vote for John Kerry in 2004—and not begrudgingly. It’s humiliating to admit in retrospect, but I believed in John Kerry. At that time, I subscribed to what you might call the “banal liberal” understanding of who is responsible for various social evils: those damn Republicans! If only folks in places like podunk Arizona could be more like the enlightened denizens of New York, I thought, what a beautiful country this could be! What a beautiful world! I had already shed a lot of this in the years that followed—but the vestiges that remained got destroyed soon after I moved to the Upper West Side.

One of the first things that stood out to me is that there’s something like a racialized caste system here that everyone takes as natural. You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you.

Al-Gharbi notes that in New York and other politically blue American cities these services are mostly provided by “minorities and immigrants from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds.” The cities operate as “well-oiled machines for casually exploiting and discarding the vulnerable, desperate, and disadvantaged. And it’s largely Democratic-voting professionals who take advantage of them.”

Such professionals are the “new elite” mentioned in the subtitle of the book. They are often referred to as the professional managerial class (PMC). Al-Gharbi adopts the term “symbolic capitalist” in service to his analytical approach, but the people he identifies as symbolic capitalists are essentially the same people who make up the PMC.

In short, al-Gharbi noticed that Democrats and their primary ideological base, the symbolic capitalists, do a lot of conspicuous wailing and fussing about inequality and oppression, yet the wailing and fussing does not interrupt their day-to-day business of perpetuating inequality and oppression. He describes how, when Donald Trump won the 2016 election, symbolic capitalists were traumatized on behalf of the oppressed masses but the masses just kept showing up for work to serve the elites.

These contradictions grew especially pronounced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder. Even as they casually discarded service workers en masse to fend for themselves—and increased their exploitation of those “essential” workers who remained (so that they could stay comfortably ensconced in their homes)—individuals and institutions associated with the symbolic economy aggressively sought to paint themselves as allies for the marginalized and disadvantaged. Billions were donated to groups like Black Lives Matter (BLM); antiracist literature shot to the top of the best-seller charts; organizations assigned antibias training and appointed chief diversity officers at an extraordinary pace.

Al-Gharbi became obsessed with the questions that arose from his experience: “How can elites whose lifestyles and livelihoods are oriented around the production, maintenance, and exploitation of inequality still view themselves as egalitarians?” Is there any substance to the “rapid and substantial change in norms and discourse” that took place in the past ten years or so? And what do conspicuous displays of symbolic “justice-oriented” activity actually accomplish?

We Have Never Been Woke attempts to describe, in mostly plain language but with lots of footnotes, the practice and theory of all this symbolic activity. Al-Gharbi’s timing was remarkable—the book came out in October last year. The book essentially explains why nobody likes the PMC, and the book appeared just at the moment when the Kamala Harris campaign was demonstrating the abject failure of a PMC-dominant model of politics.

The middle chapters of We Have Never Been Woke provide ammunition for what could have been an epic rant, mercilessly dunking on PMC wokeness over and over again. Such a rant could have been adopted as anti-woke scripture by the triumphant MAGA hordes in November, and could have resulted in al-Gharbi making a lot of money. This book is not that. Al-Gharbi appears to be in favor of giving real material help to the poor and the oppressed, unlike either of the existing legacy political parties. Although al-Gharbi does not say it, I suspect him of being a low-key drum major for righteousness.

Righteousness has not been represented at all in American politics since shortly after Martin Luther King, Jr. was removed from the scene, so We Have Never Been Woke is quite different from the red/blue random diss track generator that passes for political discourse in America today. The book does not exhaust the topic of what is wrong with our elites, but it makes a good start.

So what is a symbolic capitalist?

Al-Gharbi says “symbolic capitalists 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).”

In a prescient series of essays for Radical America in 1977, Barbara and John Ehrenreich defined the professional-managerial class (the term they coined for symbolic capitalists) as ‘salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.’ In layman’s terms, the major role they play in society is to keep the capitalist machine running (in the present and in perpetuity), maximize its efficiency and productivity, and justify the inequalities that were required in order to achieve these ends.

The Ehrenreichs and al-Gharbi agree that the roots of the PMC go back to the 19th century, when industrialization created a need for more experts to manage labor and the means of production, and to educate and indoctrinate everyone including the mass-produced experts. Al-Gharbi adopted the label symbolic capitalist instead of sticking with established terminology for a number of reasons, including his belief that symbolic capitalists are not fully formed as an economic class. He argues that their ideology is highly individualistic, and they generally have not organized as a class to promote their class interests.

It seems to me that symbolic capitalists are more aware of their common interests than the working class, and they have acted very effectively to institutionalize their control over the reproduction of symbolic capital, particularly through control of education. But We Have Never Been Woke is primarily focused on the role played by symbolic wokeness rather than on other mechanics of exercising class power. I suspect an economic class angle would become more apparent if the tools and marketable products of symbol-mongering were given more attention—actionable knowledge, intellectual property, eloquence, and all the other reified things that most people think of as the basis of a symbolic economy, but which symbolic capitalists often disregard in favor of credentials and other abstract symbols of status.

Al-Gharbi also chose the term symbolic capitalist because he wished to recognize the influence of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu figures prominently in Chapter One, where al-Gharbi explains that wokeness is a form of symbolic capital. We Have Never Been Woke attempts to “reconnect Bourdieu’s important insights on symbolic struggle with more traditional materialist concerns over exploitation and production.” Al-Gharbi explains in a footnote that the book focuses on “how symbolic domination operates in the service of exploitation. This text will highlight how symbolic capitalists’ lifestyles and livelihoods are importantly predicated on extracting labor from vulnerable and desperate people at unsustainably low rates.”

Following Bourdieu, al-Gharbi sees symbolic capital as mostly a matter of status (“resources available to someone on the basis of honor, prestige, celebrity, consecration, and recognition”). Status-based symbolic capital is formalized by credentials, but can also be demonstrated by adopting high-status vocabulary and talking about whatever the cool kids are talking about (also known as signaling). This can plausibly be interpreted as a variation on the conspicuous consumption signaling of Thorstein Veblen’s leisure class, but instead of perceiving familiarity with highbrow culture as a product of leisure, symbolic capitalists are more likely to see it as a hard-earned form of expertise and perhaps even seek employment as class signalers.

We Have Never Been Woke takes as given the notion put forward by Peter Turchin and others that producing too many elites leads to heated competition for elite positions. But where Turchin sees a general breakdown of social solidarity, al-Gharbi sees a different (or additional) dynamic—elites adopt symbolic fields of competition they can use to undercut and outmaneuver each other, particularly the competitive self-righteousness we now call wokeness. Like Turchin, al-Gharbi recognizes that elite competition generates both minor disputes within the dominant elite paradigm and also generates radical counter-elites, so sterotypes about PMC ideology and signaling do not remain static. Instead, stereotypical PMC beliefs are a battleground where important elements of status are determined, mostly by signaling loyalty to a dominant paradigm but sometimes by promoting variations or even taking the other side.

Al-Gharbi acknowledges that the economic capitalists who own the actual means of production exercise substantial power, but he also makes a strong case that symbolic capitalists have more power in America today than any grouping of non-symbolic-capitalists, and that symbolic capitalism is now the main path to become part of the billionaire class. Precisely because roles for symbolic capitalists are ever more numerous and because lack of extreme inherited wealth is not a complete barrier to entry, symbolic capitalism is the domain where most social and economic competition and mobility takes place. In the absence of any political movement in post-Reagan America for the working class to take control of the means of production from the billionaires, second-tier intra-elite competition is where the action is.

Waves of Wokeness

We Have Never Been Woke expressly declines to provide an “analytical definition” of the word woke because the term has many meanings and “the struggles over its meaning are tied to broader socio-cultural unrest.” Al-Gharbi provides a list of beliefs, such as “trans-inclusive feminism,” that most people associate with wokeness. He suggests that in its most recent phase the term woke was first used unironically to describe someone who was “alert to social injustice,” then began to be used within social-justice circles to describe “peers who were self-righteous and non-self-aware.” “Eventually, the political Right . . . began using ‘woke’ as a catchall for anything associated with the Left that seemed ridiculous or repugnant.” Al-Gharbi describes a similar cycle for the term “politically correct” in the 1980s and 90s.

Today, just as I was wrapping up this review, al-Gharbi published a blog post of Frequently Asked Questions from his book tour, and number one is “It’s a problem that a book called We Have Never Been Woke doesn’t define ‘wokeness.’” Al-Gharbi patiently explains (again) that sometimes the most important thing to know about a word is that the meaning is contested, and those who insist on a particular definition of a contested term are usually obscuring what it is really going on. Describing how this verbal contest works is a main point of the book. This seems a lot more useful than insisting that “woke” has a clear meaning and Trumpsters are just too ignorant to understand it.

Layered on top of this descriptive insight, the basic historical insight of We Have Never Been Woke is that wokeness as a trending cultural signal is not a new phenomenon. Al-Gharbi argues that there have been four “Great Awokenings” in the United States, peaking in the early 1930s, the mid-1960s, the early 1990s, and of course the most recent wave that seems to have crested just a little too early to push Kamala Harris over the finish line last November.

Despite refusing to define wokeness, al-Gharbi does define an Awokening as a period of rapid normative and discursive change around identity issues, particularly prejudice and discrimination. These changes tend to correlate across the major outputs of the symbolic economy—journalism, academics, arts and entertainment, even advertising. They also correlate with attitudes and opinions among “the primary producers and consumers of these outputs: highly educated white liberals.” Al-Gharbi hypothesizes that these waves of wokeness are not triggered by any particular event; instead, triggering events become amplified across the symbolic domains whenever wokeness is trending up. The reason expressions of wokeness begin trending up is because symbolic capitalists are feeling more than usually insecure about their prospects, and so they compete harder with each other on this symbolic field of battle to see who can be the most woke.

We Have Never Been Woke provides a historical overview of key events as well as describing similarities and differences between the Awokenings. Historians (and those old enough to remember) will likely disagree with details of al-Gharbi’s sequencing, especially since he is mostly discussing overlapping trends rather than discrete events. Fortunately, al-Gharbi is not trying to write a definitive history of the twentieth century, he is trying to describe a narrative pattern within the history of social justice advocacy, while recognizing that the meaning and purpose of the narrative was always contested. I think the historical review al-Gharbi has provided is sufficient to support his main point—the behavior of symbolic capitalists in the most recent wave of wokeness has historical antecedents. Whether or not the long arc of the universe bends toward justice, the participation of symbolic capitalists seems to cause fluctuations of unusual and perhaps increasing amplitude in cultural discourse around identity issues, particularly prejudice and discrimination.

Al-Gharbi suggests that concrete advancements for the oppressed typically do not coincide with Awokenings. I take issue with the strong form of this argument, but it seems fair to say that the tactics employed by wokists during Awokenings often lead to backlash rather than advancements, at least in the short term. Whether wave tactics are helpful in the long run by moving the Overton Window and/or giving moderates an incentive to make changes during calmer periods remains an open question.

Failures of symbolic capitalism

After al-Gharbi establishes his background theses in Chapters One and Two, the middle chapters demonstrate in some detail how symbolic capitalists fail to deliver, not just on promises of social justice, but also on their purported strong points of meritocracy and competent management. This is the bulk of the book. In his FAQ post al-Gharbi makes it clear that his purpose is to study the real world “behaviors, relationships, or allocations of resources and opportunities” that are affected (and effected) by the narrative phenomenon of wokeness rather than merely participate in the contest over the meaning and morality of wokeness. Because the book is for symbolic capitalists, detailed documentation is probably necessary if the PMC are going to be aroused from their current Biden-Harris-flameout-peak-wokeness induced stupor.

If you already have a low regard for PMC-affiliated wokeness, or if you are a very online person who is highly invested in the wokeness narrative, the part of the book that is filled with evidence can feel a little slow, begging the narrative-amplifying question:

Why not just call it what it is – hypocrisy?

We Have Never Been Woke is mostly written in understandable language with relatively moderate levels of jargon, but people who do not think like symbolic capitalists (including most MAGA fans) will likely respond to many of the insights about the divergence between symbolic capitalist words and deeds by saying “duh, they’re a bunch of hypocrites.” The words hypocrite and hypocrisy appear only a few times in We Have Never Been Woke. Instead, al-Gharbi talks of “a profound gulf between symbolic capitalists’ rhetoric about various social ills and their lifestyles and behaviors ‘in the world.’” This profound gulf is described at such length that the word hypocrisy becomes conspicuous by its absence. So why does the word hypocrisy appear so rarely in a book that is arguably all about hypocrisy?

Al-Gharbi addresses the question in his introduction: “if the purpose of this book is not to condemn symbolic capitalists as hypocrites, insincere or cynical, then what do I mean with the declaration that ‘we have never been woke’?” He cites Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, and calls for a “symmetrical anthropology” in which modern cultural constructs are analyzed “the same way as ‘primitive’ or ‘premodern’ ones.” He proposes that “if we want to understand systemic inequality, we must include academics, journalists, social justice activists, progressive politicians, dutiful bureaucrats, nonprofit workers, and others ‘in the model’ alongside those whom symbolic capitalists are less sympathetic toward (such as Trump voters or the dreaded ‘1 percent’).”

Al-Gharbi’s FAQ post puts it in even more straighforward terms—he simply assumes most symbolic capitalists sincerely believe in the social justice goals that are embedded in wokeness.

I only talk about “hearts and minds” at all to explain how people can mobilize “social justice” in self-serving ways without being cynical or insincere. I take sincerity for granted both because I think it’s actually the case that most people are sincere and because, at bottom, I’m not really interested in anyone’s sincerity (or lack thereof).

Hypocrisy is a term of judgment, not analysis. When al-Gharbi says “How can elites whose lifestyles and livelihoods are oriented around the production, maintenance, and exploitation of inequality still view themselves as egalitarians?” the question is not rhetorical. He really intends to look for an answer to the question of “how?”

It does not take a genius to recognize that the actual behavior of symbolic capitalists is objectively hypocritical when compared to their stated ideology of fighting inequality and oppression. Ordinary people are actually very good at noticing that sort of thing. What most people do in response is say to themselves, “self, those people are a bunch of hypocrites” (or alternatively “by their fruits ye shall know them”), then they shrug their shoulders and either forget about it or become more bitter and cynical. Labeling hypocrisy often functions as what John Michael Greer (formerly the Archdruid) calls a thought-stopper.

A thoughtstopper is exactly what the term suggests: a word, phrase, or short sentence that keeps people from thinking. A good thoughtstopper is brief, crisp, memorable, and packed with strong emotion. It’s also either absurd, self-contradictory, or irrelevant to the subject to which it’s meant to apply, so that any attempt you might make to reason about it will land you in perplexity. The perplexity won’t do the trick by itself, and neither will the strong emotion; it’s the combination of the two that lets a thoughtstopper throw a monkey wrench in the works of the user’s mind.

Greer gives several examples of thought-stoppers, including pseudo-profound statements and a “hefty epithet that can be flung at someone like a brick.” Greer mentions the widespread use of “communism,” but “hypocrite” could serve just as well (with the advantage of being true much more often than labeling someone as a communist—the thought-stopping effect is largely independent of truth). Pejorative thought-stoppers often serve double duty as ingroup/outgroup signals that not only stop individuals from thinking, but also stop them from talking to each other across a cultural or political divide. I think it was an exceptionally wise choice for al-Gharbi to avoid this.

If rational thought is going to make any contribution to society, it is necessary to power through the thought-stoppers, analyze what is going on, and try to figure out what should be done. The fact that the symbolic capitalists who manage everything tend to do the opposite during periods of Awokening, deploying thought-stoppers at every opportunity and in response to every problem, is an important reason why our system seems so broken.

Finale

Unlike many books that are driven by a strong thesis, We Have Never Been Woke does not run out of things to say after the first chapter or two, and provides enough conclusions in the final chapter to make the middle chapters seem like a good investment. But al-Gharbi intentionally leaves one thing out: he refuses to propose any solutions. In the FAQ post he says:

I wanted to deny readers any sense of catharsis, or any illusion that there are easy answers. I wanted readers to sit with the weight of these problems and to, themselves, really think about the implications and application for their own lives, communities and institutions (whose specific circumstances and operations I may not be as familiar with).

My publisher didn’t love this. I had to push to end the book on a willfully unsatisfying note.

Al-Gharbi is probably correct that there are no easy solutions. We Have Never Been Woke seems to suggest that the way forward is to replace competitive displays of self-righteousness with humility and actual righteousness wherever possible. That is a difficult and necessarily very personal road to travel. I’m not seeing a lot of humility or actual righteousness in either the red or the blue portion of the zeitgeist right now, but perhaps this book will help.