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We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite
Musa al-Gharbi
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024.
In recent decades, a paradox has haunted American political life. Given that political progressives wielded considerable political, economic, and cultural influence, how is it possible that our actual social order was so resistant to real change? Why did the black-white wealth gap remain unchanged, and why did economic inequality steadily increase? Why did basic access to affordable housing plummet? And why has higher education become a nightmarish debt sentence for poor and underprivileged people seeking a better life?
Enter sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi and his important and troubling book, We Have Never Been Woke, which provides a startling answer: Too many self-described progressives aren’t actually progressive. Rather, their progressivism is simply a means to power and social status, conveniently forgotten when it conflicts with those real aims. For those on the left seeking to formulate a positive vision in the wake of Trump’s recent victory, Al-Gharbi’s book may offer a valuable form of self-understanding, a guide to a less hypocritical and more socially effective politics.
In some ways, this book is the latest in a line of cultural criticism that stretches back over decades and includes such works as “The Professional-Managerial Class” (1979) by Barbara and John Ehrenreich, The Revolt of the Elites by Christopher Lasch (1991), and Elite Capture by Olufemi Taiwo (2022). Yet, the book is probably best understood through its use of the ideas of two intellectual fountainheads: Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche.
From Marx, Al-Gharbi takes the idea that social phenomena are best explained by broadly material and economic forces. Where some would explain political conflict by citing a clash of ideas, Marxist explanation mostly focuses on class formations and economic incentives. Al-Gharbi contends that many modern pathologies are explained by the activities of a certain class within our economic order, the class of symbolic capitalists. They perform “nonmanual work associated with the production and manipulation of data, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations, organizational structures and operations, art and entertainment, traditions and innovations, and so forth.” Think academics, journalists, consultants, administrators, lawyers, financiers, and certain tech workers.
From Nietzsche, Al-Gharbi takes the idea that we are often ruled by unconscious drives and forces that dictate our actual behavior, even if such behavior contradicts our more consciously held ideals. Such motivations often direct us to seek power, whether that power expresses itself in concrete economic and material wealth or in social status.
Nietzsche’s question, remember, was this: How did Christianity—a philosophy of humility and equality—become the official dogma of the world’s most ostentatiously powerful social institutions? His answer was emphatic: “There was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.” All subsequent “Christians” were motivated by status and influence like everyone else, and religious doctrines became a means to that end. Contemporary Americans live our own version of this contradiction: If many of us are so progressive, why are we incapable of bringing about the progress we desire? Al-Gharbi’s answer echoes Nietzsche’s. We are not really progressives. Rather, we use progressive discourse to get what we want most: that is, power.
Most symbolic capitalists are white liberals with good educational credentials. (Mea culpa.) We say we want equality, racial justice, inclusion, and tolerance. And we really do want those things. But when our desire to promote social equality and our desire for power conflict, the latter wins. Every time. “One’s priorities are manifested through action…” he writes, “you don’t observe what is important to someone by what they say but rather by what they do.”
Indeed, as Al-Gharbi shows, the desire to promote social equality is so comparatively weak that symbolic capitalists nearly always choose such trivial things as the convenient delivery of household goods over a principled stance against such ruthlessly exploitative companies as Amazon. Amazon is awful to its fulfillment workers, and its long-term business model is to perfect the robots and dispense with human workers completely. We all know this. But that knowledge arises from within a life that is profoundly distant from the victims of the exploitation we rely on. And so it remains a wistful desideratum, disconnected from our real motives.
The typical symbolic capitalist routinely enjoys a rotating personal chauffeur (Uber), personal assistant (Amazon delivery driver), chef and butler (meal delivery services), and even personal cleaners and home landscapers. And in symbolic capitalist hubs such as New York and Seattle, these tasks are now typically performed by economically vulnerable black and Hispanic people who receive low pay and no benefits. Al-Gharbi notes that after expenses, app-based food delivery drivers make about $7.87 per hour, and he cites a New York Times claim that 80 percent of such drivers in New York City are undocumented immigrants from Central America, Africa, and Asia.
How should this contradiction between elite lifestyles and purported political views be characterized? Al-Gharbi claims that symbolic capitalists are intentionally exploiting the poor and the disadvantaged:
Even the most sexist or bigoted rich white person in many other contexts wouldn’t be able to exploit women and minorities at the level the typical liberal professional in a city like Seattle, San Francisco, or Chicago does in their day-to-day lives…. And it’s largely Democratic-voting professionals who take advantage of [the vulnerable]—even as they conspicuously lament inequality…and once their purpose has been served, these workers are casually cast aside.
The problem here is that most contemporary liberal progressives aren’t exploiting anyone. To be sure, they are generally complicit in exploitation and benefit from it, but they are not actively and intentionally exploiting another’s vulnerability. If we must assign blame, it would go to those executives at Amazon and elsewhere who knowingly and tirelessly work to capture any surplus capital from the vulnerable, destroy unionization efforts, end benefits packages, and so forth.
Al-Gharbi would do well to distinguish more carefully between intended effects and unintended side-effects. Even if my values are to be revealed by what I do, that must be based on what I am actually trying to do and not on what might accidentally happen as a result of what I do.
What do the symbolic capitalists aim at when they use delivery apps? They are trying to secure food in a very convenient way. But in placing an order, does such a user also aim at creating and reinforcing systems of racial and economic inequality? This is one effect, but is it an intended effect? To claim that most people are expressly trying to create structural inequalities strains credulity. We can see this when we examine the larger structure of which the users are a part. They individually make no difference to these large-scale inequalities, and if they stopped using the apps, the inequalities would persist in exactly the same way. It is therefore a little strange to accuse them of deliberate exploitation, or to imply that they are directly responsible for these inequalities.
Al-Gharbi argues that this gesture toward the “system” is too vague and can be used as a convenient excuse. But these structural features are significant. Indeed, the American consumer experience is largely designed so that the pursuit of perfectly ordinary goals (such as convenient food) often ends up leading to genuinely horrible side-effects.
After all, one could easily write a book called We Have Never Been Conservative that notes that so-called conservatives, who say they wish to preserve and defend various traditional ways of life, nonetheless actively engage in behaviors that aggravate the climate crisis. And good luck preserving your cute little farmland community when climate change has turned it into a dust bowl that occasionally catches fire. This should trouble conservatives far more than it does. But nonetheless, when we see them heading down the highway in an SUV, we should not interpret them as trying to create that flaming dust bowl.
Al-Gharbi identifies several “Great Awokenings” throughout American history, occurring roughly around 1930, 1968, 1989, and 2014. Awokenings are basically sudden explosions of revolutionary egalitarian rhetoric from the symbolic classes. His twofold contention is that they (1) do not produce any meaningful material benefits for marginalized people and that (2) they are mainly the product of a certain kind of economic competition.
The historical sources for such awokenings lie in the circumstances of elite overproduction, which is to say an unusual glut of college degree-holders who expect a certain life that they can’t get. Many symbolic capitalists believe that their embrace of progressive discourse is based on the kind of moral clarity they share with, for example, Martin Luther King Jr. But they are in fact using the rhetoric of civil rights to one-up their social competitors, just as their predecessors in the Holy Roman Empire used Jesus’s messages to become astonishingly powerful. It is a tidy explanation for the excessive virtue-signaling, the call-out culture, and the dreaded purity spirals that have become commonplace among middle-class professionals.
But people engage in these behaviors only because they are so desperate for wealth and status, and there is nothing at all wrong with wanting a little wealth and status. And so, lurking in the background of Al-Gharbi’s book is a question that should be raised but isn’t: What is it about our shared social structure that explains why the pursuit of these basic human goods ends up reproducing a status quo which denies such goods to others? In trying to get a little for myself, why must I push someone else down?
The Marxist has an answer: We live under capitalism, which incentivizes us toward a zero-sum competition for goods. The “woke” virtue-signals in order to climb a corporate ladder, but the ladder itself allows only one occupant per rung.
The Marxist believes that when communism replaces capitalism, labor will be its own reward, social status will be equally distributed, and, eventually, all will have what they basically need. This would greatly reduce social competition over status and goods and ground our sense of self-worth in what we can produce for our community rather than in which status markers we can display. Al-Gharbi is actually quite friendly to the subtle combination of meritocratic and redistributive values that ground Marx’s communism. Yet he does not seem to recognize that the Marxist program is designed precisely as a solution to his problem. Under communism, the egalitarians’ ideals would not be at odds with their interests.
Of course, the Marxist dream may be impossible. Nietzsche, in particular, would scoff at the thought that you can banish social competition by delivering economic security. But this debate about human nature is the debate we need to have before we decide what to think about moralistic social competition. At its best, the book clearly lays the groundwork for that debate. At its worst, We Have Never Been Woke comes dangerously close to being an exercise in call-out culture, and doubtless the author’s profile within the anti-woke community has risen as a result.