The Gray Area with Sean Illing - The contradictions of wokeness

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Hey. It's Sean. Today, we're running 1 of my favorite episodes. It's with Musa Algarbi. He's a professor at Stony Brook University and the author of We Have Never Been Woke.

The book, Like the Conversation, isn't really about the ideology of wokeness, whatever that is. It's more about the language and the symbols around the movement and how elites have co opted them, which as you say, this is much more than a superficial critique of woke politics. Anyway, it's terrific, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. There are several terms in our political vocabulary that have been stretched to the point of incoherence. Marxist and Orwellian spring immediately to mind.

But at this moment, I'm not sure any term can compete with woke. Whether you're on the left or the right, whether you're pro or anti woke, or even if you're not especially political and don't follow this stuff. Woke is a word you simply cannot escape. The problem is that woke has become a catch all term, often deployed in bad faith to smear or dismiss anything that has any vague association with progressive politics. As a result, any time you venture into an argument about wokeness, it becomes hopelessly entangled in this broader cultural battle.

However, wokeness is not purely a figment of the reactionary mind. Even if we can't quite define it, it refers to something actually happening in the world. And if we can cut through all the bullshit and all the bad faith, it's worth understanding what it is and where it comes from. I'm Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area. Today's guest is Musa Algarvi.

He's a journalist, a professor at Stony Brook University, and the author of a very interesting new book called We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Moussa's book is a serious effort to understand this movement and the effects it is having or not having on our society. And whether 1 agrees with all of his conclusions or not, it's impossible to read this book and not walk away feeling like you know more than you did before you read it. So I invited him on the show to talk about what wokeism means, why it's not as new and unprecedented as people think, and why the social and economic forces driving it are so complicated. Musa Algarbi, welcome to the show.

It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

I'm glad we're finally doing this. Wokeism is a topic I've mostly avoided on the show, not because I don't think it refers to a real thing happening in the world, but because most of the discourse around it is so tedious and circular and or bad faith. And if your book was merely a defense of wokeness or an attack on it, I don't think I would have invited you on. But it's so much more than that. In your mind, what makes it a fresh contribution?

I think 1 of the big contributions of the book is that it helps contextualize the present moment in a different way. It shows that what's happening after 2010 is actually a case of something. And in fact, there have been 3 other previous awokenings. And by comparing and contrasting these cases, we can actually get a lot of insight into questions like why do these awokenings come about? Why do they end?

Do they change anything? These kinds of questions, instead of trying to just explain things that are happening today in terms of other things that are also happening today, to kind of step back and take a more kind of structural look at what's happening. So I think that's 1 of the big values. Primarily what it's trying to do is this deep study of contemporary inequalities, how they come about, who benefits from them and how. And here, I think it makes an important contribution as well because especially in symbolic capitalist spaces, so spaces like higher ed, journalism, and so on, when we tell narratives about how various social problems come about and persist and so on, the stories that we tell are kind of self serving.

And in particular, we tend to focus on basically the millionaires, the billionaires, the multinational corporations, and also those damn Republicans. And it's not like those stories are false per se, but they're also really, really, really incomplete. So part of what I'm trying to do in this book is hit those missing notes to show people, like even if we want to explain the actions of the millionaires and the billionaires and the multinational corporations, for instance, it's actually impossible to explain how any of the stuff that those actors do actually happens without us. It's with us and through us that they accomplish those goals. And then the last contribution, I think, is it's a cool study of the political economy of the knowledge professions.

So how does the changing kind of power and wealth of the symbolic professions and the people who take part in them, how does that relate to our changing kind of moral and political narratives and the ways that we behave politically in society and our ideological alignments and things like that.

I want to get into the meat of the case you're making here. Let's just do a little bit of table setting to ground us. And I realize every interviewer is probably asking you to define wokeness. And in the book, you don't offer a precise definition because it's a contested term. And like many contested terms, it can't be clearly defined.

However, I do think it will help if you explain why you resisted defining it, and then at least give me the most general account you can of wokeness so that we at least know what we're talking about for the rest of this conversation, or people know what you're talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. There's this move in the discourse that I think is really unhelpful. That's basically like, if you can't provide a crisp analytic definition of something, then you just don't know what you're talking about. You're not talking about anything. There's no there there.

It's a moral panic or whatever. And I think that's a really bad way to think about how language works. Like, the idea that we need necessary and sufficient conditions for something in order to understand what it is is just false. So what I don't do in the book is provide that. But I do provide kind of a rich, thick description about what different stakeholders seem to mean when they refer to wokeness.

And there, there's actually a lot of agreement. And there are a whole bunch of things that people across the political and ideological spectrum seem to have in mind when they're talking about this contested term. I don't think they cohere into a definition, but it is the case that stakeholders across the political and ideological spectrum, there is a broad zone of agreement of things that we're talking about when we talk about wokeness. I'll say during the last period of awakening in the late 80s to early 90s, instead of talking about wokeness, they talked about political correctness. But it was the same constellation of attitudes and dispositions more or less.

The dynamics of how that word played out in the public unfolded in much the same way. So at first, there was a lot of people who identified as politically correct in an unironic way to mean my views, my moral and political views are correct. And other people started to associate PC culture with this kind of sanctimonious, purely symbolic form of activism. And then gradually the right seized upon this dispute within the left and started attacking anything they didn't like as PC. And then it became difficult for anyone to associate unironically with the term politically correctness.

And the term political correctness became almost purely a term of derision. And even to be politically incorrect, it took on a somewhat positive aliency at people like Bill Maher who had a whole show politically incorrect or something like that. And you see the same thing playing out with woke today. So Increasingly, no 1 self identifies as woke in an unironic way. The same dynamic that we saw playing out in the last awakening around political correctness is now playing out in a very similar way around the term woke.

And then the next Awakening, the term woke probably won't be part of it. There'll be some probably some other term as this 1, some other term that activists use to define themselves and their approach to politics and so on.

Okay. So we're in the midst of the fourth awokening, according to you, that we've had in this country. There's 1 in the twenties or thirties. There's another 1 in the sixties. There's the 1 you're just talking about in the eighties, nineties, and then this current 1.

What do all these periods have in common? What is the thread that ties them together?

The tweet length answer is that these periods of awokening happen when there's a big crisis for elites, where they are expecting a certain life and it seems like they won't be able to live that life. 1 thread that cuts across all 4 awokenings is that they tend to occur during these periods of elite overproduction. So elite overproduction is a term that's taken from sociologist Jack Goldstone and historian Peter Churchin. And it refers to a condition where society is producing more people that have a reasonable expectation to be elites, then we have the capacity to actually give them the elite lifestyles and positions that they're expecting. So you have growing numbers of people who did everything right.

They got good grades, they went to college, they went to the right colleges, they studied the right majors. And they're expecting 6 figure salaries and to be able to have a house and to get married and settle down and have kids and a standard of living that's close to or better than what their parents experienced. And all of a sudden they're not able to do any of that. When you have growing numbers of people in that kind of a condition, what they tend to do is indict the social order that they think failed them and try to tear down some of the existing elites to make space for people like themselves. So that's at their core, what I argue is happening in Awokenings.

The 2 factors that cut across all 4 Awokenings are the elite overproduction and this other factor, popular immiseration. So elite overproduction, 1 reason why that's not enough to predict awokenings, why it's not sufficient, is because often when elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care. And that's because there's this phenomenon where the fortunes of elites and non elites tend to operate countercyclically. When elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care. No one's breaking out a tiny violin and going, Oh, poor elite guy.

He has to live a normal life and get a normal job like everyone else. Oh, let me play you a Sam song, right? So if times are pretty good for everyone else but bad for elites, no 1 cares. But there are these moments when the trajectories get collapsed, when things have been kind of bad and growing worse for ordinary people for a while, and all of a sudden they're bad for a lot of elites too, those are the moments when awoken things happen. Because the frustrated elite aspirants not only have a motive, but they also have a means to really mess with the system because there's this huge base of other people in society who are also really frustrated with the way things are going, who also have a bone to pick with the people who are kind of running the show.

And so they have more leverage. These frustrated elite aspirants have more leverage over the system than they otherwise might.

Let me push on something for a second. The case you make in the book is that the elites and you and I are technically part of this group because of what we do. Like to imagine that we're part of the 99% and it's the 1 percenters who are the real elites when in fact it's really the top 20% who are hoarding most of the power and wealth. Isn't it true though that much of what you call the symbolic capitalist class, that's a term we're we're about to define right after this. But for now, let's just say people like me and you and journalists, academics, bureaucrats, lawyers, corporate management types, and so on.

Like, most of us exist in a kind of precarity that is much closer to the lived experience of the middle and working classes than it is to the tech CEOs or the hedge fund managers. You and I have much more in common with a school teacher or a firefighter or a retail manager than we do with Mark Zuckerberg or Jay Z or whoever the hell is running Goldman Sachs these days. It seems to me that in theory, at least, there's more convergence of interest here than your thesis might suggest. What am I missing?

I mean, I think that's definitely how we like to think of ourselves. But as I show in the book, 1 of the problems that we have is that we compare ourselves, I think, too much to people like Mark Zuckerberg and go, Oh, well, I'm just a normie, rather than comparing ourselves to normie. So I'll give an example I talk about in the book is when you look at adjunct professors. So adjunct professors, relative to tenure line professors, are clearly exploited. They make a lot less money for doing the same kinds of work.

They have no say over faculty governance. They have really precarious labor contracts. They have no academic freedom to speak of, as I discovered firsthand when I did that job.

I was 1. It sucked. But

it's also the case that if you are a full time adjunct instructor, on average, you make much more than the typical American worker. And you also have much better working conditions. You have much higher social status and so on. And this is part of the reason why people choose to adjunct instead of becoming a manager at Waffle House or something is because they don't want to be those people. They don't like the idea of working as a manager in a Waffle House or something like that.

They would rather struggle, struggle, as an adjunct at Berkeley than to be a shoe salesman. They don't see themselves in the same boat. They don't want to be in the same boat. They passionately don't want to be in the same boat. And even in terms of things like culture, in many respects, actually, we are closer to people like Mark Zuckerberg and those folks.

And in fact, increasingly the millionaires and the billionaires are drawn from us anyway, Zuckerberg being a great example. Like for instance, take journalists. So journalism used to be a job where you had decent numbers of working class people. That's not the case so much anymore. Both because of credential requirements, like journalists are increasingly focused on only people with college degrees can be journalists and especially people who graduate from elite schools.

So in a world where you need to have a college degree and a college degree in the right majors and from the right schools in order to be a journalist. And in order to be a journalist, you also have to basically work for free in really expensive cities to get your foot in the door and so on. Then the only people who can really be journalists are people who are relatively affluent. That has important implications for the way we do our job. So for instance, holding the elite to account plays out much different if the people you're supposed to be holding to account are your classmates and your friends and your lovers and your neighbors versus if you have this kind of sociological distance between you and the elites.

And the perspectives of non elite people are also not particularly present in our institutions. So a great example, there's an essay by Bertrand Cooper called Who Gets to Create Black Culture? And in this essay, he points out, like if George Floyd was alive, after he was killed, he became the New York Times, the Washington Post, HBO, everyone, George Floyd, George Floyd, George Floyd. If George Floyd hadn't been killed, but he wanted to write for the New York Times, there's 0 chance he would have been able to write for the New York Times. The New York Times doesn't care what people like George Floyd think about anything.

Their perspectives are not valid. They're not valued. Ironically, George Floyd became someone who mattered to us after he became a victim of state violence, and we could use his death in our power struggles. Until that point, George Floyd and his perspectives don't matter to us. People like George Floyd don't matter to us.

We don't engage with those people. We don't uplift their perspectives. And so actually, just don't think it's true that we have a lot in common with ordinary. Not only do we not have a lot in common with ordinary people in terms of our interests in social networks and things like that, but we don't want to. Even when you look at things like our moral and political views.

Our moral and political views and the ways that we engage in politics are far out of step with the way that the rest of Americans talk and think about these social issues, but are actually much closer to the ways that millionaires and billionaires and those kinds of people talk and think about politics.

Do you think the New York Times doesn't give a shit about George Floyd until he's been killed by the state? Or is it that the audience won't pay attention until that's the case?

I think it's kind of both. And part of the reason it's both, actually, I talk about this a bit in the book is that the people who produce and consume these narratives are increasingly the same people. It's the same slice of society that's producing almost all of this work in the symbolic professions. And they're almost the exact same as the audience that's consuming them in terms of where they live, the professions they work in, what their values are, the kinds of educational background they have, and so on. It's this really incestuous relationship increasingly between writers and audiences where they're virtually identical.

So I think it's the case that a lot of the writers don't really, and editors and stuff, don't really have their finger on the pulse of normies. But I think it's also true that the audience of The New York Times doesn't particularly care about normies and their problems either.

I think there's just something undeniably true about that. You know, there there's a a particularly depressing section of the book, for me at least, where you're talking about how much of what we think of as the discourse, non fiction books, newspapers, journals, magazines, is mostly just elites talking to other elites with the pretense that it matters to or is even seen by the rest of the country. But it really isn't for the most part. So a lot of it is just masturbatory.

Yeah. It matters especially for the work that's trying to understand and mitigate social problems because a lot of the people that we're trying to help are just not part of the conversation.

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So this would be a good time to explain this term, symbolic capitalism. Because the thing people are constantly puzzling over is that the elites in our society who benefit most from the systemic inequalities, mostly highly educated white liberals, are also the ones most exercised about all of these inequalities. Now this appears to be a contradiction on the face of it, but it's really not for you. Right? Like, this is just a game symbolic capitalists play with each other.

It's not just a game. So 1 of the ways I think the discourse sometimes goes awry is that there's this kind of narrative tendency that we have where we think if we can expose that someone has an interest in doing something or believing something, that they must not be sincere.

Right. Not true.

Yeah, and I think that's a bad way of thinking about thinking because our cognitive and perceptual systems, argue, are kind of fundamentally geared towards perceiving and thinking about the world in ways that enhance our interests and further our goals. And if we take that research seriously, then we would see that there's actually not a contradiction between sincerely believing something and also mobilizing that belief in the service of your self interest. In fact, if you had an interest in believing something, you would believe it even more sincerely. And you would probably try to get other people to believe it as well. I just take it for granted that when we say we want the poor to be uplifted, that we want people who are marginalized and disadvantaged in society to live lives of dignity and inclusion.

I don't think we're being insincere about that. But that's not our only sincere commitment. We also sincerely want to be elites, which is to say, we think that our voice and our preferences should matter more than the person checking us out at Stop and Shop or the gas station attendant when we fill up the tank. We think that we should have a higher standard of living than someone who's flipping burgers at McDonald's or selling shoes at Dillard's. We strongly want our children to reproduce or have an even stronger social position than ourselves.

And so these drives are in fundamental tension though. Like the drive to be an egalitarian and the drive to be an elite don't sit easily with each other. You can't really be an egalitarian social climber, right? This kind of tension has been with the symbolic capitalists from the beginning. It's a tension that kind of defines this elite constellation from the beginning through the present.

So yeah, I don't think it's the lack of sincerity. I think it's just that we have these other sincere drives and this desire to be elite when they do come into conflict as they often do.

So symbolic capitalists are aligned pretty disproportionately with the political left, for reasons you can explain, and you certainly do it in the book. But you also write that, at bottom, the anti woke and the woke actually subscribe to the same fundamental worldview. I'd love for you to explain why that is because I think it's important.

Yeah. So so 1 of the things that's true of both the woke and the anti woke crowd is that they they both think that things like symbols and rhetorics and beliefs and hearts and minds and things like the names on buildings and what kinds of things are taught to These kinds of struggles over culture and symbols and rhetoric and so on are the most important things. More important than a lot of bread and butter issues that normal people have to deal with in their day to day life. Like a lot of the anti woke people describe wokeness as this kind of major threat to Western civilization, to the prevailing order. They're also engaged in this kind of cosmic struggle in their minds.

And so their ways of thinking about the world and politics are not much different than the people they're criticizing. And I also argue later in the book that 1 thing that you see, 1 of the big impacts of awokenings, they don't tend to change much in terms of allocations of resources for the genuinely disadvantaged in society and so on. They don't tend to help the wretched of the earth in a meaningful, durable way. 1 thing that does tend to happen though, is that these moments of awokening tend to devolve into culture wars and they result in these non trivial gains for the right, typically at the ballot box. And then often the creation of alternative knowledge economy infrastructures and kind of durable mistrust of mainstream institutions.

Okay, so why does this happen? So during these periods of awokening, symbolic capitalists shift a lot. Like the ways that we engage in politics, the way we think about things and so on shift in these really radical ways. And so the gap between us and everyone else gets bigger than it normally is. And we recognize that and we assume often that it's because those people are growing more racist or sexist or whatever.

But actually when you look at the trend lines, they're not. It's that we've shifted a lot while they've been pretty steady. But so the gap gets bigger and people care about it more. And they care about the gap more because we become more militant during these periods of villainizing and demonizing and mocking and trying to censor and so on anyone who disagrees with us. So people notice this gap more because we're becoming more confrontational towards people that we disagree with.

And so this gap and the fact that people care about the gap more, it creates an opportunity for right aligned political entrepreneurs to basically campaign by running against us, by bringing people like us under control. Narratives start to circulate like, oh, well, the mainstream media is just a propaganda arm for the Democratic Party or colleges and universities are in the business now of just indoctrinating young people rather than teaching them useful knowledge and skills. And so there tend to be these movements by right aligned political folks tend to campaign against people like us. You usually see efforts to curb our autonomy, cut lines of funding and things like that. And you also see the creation of these alternative infrastructures.

So after the awakening of the 1960s and 70s, for instance, there was a perception that higher ed was lost, can't fix it. It's just captured. It's ideologically captured. And so what did people do? Well, they launched these right aligned think tanks starting with the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation and so on.

And then in the late 80s, early 90s, there was a perception that the media was lost. And so what did they do? They launched Fox News in the aftermath of the Third Great Awokening. And then finally, in the current moment, you see these moments too, like Elon Musk trying this anti woke takeover of Twitter, Donald Trump trying to launch Truth Social. And the thing about it is these alternative knowledge economy infrastructures, they have an existential stake.

Like the way they make money, the way they keep viewers is by sowing consistent mistrust in mainstream institutions. So Fox News, their bread and butter is all day, every day telling people the mainstream media is lying to you. They don't care about people like you. They don't share your values. They're not giving you the whole story.

Like that's how they make money. This all day, every day, sowing trust in mainstream institution in order to capture part of our market share. And so to the extent that we create an opportunity, a market for these alternative infrastructures because of the ways that we conduct ourselves during awokenings, 1 consequence of that tends to be kind of durable mistrust and kind of reduced influence in long term way. We live with the consequences of that for a long time.

Right. And another consequence is that the power structure basically remains the same.

Yeah.

Can you steel man the case, for a minute at least, for what we're calling wokeness, as something potentially more materially significant than maybe we're giving it credit for? Right? Is there a politics is downstream of culture argument that the focus on symbolism and representation and the rest of it will create the kinds of cultural changes today that will lead to concrete material improvements in people's lives tomorrow? Or have you seen enough historical evidence to suggest that just doesn't happen?

By a lot of measures, like things like black white income gaps, mass incarcerate, like a lot of these kinds of social problems that people were upset about in the 1960s are the same or worse today. Now, that said, I do think that there are some ways in which society and culture change that are just beneficial. And sometimes these changes are kind of orthogonal to the In fact, they're typically orthogonal to the Great Awakenings, but they are sometimes changes that were done by symbolic capitalists. Sometimes in between awakenings, so not during the awakenings, actual good things that have happened in institutions that we should celebrate. So for instance, 1 of the things that bugs me out in a lot of the conversations around DEI and merit in higher ed is that there's this kind of wild, ahistorical narrative that seems to be at play.

So people will say things like the implicit argument is like back in the day, we used to make decisions based on things like their people's merit for hiring and promotion in academia. And today we pay so much attention to things like identity. And it's like, and that's kind of a ridiculous ahistorical argument. So until somewhat recently in US history, pretty much the only people who could be professors were straight white men, especially WASP men. If you were Black, if you were a woman, if you were explicitly gay, if you were even Jewish in many cases, then you were not eligible to be a professor.

And it even hidden. No 1 was ashamed of this. These were jobs for WASP men. A lot of jobs weren't even It wasn't until the 1990s. The 1990s when departments were actually forced to conduct open searches and list their open positions publicly.

Until that time, people would just give lifetime appointments to people in their network and with no competition, meritocratic or otherwise. And so before, during this period, the good old days, it was definitely the case where when the only people who could even be considered for a job were straight white men, that no 1 talked about race, gender, or sexuality in hiring and promotion decisions. Because why would you? What was there to talk about? But that didn't mean that hiring and promotion wasn't identity based.

It was more identity based. You had to belong to this very specific slice of society to even be considered for the job. So to say that that's not identitarian is wild. It was only when we stopped taking for granted that professors were straight white men, that the question of who does get to become a professor and in virtue of what becomes a live question.

Well, can we also say to the extent that what you just said is true, and it is, that is, in fact, a victory of these sorts of social and cultural movements that did produce an actual change in society that was materially significant.

Yeah. I mean, frankly, the upshot is that hiring and promotion today is actually much more standardized. It's much more transparent. It's much more metrics focused than basically it ever has been. But the thing about it is a lot of these changes, again, they weren't necessarily the product of awokenings.

And you can see this for a lot of other positive changes. So Colleen Aaron, a colleague of mine who's a sociologist, she has this great book on the First Step Act. So the First Step Act was for readers who are not immediately familiar. It was 1 of the most significant pieces of criminal justice reform that had been passed into law in decades. And as Colleen shows in this book, the passage of the First Step Act was created through this careful process of consensus building across Democrats, Republicans, all of these community organizations and legislators.

There's this kind of gradual consensus building effort that took decades even before Black Lives Matter and the Great Awakening and all of this kind of stuff. In conservative and Republican spaces, there was growing awareness that there were problems in the criminal justice system. So it happened to get signed into law under President Trump during the Great Awakening, but it wasn't caused by the Great Awakening. And in fact, because it happened to get signed into law during this period of heightened contestation over social justice, and there were a lot of symbolic capitalists who were kind of hot dogging, striking these really extreme positions that were out of step, with what most of the people we were trying to help want, like defund the police, close all the prisons and so on. That this long period of decades long consensus building was destroyed by the way that symbolic capitalists conducted herself during the Great Awokening.

And so rather than the First Step Act being like the cornerstone upon which to build other criminal justice reform, It actually basically limped across the finish line and there hasn't been much change other than that, which is to say, there are good things that happen that symbolic capitalists often take part in, but they tend to be orthogonal to these periods of great awokening. If anything, often the periods of great awokening end up messing up social reform movements that are already underway for a whole host of reasons I discuss in the book.

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How is Trump's psychology having an impact on the great power conflict?

There were folks who for years could never imagine The US carrying out limited strikes on Iran. Right? If you go back to the 12 day war, he dropped those bunker busters. Right? And you had presidents through multiple administrations who never would have gone to full scale war with Iran, and here they are.

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You know as well as I do that anti wokeism has become its own little cottage industry on the right, with the caveat that we obviously can't control what bad faith actors do with our work once it's out in the world. Do you worry about this book being misinterpreted and perhaps adopted as a cudgel in The Culture War?

Yeah. I talk about this in the book, that 1 of the perennial joys and terrors of putting ideas out in the world is after a while they cease to be yours to control. I worry about that as much as anyone else. But what I tried to focus on for this book was trying to answer the questions that I had as kind of fully and comprehensively and kind of fairly as possible and kind of let the politics play out how they do. That's not my job.

But that said, I also tried I think a lot of the anti woke kind of culture warriors are going to have a tough time really mobilizing the book the way they might hope, both because it has a lot of very critical things to say about the anti woke kind of people and the game that they're playing as well. I apply a very symmetrical lens to understanding them and their behaviors and actions. And the book also, the reality is a lot of work like in queer theory or critical race theory or feminist standpoint epistemology or postcolonial theory, these modes of scholarship deeply inform my own thinking, including on these questions about power and ideology and how they relate to each other. In a deep sense, what the book is doing is taking the arguments from these literatures to what I perceive to be their logical conclusions, which should lead us to ask of our own ostensibly emancipatory ideologies whether or not they might also reflect our class interests, whether or not they actually represent the values and interests of the people that we're trying to help. And whether or not, like like there's no reason to think that our own belief systems are exempt in a lot of these other related literatures and not to villainize them or mock them or demean them, but in fact, to show how they can be valuable.

And so in this and a lot of other ways, I think the book is not easily digestible into the culture wars and the ways that people might hope.

You said something a second ago, I'm glad you did. Because I wouldn't normally mention this. This is not in my little prep doc I have on hand. But it's relevant. And you gestured to it just a second ago, and you also addressed it in the book.

So I'm going to broach it here. You're a black Muslim American challenging some of the orthodoxies on the left and the right. And there's this thing that often happens on the left. And I don't like it, where whenever a black person has views that aren't doctrinaire or or that aren't the views a white progressive thinks a black person is supposed to have, they get dismissed or attacked. And I think you even say in the book that you're emphasizing your blackness and the influence of black scholarship on the book to push readers to listen to you in a way they might otherwise not.

What is it that you want those readers in particular to hear that they might otherwise not?

Yeah. So the thing that they need to hear is that the values and interests of people like us are often out of step with those of the people that we want to help. Our views of politics, the solutions that we have to social problems are often out of step with what other people want and need in some ways and often in ways that cause them harm. Quick example. I was at a conference on political polarization.

They had 4 black people taking part in this conversation alongside the whites. The 4 of us, there was me who's half white, there was 2 Afro Caribbean folks, and then there was someone who was Kenyan and Nigerian. So not 1 person out of the 4 black people who were part of this panel, not 1 person was a monoracial non immigrant Black person. They're the overwhelming majority of America's Black population. They were nowhere represented on this panel, setting aside the class dimension of it.

But even just looking at ethnicity, we were not even ethnically remotely representative of Blacks in America. And in that panel, while unrepresentative of Black America, was perfectly representative of how almost all of the spokespeople in symbolic capitalist spaces are. Almost all of the Black spokespeople in symbolic capitalist spaces are either mixed race or recent immigrant black heritage. And the few exceptions to that rule tend to be people who are themselves from really relatively affluent backgrounds. So the problem with turning to people like myself to understand how all Black America thinks is just that we're not representative of Black America.

Our experiences are not the same. Our challenges are not the same. Our values and interests are often very different from the modal Black American. If you look at the modal Black American, Black people in America vote overwhelmingly with the Democratic Party, but not because they're super liberal. They're some of the most culturally conservative folks in the democratic block.

And in fact, this is 1 of the big problems that a lot of institutions have when they try to promote diversity and inclusion, is that we often create these spaces that are really hostile towards traditional or socially conservative or religious views in the name of diversity and inclusion. But the people who are most affected by that are people who are already underrepresented in these spaces. The kinds of people who are already the dominant population, so relatively affluent, highly educated background, urban and suburban white people and so on. The people who dominate these institutions demographically also tend to share the dominant ideologies. They're products of the same kinds of childhoods and institutions and so on.

If you look at the Americans who are most likely to self identify as anti racist, feminists, as allies to LGBTQ people, as environmentalists and so on, it's highly educated, relatively affluent urban and suburban white people. And so if we create an environment that if you're not those things, you're going to be suppressed or villainized or socially sanctioned and whatever. The people who are going to be most adversely affected by that are going to be non traditional students, rural students, less affluent students, immigrants, non white students, religious minority students, and so on. So we do all of these policies in the name of diversity and inclusion that are often devastating for the people we want to help.

Well, look, I'm not going to ask you to solve all of our political problems. But I guess I am curious what you think or what you see on the other side of this awokening. I mean, our our politics feel pretty dysfunctional right now. It feels pretty stuck and hopelessly polarized. Do you have any reason, based on how these previous eras have played out, to think we might end up in a healthier place after all this?

So in the book, I talk about how there are these things that are very much the same across the awakenings. But there are also a couple of things that are different, that are different in an important way. For all the parts of the awakening that's cyclical, there is actually this set of trend lines that I think matters a lot for thinking through what the legacy of this awakening might be and what the next 1 might look like. 1 thing that I think is importantly different that has been increasingly different each awakening is that the share of Americans who take part in the symbolic professions has changed. So in the 1920s, at the time of the first Great Awakening, symbolic capitalists were like 3% of workers.

And now it's about a third of workers. And so still a minority, not close to a majority, but a really big minority. And that matters. That matters because when you're only 3% of a population, you can't just write off the rest of America. If you're a third of all workers though, and you tend to be the most affluent workers and you're concentrated in these very particular communities and you're taking part in these really interconnected institutions like academia and the nonprofit sphere and policymaking circles and so on, then it actually is.

Absolutely can. So you can just totally write off the values of most of America and make money hand over fist. You can be a political party that increasingly alienates or is increasingly distant from mainstream America. And you can win lots of elections, of national city elections, state elections all across the country, be flush with funds and even be competitive on the national stage if you can just get enough normies to get along with you in addition to your core constituency. 1 of the things that's become increasingly the case that's been different from awokening to awokening is that symbolic capitalists have been a larger share of the overall workforce and more resources have been consolidated in our hands.

And as a result of that, we have a lot more autonomy from the rest of the public in a way that is sometimes pernicious. And more broadly, I just think that some of the current bifurcation we see between us and most of the rest of society is probably not sustainable. I think 1 of the things that you see very clearly is that growing shares of Americans feel like they don't have a voice or a stake in our institutions. They think that their values are not represented in our institutions. And in fact, they think that our institutions are hostile towards their interests.

And there's lots of research in The United States and around the world that suggests that when people feel that way, what they do is they try to burn down those institutions. They try to marginalize them, defund them, delegitimize them, and otherwise burn them down. And that's a very rational response. And it doesn't matter what the institution is. If you don't have a voice or a stake in it and you think it's committed to the destruction of people like you, why would you not resist it?

It would be crazy to actually conspire with that institution towards your own destruction and then miseration, right? You would of course resist it. That's the natural normal thing to do. And it doesn't matter what that institution is. So often symbolic capitalists, when we're met with distrust, when we're met with this kind of resistance, we pathologize it as, like for instance, anti intellectualism.

And instead of really reckoning in a serious way with the fact that a lot of people feel not wrongly in many cases, that they don't have a voice or a stake, that people like us look down on people like them, that people like us are actively hostile towards people like them, that we write off their suffering. And we actually hope in many cases that their suffering continues or grows worse because they think the wrong things or say the wrong things or vote for the wrong people and so on. And so I think this bifurcation is not sustainable in the long term. Something's going to give 1 way or another. And I hope that we can make choices that allow something to give in a way that's not highly destructive.

I do wanna say that I think this book is as intellectually honest as a book on this topic could possibly be. And for that reason, I think it's a it's a it's a genuinely worthwhile contribution to this conversation. So I I commend you for that.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Once again, the book is called We Have Never Been Woke, The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Musa Algarbi, thank you.

It's it's been great. Thank you for for having me.

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