Musa al-Gharbi had been on stage for ten minutes talking about his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite when the audience started shaking their heads. The affluent, largely white crowd at the Washington DC bookshop Politics & Prose scowled because Al-Gharbi had the temerity to question their moral bona fides. On the eve of an election in which working-class people would rebuff America’s progressive party, Al-Gharbi was there to tell them that being woke didn’t make them good. In fact, being woke marked them out as members of the elite; as people who exploited the vulnerable and doggedly pursued power – all while being convinced of their moral supremacy in a twisted form of false consciousness.
Al-Gharbi is a leading diagnostician of progressives’ collapse. He has been described as a “rising intellectual star” by the writer David Brooks, and in 2021 advised the then equalities minister and now Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch on diversity training. An earlier draft of Al-Gharbi’s book pivoted around the work of the late Christopher Lasch. In The Revolt of the Elites (1994), Lasch asked: “What does it profit the residents of the south Bronx to enforce speech codes at elite universities?” Like those who saw Halley’s Comet a century after the astronomer’s death, Al-Gharbi collects the evidence that supports Lasch’s insight.
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