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.
After the event in the bookshop, Al-Gharbi and I went to a Mexican restaurant next door. He attributes his insights in part to his own story. Al-Gharbi grew up in a military family in Sierra Vista, Arizona, 20 miles from the Mexico border. “We were traditionally middle-class – my mom wasn’t collecting income, but my stepdad was in the army, and was making a fine salary,” he told me. After an aborted attempt to become a Catholic priest, Al-Gharbi did degrees in philosophy and Middle Eastern studies and converted to Islam. It was the death of his twin brother on tour in Afghanistan that fuelled his interest in politics over metaphysics. In 2016, he moved to New York to study for a PhD in sociology at Columbia University, where he first encountered the progressive elite.
On the Upper West Side, he found a “racialised caste system” where, he writes in We Have Never Been Woke, the elites had “disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you”. He was struck by the gap between his fellow students’ progressive rhetoric promoting diversity and their actions. In the days after the 2016 election of Donald Trump, for instance, “I had a sociological theory seminar, and we were supposed to talk about [WEB] Du Bois. Instead, we had a rap about our feelings. People were openly sobbing. I was struck because the only reason [the students] were able to take it so easy is because there were all these other people who just showed up to work the next day and did their jobs.” Al-Gharbi told me he thinks he noticed the disconnect because he had only recently been serving such people as a shoe seller in Arizona.
He does not have a straight definition of “woke”, comparing it to other abstract nouns such as “justice” and “love”, but describes it as the ideology of elites grasping to hold on to their position in society. He calls these elites “symbolic capitalists”, who traffic in “non-manual work associated with the production and manipulation of data, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations. Think academics, consultants, journalists, administrators, lawyers, people who work in finance and tech.”
Symbolic capitalists have obtained “idiosyncratic tastes and unusual lifestyles” compared to the rest of the US. “These preferences and expectations are generally fulfilled by exploiting desperate and vulnerable people, whose poverty and precarity are prerequisites for the elite lifestyles we enjoy,” Al-Gharbi writes. As men neglect domestic duties, elite women can only work when employing other women – often on low wages – to care for their children and clean their houses. Fast fashion and online shopping necessarily rely on the exploitation of warehouse workers. Symbolic capitalists are driven around by underpaid Uber drivers. Sex workers are predominantly used by the highly educated and wealthy.
All of which cuts against the woke values that symbolic capitalists have extolled over the past decade. To understand this discrepancy, Al-Gharbi looks to the past. He argues that the era that reached its apogee during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 was the fourth in a series of “great awokenings”. Each is marked by the ostracisation of dissenters, therapeutic language and an association with the oppressed. Al-Gharbi suspected our present awokening was part of a pattern after reading The Road to Wigan Pier, in which George Orwell wrote that the “typical socialist” was a “prim little man with a white-collar job… [and] a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting”.
According to Al-Gharbi, the first awokening was in the early 1930s, when graduates who expected high-paying jobs were thwarted by the Great Depression and turned to the anti-war movement, feminism and the first gay rights organisations. The second awokening did not hit until the 1960s: Tom Wolfe’s age of radical chic, when Black Panthers and white liberal “radicals” partied together over hors d’oeuvres served by maids in uniform. Al-Gharbi contends this awokening was triggered by the extension of the draft to students, and was therefore separate to the Civil Rights movement, which long-predated the advent of the soixante-huitards of 1968. “Middle-class students became radical precisely when their plans to leave the fighting to minorities and the poor by enrolling in college and waiting things out began to fall through,” he writes. The third occurred in the late 1980s, when debate around sexism, racism and homophobia spiked once again and the enforcement of “political correctness” began. The latest iteration emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. By the end of that decade, white liberals believed minorities suffered more racism than minorities themselves did.
None of these movements, Al-Gharbi argues, materially improved the lot of the people the woke claimed to support. All, he contends, were led by graduates who didn’t get the status they thought they deserved and who sought to usurp those who did using accusations of moral imperfection. Al-Gharbi consciously situates himself in the tradition of WEB Du Bois of criticising white liberals for using social justice movements to pamper their egos. Social justice is not his target; his argument is that social progress is separate to, and achieved in spite of, these awokenings.
Progressives, Al-Gharbi told me, fail on their own terms by not practising their values. While he believes identity politics can unhelpfully divide people into competing tribes, in many ways he doesn’t think the woke are woke enough. “[The sociologist Pierre] Bourdieu has this great quote that runs something like, ‘I don’t think it’s a problem that the kids are burning cars. I want them to be able to burn cars for a purpose,’” he said. “And that’s kind of where I land. I don’t disagree with a lot of the things that protesters are calling for.”
Al-Gharbi rejects the argument that criticising symbolic capitalists distracts from the real enemy, the top 1 per cent, because symbolic capitalists administrate and maintain the wealthy’s power: “Who is it that works in the PR firms that [make the billionaires look good]? Oh, that’s symbolic capitalists. Who are the journalists that write the fawning profiles when they make these donations [to charities]? Oh, that’s symbolic capitalists. Who is it that’s helping them launder their money, working in finance? Oh, that’s symbolic capitalists. Who is administering the non-profits? That’s symbolic capitalists.” The argument that the elites are mere footmen to billionaires is, Al-Gharbi said, “a story we tell ourselves because it absolves us of responsibility – but it’s just not true”.
Trump’s victory on 5 November can be understood as a revolt against the supremacy of symbolic capitalists, their “idiosyncratic” mores and belief in their own self-righteousness. “Kamala Harris is a very prototypical symbolic capitalist, and it’s actually hard to imagine her as anything else,” he said.
Musa al-Gharbi thinks Trump won because the Democrats became a party of the elites, by the elites and for the elites. Harris excited voters with six-figure salaries or more, while Trump won with people earning less than $50,000 a year. The Democrats became a party of symbolic capitalists. Few people liked that. And they voted accordingly.
[See also: The West’s useful idiots]
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