Old questions, new answers

 This week I have read a remarkable new book, We Have Never Been Woke, by a sociologist named Musa Al-Gharbi.   Al-Gharbi was born sometime in the mid to late 1980s, it appears, to a black father and a white mother, both of whom were serving in the military.  He grew up and went to college in Arizona. To judge from the autobiography he posted on his web site, he has been a deep thinker all his life.  His twin brother was killed in the military in Afghanistan in 2010, and Al-Gharbi emerged as a critic of US Middle Eastern policy and eventually converted to Islam himself.  In 2016, when he was around 30, he began graduate school at Columbia as a sociologist, and he earned his Ph.D. seven years later with a dissertation of extraordinary scope and relevance.  That dissertation has now become We Have Never Been Woke.  

This book is intellectually ambitious, readable, and based upon extraordinarily wide reading in social science literature.  Its bibliography lists about 1500 sources, which he uses with great economy.  Its subject is our educated elite, the people who make our educational, governmental, medical, financial, literary, artistic, industrial, and high-tech institutions.  He calls this elite "symbolic capitalists."  They are, he estimates, about two-thirds Democratic, and concentrate themselves in a number of "symbolic hubs," including the Boston, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and D. C. metropolitan areas, as well as Chicago, Atlanta, and perhaps Houston and Dallas.  (The book doesn't pay too much attention to red states or conservative elites.)  He sees wokeness as the dominant ideology of symbolic capitalists, characterized by a focus (or obsession) with oppression based on race, gender, and sexuality.  He apparently reacted to the extremely woke environment of Columbia (which also had a huge impact on the somewhat younger Coleman Hughes) like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.  He was as we shall see affected somewhat by wokeness, but he saw himself essentially as an outsider who could see through it.  Interestingly enough, he not only identifies himself as a symbolic capitalist but uses the pronoun "we" to refer to them throughout.

The woke elite, Al-Gharbi argues from many perspectives, are hypocrites.  While they claim to side with the oppressed, they dominate the upper economic reaches of our society and now hold power over most of our institutions.  Most importantly, their actual impact upon society as a whole does nothing for the lower economic half of the population, regardless of its race, gender, or sexual orientation.  They speak a language that is inherently offensive to the majority of the population that has not secured at least a B.A. degree.  They live in the least egalitarian metropolitan areas in the country, and often resist measures--such as efforts to construct more affordable housing--that would actually help the less well off.  They have, of course, promoted the globalization of our economy that has taken away so many good working-class jobs.  He argues that much of the new economy, including Amazon, Uber and Lift, and Door Dash and Grub Hub, exploits poorly paid workers--many of them immigrants--to make the lives of symbolic capitalists easier and more convenient.  Those workers, he argues, serve their economic betters the way that servants did in earlier eras--but masters took more responsibility for the lives of servants in those days than they do now.  

Symbolic capitalists' control of the media--and, he argues, their dominance on social media--have allowed them to portray themselves as egalitarian.  That, Al-Gharbi thinks, relies on a misreading of economic data.  Occupy Wall Street, a key episode in setting the tone of the 2010s, focused on the top one percent of our economy, but he focuses on the top 40 percent, which includes most of our college educated population and which has also been making gains while the lower 50 percent stagnates.  And, echoing the point that I have made for years, he notes that the diversification of that top 40 percent, which now includes far more women and nonwhites, has done nothing for the bottom half--and the bottom half knows it.  

I think Al-Gharbi has an excellent sense of where the United States is today, but his grasp of the last century of US history seems to me much shakier.  He uses another term, the Great Awokening, which appears to have been coined by another left-center skeptic, Matthew Iglesias, to refer to the spread of the oppressor-oppressed model since around 2011.  That  seems to me very accurate, but he moves onto shakier ground when he tries to identify three previous Great Awokenings in the 1930s, the late 1960s, and the early 1990s.  I don't think that the New Deal had the same focus on race and gender, even though it benefited both black Americans and women substantially.  It was based specifically on narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor and assuring everyone a decent life.  The late 1960s are indeed a precursor to what we have experienced more recently, insofar as they saw the beginning of the repudiation of the ideas of meritocracy and the claim that American society was fundamentally racist, sexist and imperialistic that has now blossomed.  Those ideas did break into public consciousness in the early 1990s under the name of "political correctness," but the country as a whole was moving in a different direction.   I also disagree with his analysis of where these movements came from.  Every one of those eras, he claims, saw the educated class threatened by economic developments that limited its opportunities, and it tried to seize the moral high ground to regain its position.  Al-Gharbi often thinks like an economist: he thinks almost all behavior is motivated by very real self-interest.  I do think that the self-interest of women and nonwhites, especially in academia, has a lot to do with the spread of woke ideas in the last 20 years.   But as I have often written here, I think all this is part of a general rebellion against authority of all kinds--political, social and intellectual--that began in the late 1960s and has allowed for all sorts of left- and right-wing ideas that would have been written off as crazy in the  mid-twentieth century to flourish.  And last but not least, the many hundreds of scholars whom he lists in his bibliography do not include William Strauss and Neil Howe, who might have opened his eyes to different perspectives.

It is because symbolic capitalists--our college-educated elite--have done so little for the lower half of the economic order that Al-Gharbi concludes that its dominant ideology--and it is dominant among them, as we shall see--must serve a different purpose.  That purpose is simply to make its adherents feel morally superior to their foes, and therefore entirely deserving of whatever they have.   It also allows them to view their opponents--Trump voters--as moral reprobates, "deplorables," as one might say.  Yes, he admits, Republican elites are more culturally conservative and pro-free market than Democratic ones--but both elites and more pro-free market and culturally liberal than the average American.  Interestingly enough, he cannot give up the woke idea of white privilege, but he seems to admit that wealth bestows much more advantage on Americans than skin color, and he mentions the critical, much-ignored fact that a plurality of poor Americans are white.  (That is why I do not believe that white skin, in and of itself, confers any privilege at all any more.)  Citing numerous studies by others, he notes that many of the nonwhites benefiting from affirmative action are either from immigrant families or families that are already well-to-do.  He points out again and again that woke ideology is much less popular among the poor--of all races--than the well-educated.   The vast majority of Hispanics reject the term Latinx, which, like ritual "land acknowledgements" on web sites and at public events, simply signal that the speaker belongs to the morally elect.  He also cites studies showing that tribalism is a more powerful force among those who have been to college than those who have not, and that they are now less likely to change their minds in response to discovering facts that contradict their opinons.

In one of his more arresting sections, Al-Gharbi turns to the influence of woke ideas--including critical race theory--in schools and colleges.  I was glad to see him make the obvious point that while K-12 schools do not teach the intellectual history of critical race theory through the works of Derrick Bell and Kimberle Crenshaw, their curriculums often reflect the conclusions of critical race theory.  But then he points out that the biggest controversies over CRT in the classroom have involved either elite private schools like Dalton and Horace Mann in New York, or schools in very wealthy suburbs like Loudon County,  Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C.  And why, he asks, have these schools adopted these curricula?  Because they exist to feed students into the Ivy League and other elite institutions, whose admissions offices are actively recruiting social justice warriors who can talk the talk.  That does not, however, mean that those schools are actually educating their students to change the economic foundations of our society.  In fact, a recent study reported in the Boston Globe used linked in to find that more than half of Harvard graduates now go into consulting, finance, or information technology.

Some major newspaper columnists like David Brooks have quoted Al-Gharbi recently, but the New York Times has declined to review We Have Never Been Woke.  The Washington Post published a favorable review from a graduate student, which drew hundreds of outraged comments from woke readers, many of whom repeated the standard progressive talking point that "wokeness" is a right wing code word designed to fight social change.  I am delighted that Al-Gharbi is now an assistant professor at SUNY Stoney Brook and I think he can be one of the leading social scientists of his generation.  And I don't think it's coincidental that he has mixed ancestry, just like Coleman Hughes (whose parents black and Puerto Rican) and myself (whose parents were old-line WASP and first-generation American Jew.)  Many of us who grow up without a clearly defined ethnic identity seem to emerge with a frightening tendency to think for ourselves.

Al Gharbi never quotes or paraphrases Benjamin Disraeli's famous passage about "the two nations," but he might have.  His book was finished before the last election, but its results--and the findings of the CNN exit poll--confirm to me that his basic portrayal of the divide within our nation is accurate.  The real divide in our country is between the  approximately 45 percent who have at least a BA degree and the 55 percent who do not.  43 percent of the respondents in the CNN exit poll of voters had college degrees, and 56 percent of them voted for Kamala Harris while 42 percent voted for Trump.  57 percent of the respondents lacked those degrees, and 56 percent of them voted for Trump, as opposed to 43 percent for Harris.  Harris won 53-45 among white voters with degrees and lost by a two to one margin among white voters without them.  In my opinion, the lower economic half of our population--including growing numbers of Hispanics and black Americans--agrees with Al-Gharbi that the educated elite is dominated by a hypocritical ideology that is doing nothing for anyone but themselves.  And that, in my opinion, is the biggest reason that Donald Trump and the Republican party now control the entire federal government and have set about eliminating the influence of that ideology, while making the economic divide in the country wider than ever.