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0:01:20 – There are several terms in our political vocabulary
0:01:24 that have been stretched to the point of incoherence.
0:01:28 Marxist and Orwellian spring immediately to mind,
0:01:32 but at this moment, I’m not sure any term
0:01:33 can compete with woke.
0:01:39 Whether you’re on the left or the right,
0:01:42 whether you’re pro or anti-woke,
0:01:44 or even if you’re not especially political
0:01:46 and don’t follow this stuff,
0:01:49 woke is a word you simply cannot escape.
0:01:54 The problem is that woke has become a catch-all term,
0:01:59 often deployed in bad faith to smear or dismiss anything
0:02:03 that has any vague association with progressive politics.
0:02:07 As a result, anytime you venture into an argument
0:02:10 about wokeness, it becomes hopelessly entangled
0:02:12 in this broader cultural battle.
0:02:17 However, wokeness is not purely a figment
0:02:19 of the reactionary mind.
0:02:23 Even if we can’t quite define it,
0:02:27 it refers to something actually happening in the world.
0:02:29 And if we can cut through all the bullshit
0:02:32 and all the bad faith, it’s worth understanding
0:02:34 what it is and where it comes from.
0:02:40 I’m Sean Elling, and this is The Gray Area.
0:02:43 (upbeat music)
0:02:53 Today’s guest is Musa Algarvi.
0:02:56 He’s a journalist, a professor at Stony Brook University,
0:02:59 and the author of a very interesting new book
0:03:01 called We Have Never Been Woke,
0:03:04 The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.
0:03:09 Musa’s book is a serious effort
0:03:12 to understand this movement and the effects it is having
0:03:15 or not having on our society.
0:03:20 And whether one agrees with all of his conclusions or not,
0:03:23 it’s impossible to read this book and not walk away
0:03:27 feeling like you know more than you did before you read it.
0:03:28 So I invited him on the show
0:03:31 to talk about what wokeism means,
0:03:35 why it’s not as new and unprecedented as people think,
0:03:38 and why the social and economic forces driving it
0:03:40 are so complicated.
0:03:47 Musa Algarvi, welcome to the show.
0:03:47 – It’s great to be here.
0:03:50 Thank you so much for having me.
0:03:51 – I’m glad we’re finally doing this.
0:03:58 Wokeism is a topic I’ve mostly avoided on the show,
0:04:01 not because I don’t think it refers
0:04:03 to a real thing happening in the world,
0:04:06 but because most of the discourse around it
0:04:11 is so tedious and circular or bad faith.
0:04:15 And if your book was merely a defense of wokeness
0:04:17 or an attack on it,
0:04:18 I don’t think I would have invited you on,
0:04:21 but it’s so much more than that.
0:04:25 In your mind, what makes it a fresh contribution?
0:04:28 – I think one of the big contributions of the book
0:04:31 is that it helps contextualize the present moment
0:04:32 in a different way.
0:04:35 It shows that what’s happening after 2010
0:04:36 is actually a case of something.
0:04:38 And in fact, there have been three other
0:04:39 previous awokenings.
0:04:41 And by comparing and contrasting these cases,
0:04:44 we can actually get a lot of insight into questions
0:04:46 like why do these awokenings come about?
0:04:47 Why do they end?
0:04:48 Do they change anything?
0:04:51 And these kinds of questions,
0:04:53 instead of trying to just explain things
0:04:54 that are happening today,
0:04:57 in terms of other things that are also happening today,
0:05:00 to kind of step back and take a more
0:05:02 kind of structural look at what’s happening.
0:05:04 So I think that’s one of the big values.
0:05:06 Primarily what it’s trying to do
0:05:10 is this deep study of contemporary inequalities,
0:05:13 how they come about, who benefits from them and how.
0:05:17 And here I think it makes an important contribution as well,
0:05:21 because especially in symbolic capitalist spaces,
0:05:26 so spaces like higher ed, journalism, and so on,
0:05:29 when we tell narratives about how various social problems
0:05:31 come about and persist and so on,
0:05:34 the stories that we tell are kind of self-serving.
0:05:39 And in particular, we tend to focus on basically,
0:05:40 the millionaires, the billionaires,
0:05:42 the multinational corporations,
0:05:44 and also those damn Republicans.
0:05:47 And it’s not like those stories are false per se,
0:05:52 but they’re also like really, really, really incomplete.
0:05:55 And so part of what I’m trying to do in this book
0:05:59 is kind of hit those missing notes to show people,
0:06:02 like even if we want to explain the actions
0:06:04 of the millionaires and the billionaires
0:06:07 and the multinational corporations, for instance,
0:06:11 it’s actually impossible to explain how any of the stuff
0:06:15 that those actors do actually happens without us.
0:06:18 It’s with us and through us that they accomplish those goals.
0:06:21 And then the last contribution, I think,
0:06:23 is it’s a cool study of the political economy
0:06:26 of the knowledge professions.
0:06:29 So how does the changing kind of power and wealth
0:06:31 of the symbolic professions
0:06:32 and the people who take part in them,
0:06:36 how does that relate to our changing
0:06:38 kind of moral and political narratives
0:06:42 and the ways that we behave politically in society
0:06:45 and our ideological alignments and things like that?
0:06:48 – I wanna get into the meat of the case you’re making here.
0:06:55 Let’s just do a little bit of table setting to ground us.
0:07:00 And I realize every interviewer is probably asking you
0:07:03 to define wokeness.
0:07:08 And in the book, you don’t offer a precise definition
0:07:12 because it’s a contested term and like many contested terms,
0:07:15 it can’t be clearly defined.
0:07:18 However, I do think it will help
0:07:22 if you explain why you resisted defining it
0:07:26 and then at least give me the most general account
0:07:29 you can of wokeness so that we at least know
0:07:32 what we’re talking about for the rest of this conversation
0:07:33 or people know what you’re talking about.
0:07:34 – Yeah, absolutely.
0:07:38 So, yeah, there’s this move in the discourse
0:07:40 that I think is really unhelpful.
0:07:43 That’s basically like, if you can’t provide
0:07:45 a crisp analytic definition of something,
0:07:47 then you just don’t know what you’re talking about.
0:07:49 You’re not talking about anything.
0:07:51 There’s no there, there, it’s a moral panic or whatever.
0:07:53 And I think that’s a really bad way
0:07:55 to think about how language works.
0:07:57 Like the idea that we need necessary
0:08:00 and sufficient conditions for something
0:08:02 in order to understand what it is is just false.
0:08:05 So what I don’t do in the book is provide that
0:08:09 but I do provide kind of a rich thick description
0:08:12 about what different stakeholders seem to mean
0:08:14 when they refer to wokeness.
0:08:16 And there, there’s actually a lot of agreement
0:08:17 and there are a whole bunch of things
0:08:19 that kind of people across the political
0:08:22 and ideological spectrum seem to have in mind
0:08:25 when they’re talking about this contested term.
0:08:27 I don’t think they cohere into a definition
0:08:29 but it is the case that stakeholders
0:08:32 kind of across the political and ideological spectrum,
0:08:35 there is a kind of broad zone of agreement
0:08:38 of kinds of things that we’re talking about
0:08:39 when we talk about wokeness.
0:08:41 And I’ll say during the last period of a wokening
0:08:43 in the late 80s to early 90s,
0:08:44 instead of talking about wokeness,
0:08:46 they talked about political correctness.
0:08:50 But it was, but it was like the same constellation
0:08:53 of attitudes and dispositions more or less.
0:08:56 And the dynamics of how that word played out
0:08:59 in the public unfolded in much the same way.
0:09:01 So at first there was a lot of people
0:09:03 who identified as politically correct
0:09:07 in an ironic way to mean my views,
0:09:09 my moral and political views are correct.
0:09:14 And other people started to associate PC culture
0:09:15 with this kind of sanctimonious,
0:09:19 purely symbolic form of activism.
0:09:23 And then gradually the right seized upon this dispute
0:09:25 within the left and started attacking anything
0:09:27 they didn’t like as PC.
0:09:30 And then it became difficult for anyone
0:09:32 to associate unironically
0:09:34 with the term politically correctness
0:09:36 and the term political correctness became
0:09:38 almost purely a term of derision.
0:09:40 And even to be politically incorrect,
0:09:42 it took on a somewhat positive valency
0:09:45 at people like Bill Maher who had a whole show
0:09:47 politically incorrect or something like that.
0:09:50 And you see the same thing playing out with woke today.
0:09:55 So increasingly no one self identifies as woke
0:09:57 in an unironic way.
0:10:01 And so the same kind of dynamic that we saw playing out
0:10:03 in the last awokening around political correctness
0:10:06 is now playing out in a very similar way
0:10:07 around the term woke.
0:10:09 And in the next awokening, the term woke
0:10:11 probably won’t be part of it.
0:10:15 There’ll be some probably some other term as this one,
0:10:18 some other term that activists used to define themselves
0:10:20 in their approach to politics and so on.
0:10:26 – Okay, so we’re in the midst of the fourth awokening,
0:10:28 according to you that we’ve had in this country.
0:10:30 There’s one in the 20s or 30s.
0:10:32 There’s another one in the 60s.
0:10:36 There’s the one you’re just talking about in the 80s, 90s.
0:10:38 And then this current one,
0:10:41 what do all these periods have in common?
0:10:45 What is the thread that ties them together?
0:10:49 The tweet length answer is that these periods
0:10:54 of awokening happen when there’s a big crisis for elites
0:10:59 where they are expecting a certain life
0:11:03 and it seems like they won’t be able to live that life.
0:11:05 One thread that cuts across all four awokenings
0:11:09 is that they tend to occur during these periods
0:11:10 of elite overproduction.
0:11:14 And so elite overproduction is a term that’s taken
0:11:16 from sociologist Jack Goldstone,
0:11:18 then historian Peter Turchin.
0:11:20 And it refers to a condition
0:11:22 where society is producing more people
0:11:25 that have a reasonable expectation to be elites.
0:11:28 Then we have the capacity to actually give them
0:11:31 the elite lifestyles and positions that they’re expecting.
0:11:33 So you have growing numbers of people
0:11:34 who did everything right.
0:11:37 They got good grades, they went to college,
0:11:39 they went to the right colleges,
0:11:40 they studied the right majors
0:11:43 and they’re expecting six figure salaries
0:11:45 and to be able to have a house
0:11:47 and to get married and settled down
0:11:48 and have kids and a standard of living
0:11:50 that’s close to or better
0:11:51 than what their parents experienced.
0:11:54 And all of a sudden they’re not able to do any of that.
0:11:56 When you have growing numbers of people
0:11:58 in that kind of a condition,
0:12:01 what they tend to do is indict the social order
0:12:02 that they think failed them
0:12:05 and try to tear down some of the existing elites
0:12:07 to make space for people like themselves.
0:12:09 So that’s at their core,
0:12:11 what I argue is happening in awokenings.
0:12:16 The two factors that cut across all four awokenings
0:12:19 are the elite overproduction
0:12:22 and this other factor, popular immiseration.
0:12:24 So elite overproduction,
0:12:28 one reason why that’s not enough
0:12:31 to predict awokenings, why it’s not sufficient
0:12:37 is because often when elites are having a tough time,
0:12:40 it’s hard to get anyone to care.
0:12:42 And that’s because there’s this phenomenon
0:12:45 where the fortunes of elites and non-elites
0:12:47 tend to operate counter-cyclicly.
0:12:49 When elites are having a tough time,
0:12:51 it’s hard to get anyone to care.
0:12:53 No one’s breaking out a tiny violin
0:12:55 and going, “Oh, poor elite guy,
0:12:58 he has to live a normal life and get a normal job.
0:12:59 Like everyone else.
0:13:01 Oh, let me play you a sad song, right?”
0:13:03 So if times are pretty good for everyone else
0:13:05 but bad for elites, no one cares.
0:13:07 But there are these moments
0:13:09 when the trajectories get collapsed,
0:13:13 when things have been kind of bad and growing worse
0:13:15 for ordinary people for a while
0:13:18 and all of a sudden they’re bad for a lot of elites too,
0:13:20 those are the moments when awokenings happen
0:13:24 because the frustrated elite aspirants
0:13:26 not only have a motive,
0:13:29 but they also have a means to really mess with the system
0:13:32 ’cause there’s this huge base of other people in society
0:13:34 who are also really frustrated
0:13:35 with the way things are going,
0:13:38 who also have a bone to pick
0:13:40 with the people who are kind of running the show.
0:13:41 And so they have a more leverage,
0:13:43 these frustrated elite aspirants have more leverage
0:13:46 over the system than they otherwise might.
0:13:48 – Let me push on something for a second.
0:13:51 The case you make in the book is that the elites
0:13:53 and you and I are technically part of this group
0:13:55 because of what we do,
0:13:59 like to imagine that we’re part of the 99%
0:14:01 and it’s the one percenters who are the real elites
0:14:05 when in fact it’s really the top 20%
0:14:08 who are hoarding most of the power and wealth.
0:14:13 Isn’t it true though that much of what you call
0:14:15 the symbolic capitalist class,
0:14:17 that’s the term we’re about to define right after this,
0:14:19 but for now let’s just say people like me and you
0:14:22 and journalists, academics, bureaucrats, lawyers,
0:14:25 corporate management types and so on.
0:14:29 Most of us exist in a kind of precarity
0:14:32 that is much closer to the lived experience
0:14:34 of the middle and working classes
0:14:37 than it is to the tech CEOs or the hedge fund managers.
0:14:40 You and I have much more in common with a school teacher
0:14:43 or a firefighter or a retail manager
0:14:46 than we do with Mark Zuckerberg or Jay-Z
0:14:49 or whoever the hell is running Goldman Sachs these days.
0:14:51 It seems to me that in theory at least
0:14:53 there’s more convergence of interest here
0:14:56 than your thesis might suggest.
0:14:57 What am I missing?
0:14:58 – I mean, I think that’s definitely how we like
0:15:01 to think of ourselves, but as I show in the book,
0:15:04 one of the problems that we have is that we compare
0:15:07 ourselves, I think too much to people like Mark Zuckerberg
0:15:09 and go, “Oh, well, I’m just a normie,”
0:15:11 rather than comparing ourselves to normies.
0:15:14 So I’ll give an example I talk about in the book
0:15:18 is when you look at adjunct professors.
0:15:22 So adjunct professors relative to tenure line professors
0:15:23 are clearly exploited.
0:15:28 They make a lot less money for doing the same kinds of work.
0:15:31 They have no say over faculty governance.
0:15:33 They have really precarious labor contracts.
0:15:35 They have no academic freedom to speak of
0:15:37 as I discovered firsthand when I did that job.
0:15:38 – I was one, it sucked.
0:15:44 – But it’s also the case that if you are
0:15:47 a full-time adjunct instructor on average,
0:15:51 you make much more than the typical American worker
0:15:53 and you also have much better working conditions.
0:15:55 You have much higher social status and so on.
0:15:58 And this is part of the reason why people choose to adjunct
0:16:00 instead of becoming a manager at Waffle House or something
0:16:03 is because they don’t wanna be those people.
0:16:07 The idea of working as a manager in a Waffle House
0:16:08 or something like that,
0:16:13 they would rather struggle as an adjunct at Berkeley
0:16:16 than to be a shoe salesman.
0:16:18 They don’t see themselves in the same boat.
0:16:20 They don’t wanna be in the same boat.
0:16:23 They passionately don’t wanna be in the same boat.
0:16:26 And even in terms of things like culture,
0:16:30 in many respects, actually we are closer to people
0:16:32 like Mark Zuckerberg and those folks.
0:16:34 And in fact, increasingly the millionaires
0:16:37 and the billionaires are drawn from us anyway,
0:16:39 Zuckerberg being a great example.
0:16:42 Like for instance, take journalists.
0:16:44 So journalism used to be a job
0:16:47 where you had decent numbers of working class people.
0:16:49 That’s not the case so much anymore.
0:16:52 Both because of credential requirements,
0:16:56 like journalists are increasingly focused on
0:17:00 only people with college degrees can be journalists
0:17:03 and especially people who graduate from elite schools.
0:17:07 And so like in a world where you need to have
0:17:09 a college degree and a college degree in the right majors
0:17:11 and from the right schools in order to be a journalist.
0:17:13 And in order to be a journalist,
0:17:15 you also have to basically work for free
0:17:16 in really expensive cities
0:17:18 to get your foot in the door and so on.
0:17:20 Then the only people who can really be journalists
0:17:22 are people who are relatively affluent.
0:17:24 And that has important implications
0:17:26 for the way we do our job.
0:17:30 So for instance, it’s holding the elite to account
0:17:31 plays out much different.
0:17:33 If the people you’re supposed to be holding to account
0:17:35 are your classmates and your friends
0:17:38 and your lovers and your neighbors versus
0:17:40 if you have this kind of sociological distance
0:17:41 between you and the elites.
0:17:48 And the perspectives of non-elite people
0:17:51 are also not particularly present in our institution.
0:17:55 So a great example, there’s an essay by Bertrand Cooper
0:17:57 called “Who Gets to Create Black Culture?”
0:18:00 And in this essay, he points out,
0:18:04 like if George Floyd was alive after he was killed,
0:18:09 he became the New York Times, the Washington Post, HBO,
0:18:12 everyone, George Floyd, George Floyd, George Floyd.
0:18:13 If George Floyd hadn’t been killed,
0:18:16 but he wanted to write for the New York Times,
0:18:18 there’s zero chance he would have had to,
0:18:20 he would have been able to write for the New York Times.
0:18:21 The New York Times doesn’t care
0:18:24 what people like George Floyd think about anything.
0:18:27 Their perspectives are not valid.
0:18:28 They’re not valued.
0:18:32 Ironically, George Floyd became someone who mattered to us
0:18:34 after he became a victim of state violence
0:18:37 and we could use his death in our power struggles.
0:18:41 Until that point, George Floyd and his perspectives
0:18:42 don’t matter to us.
0:18:43 People like George Floyd don’t matter to us.
0:18:45 We don’t engage with those people.
0:18:47 We don’t uplift their perspectives.
0:18:50 And so actually, I just don’t think it’s true
0:18:52 that we have a lot in common with ordinary,
0:18:56 not only do we not have a lot in common with ordinary people
0:19:00 in terms of our interests and social networks
0:19:02 and things like that, but we don’t want to,
0:19:03 even when you look at things like our moral
0:19:05 and political views.
0:19:07 Our moral and political views and the ways
0:19:10 that we engage in politics are far out of step
0:19:14 with the way that the rest of Americans talk
0:19:15 and think about these social issues,
0:19:18 but are actually much closer to the ways
0:19:19 that millionaires and billionaires
0:19:22 and those kinds of people talk and think about politics.
0:19:23 – Do you think the New York Times
0:19:26 doesn’t give a shit about George Floyd
0:19:27 until he’s been killed by the state,
0:19:31 or is it that the audience won’t pay attention
0:19:33 until that’s the case?
0:19:34 – I think it’s kind of both.
0:19:36 And part of the reason it’s both actually,
0:19:38 I talk about this a bit in the book,
0:19:41 is that the people who produce and consume these narratives
0:19:44 are increasingly the same people.
0:19:47 It’s the same slice of society that’s producing
0:19:49 almost all of this work in the symbolic professions
0:19:51 and they’re almost the exact same
0:19:53 as the audience that’s consuming them
0:19:56 in terms of where they live, the professions they work in,
0:19:57 what their values are,
0:20:01 the kinds of educational background they have, and so on.
0:20:04 It’s this really incestuous relationship increasingly
0:20:06 between writers and audiences
0:20:07 where they’re virtually identical.
0:20:10 So I think it’s the case that a lot of the writers
0:20:13 don’t really, and editors and stuff,
0:20:16 don’t really have their finger on the pulse of normies,
0:20:17 but I think it’s also true
0:20:19 that the audience of the New York Times
0:20:20 doesn’t particularly care about normies
0:20:22 and their problems either.
0:20:25 – I think there’s just something undeniably true about that.
0:20:29 There’s a particularly depressing section of the book,
0:20:31 for me at least, where you’re talking about
0:20:36 how much of what we think of as the discourse,
0:20:39 nonfiction books, newspapers, journals, magazines,
0:20:44 is mostly just elites talking to other elites
0:20:47 with the pretense that it matters to or is even seen by.
0:20:50 The rest of the country, but it really isn’t for the most part.
0:20:53 So a lot of it is just masturbatory.
0:20:56 – Yeah, it matters especially for the work
0:21:01 that’s trying to understand and mitigate social problems,
0:21:04 because a lot of the people that we’re trying to help
0:21:06 are just not part of the conversation.
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0:24:07 In season three of this award-winning podcast,
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0:24:14 Starting with the fight against the workhouse,
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0:24:25 Host Ashley C. Ford interviews Ainez Bordeaux,
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0:24:31 Experiencing what I experienced
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0:25:16 (gentle music)
0:25:22 So this would be a good time
0:25:25 to explain this term, symbolic capitalism,
0:25:29 because the thing people are constantly puzzling over
0:25:33 is that the elites in our society
0:25:37 who benefit most from the systemic inequalities,
0:25:41 mostly highly educated white liberals,
0:25:44 are also the ones most exercised
0:25:45 about all of these inequalities.
0:25:49 Now this appears to be a contradiction on the face of it,
0:25:51 but it’s really not for you, right?
0:25:54 Like this is just a game symbolic capitalist play
0:25:56 with each other.
0:25:58 It’s not just a game.
0:26:01 So one of the ways I think the discourse sometimes
0:26:05 goes awry is that there’s this kind of narrative tendency
0:26:08 that we have where we think if we can expose
0:26:10 that someone has an interest in doing something
0:26:13 or believing something, that they must not be sincere.
0:26:15 Right, not true.
0:26:17 Yeah, and I think that’s a bad way of thinking about thinking
0:26:20 because our cognitive and perceptual systems,
0:26:23 I argue, are kind of fundamentally geared
0:26:25 towards perceiving and thinking about the world
0:26:28 in ways that enhance our interests and further our goals.
0:26:30 And if we take that research seriously,
0:26:33 then we would see that there’s actually not a contradiction
0:26:36 between sincerely believing something
0:26:39 and also mobilizing that belief
0:26:41 in the service of your self-interest.
0:26:43 In fact, if you had an interest in believing something,
0:26:46 you would believe it even more sincerely
0:26:47 and you would probably try to get other people
0:26:49 to believe it as well.
0:26:52 I just take it for granted that when we say
0:26:54 we want the poor to be uplifted,
0:26:56 that we want people who are marginalized
0:26:57 and disadvantaged in society
0:27:00 to live lives of dignity and inclusion.
0:27:02 I don’t think we’re being insincere about that,
0:27:04 but that’s not our only sincere commitment.
0:27:06 We also sincerely want to be elites,
0:27:10 which is to say we think that our voice
0:27:12 and our preferences should matter
0:27:15 more than the person checking us out at Stop and Shop
0:27:20 or the gas station attendant when we fill up the tank.
0:27:23 And we think that we should have a higher standard of living
0:27:27 than someone who’s flipping burgers at McDonald’s
0:27:29 or selling shoes at Dillard’s.
0:27:31 We strongly want our children to reproduce
0:27:34 or have an even stronger social position than ourselves.
0:27:36 And so these drives are in fundamental tension though,
0:27:38 like the drive to be an egalitarian
0:27:41 and the drive to be an elite don’t sit easily with each other.
0:27:45 You can’t really be an egalitarian social climber, right?
0:27:50 And this kind of tension has been
0:27:52 with the symbolic capitalists from the beginning.
0:27:57 It’s a tension that defines this elite constellation
0:28:00 from the beginning through the present.
0:28:02 So yeah, I don’t think it’s a lack of sincerity.
0:28:05 I think it’s just that we have these other sincere drives
0:28:06 and this desire to be elite
0:28:09 when they do come into conflict as they often do.
0:28:14 – So symbolic capitalists are aligned pretty disproportionately
0:28:19 with the political left for reasons you can explain
0:28:22 and you certainly do in the book.
0:28:25 But you also write that at bottom the anti-woke
0:28:28 and the woke actually subscribe
0:28:32 to the same fundamental worldview.
0:28:33 I’d love for you to explain why that is
0:28:34 because I think it’s important.
0:28:38 – Yeah, so one of the things that’s true
0:28:42 of both the woke and the anti-woke crowd
0:28:46 is that they both think that things like symbols
0:28:49 and rhetorics and beliefs and hearts and minds
0:28:52 and things like the names on buildings
0:28:57 and what kinds of things are taught to,
0:29:00 like that these kinds of struggles over culture
0:29:02 and symbols and rhetoric and so on
0:29:05 are like the most important things.
0:29:07 More important than a lot of bread and butter issues
0:29:11 that normal people have to deal with in their day-to-day life.
0:29:16 Like a lot of the anti-woke people describe wokeness
0:29:20 as this kind of major threat to Western civilization,
0:29:21 to the prevailing order,
0:29:24 like they’re also engaged in this kind of cosmic struggle
0:29:26 in their minds.
0:29:30 And so their ways of thinking about the world and politics
0:29:33 are not much different than the people they’re criticizing.
0:29:36 As I show in the, and I also argue later in the book,
0:29:40 that one thing that you see,
0:29:43 one of the big impacts of awokenings,
0:29:44 they don’t tend to change much
0:29:46 in terms of allocations of resources
0:29:50 for the genuinely disadvantaged in society and so on.
0:29:52 They don’t tend to help the wretched of the earth
0:29:53 in a meaningful, durable way.
0:29:57 One thing that does tend to happen though,
0:30:01 is that these moments of awokening
0:30:04 tend to devolve into cultural wars
0:30:07 and they result in these non-trivial gains for the right,
0:30:09 typically at the ballot box,
0:30:12 and then often the creation
0:30:16 of alternative knowledge economy infrastructures
0:30:23 and kind of durable mistrust of mainstream institutions.
0:30:25 Okay, so why does this happen?
0:30:28 So during these periods of awokening,
0:30:30 symbolic capitalists shift a lot.
0:30:32 Like the ways that we engage in politics,
0:30:33 the way we think about things
0:30:36 and so on, shift in these really radical ways.
0:30:38 And so the gap between us and everyone else
0:30:41 gets bigger than it normally is.
0:30:43 And we recognize that and we assume often
0:30:45 that it’s because those people
0:30:47 are growing more racist or sexist or whatever,
0:30:49 but actually when you look at the trend lines,
0:30:51 they’re not, it’s that we’ve shifted a lot
0:30:53 while they’ve been pretty steady.
0:30:57 But so the gap gets bigger and people care about it more.
0:30:59 And they care about the gap more
0:31:02 because we become more militant during these periods
0:31:04 of villainizing and demonizing and mocking
0:31:06 and trying to censor and so on,
0:31:08 anyone who disagrees with us.
0:31:10 So people notice this gap more
0:31:12 because we’re becoming more confrontational
0:31:14 towards people that we disagree with.
0:31:17 And so this gap and the fact
0:31:18 that people care about the gap more,
0:31:20 it creates an opportunity
0:31:22 for like right aligned political entrepreneurs
0:31:25 to basically campaign by running against us
0:31:28 by bringing people like us under control.
0:31:30 Narratives start to circulate like,
0:31:33 oh, well the mainstream media is just a propaganda arm
0:31:34 for the Democratic Party
0:31:38 or colleges and universities are in the business now
0:31:40 of just indoctrinating young people
0:31:43 rather than teaching them useful knowledge and skills.
0:31:46 And so there tend to be these kinds of movements
0:31:48 by right aligned political folks
0:31:49 then to campaign against people like us.
0:31:53 And you usually see efforts to curb our autonomy,
0:31:55 cut lines of funding and things like that.
0:31:56 And you also see the creation
0:31:59 of these alternative infrastructures.
0:32:03 So after the awokening of the 1960s and 70s, for instance,
0:32:05 there was a perception that higher ed was lost,
0:32:06 can’t fix it.
0:32:09 It’s just captured, it’s ideologically captured.
0:32:11 And so what did people do?
0:32:13 Well, they launched these right aligned think tanks
0:32:14 starting with the Kato Institute
0:32:16 and the Heritage Foundation and so on.
0:32:19 And then in the late 80s, early 90s,
0:32:22 there was a perception that the media was lost.
0:32:23 And so what did they do?
0:32:24 They launched Fox News
0:32:26 in the aftermath of the third grade awokening.
0:32:29 And then finally, in the current moment,
0:32:32 you see these moments to like Elon Musk
0:32:35 trying this anti-woke takeover of Twitter
0:32:38 or Donald Trump trying to launch true social.
0:32:40 And the thing about it is these alternative
0:32:42 knowledge economy infrastructures,
0:32:45 they have an existential stake.
0:32:48 Like the way they make money, the way they keep viewers
0:32:51 is by sowing consistent mistrust in mainstream institutions.
0:32:54 So Fox News, their bread and butter
0:32:56 is all day, every day telling people,
0:32:58 the mainstream media is lying to you.
0:33:00 They don’t care about people like you.
0:33:01 They don’t share your values.
0:33:03 They’re not giving you the whole story.
0:33:04 Like that’s how they make money.
0:33:05 This is all day, every day,
0:33:07 sowing trust in mainstream institution
0:33:09 in order to capture part of our market share.
0:33:14 And so to the extent that we create an opportunity,
0:33:18 a market for these alternative infrastructures
0:33:20 because of the ways that we conduct ourselves
0:33:23 during awokenings, one consequence of that
0:33:25 tends to be kind of durable mistrust
0:33:28 and kind of reduced influence in a long-term way.
0:33:31 We live with the consequences of that for a long time.
0:33:34 – Right, and another consequence is that
0:33:38 the power structure basically remains the same.
0:33:39 – Yeah.
0:33:43 – Can you steelman the case for a minute, at least,
0:33:46 for what we’re calling wokeness
0:33:49 as something potentially more materially significant
0:33:51 than maybe we’re giving it credit for, right?
0:33:55 Is there a politics is downstream of culture argument
0:33:58 that the focus on symbolism and representation
0:34:01 and the rest of it will create
0:34:03 the kinds of cultural changes today
0:34:06 that will lead to concrete material improvements
0:34:08 in people’s lives tomorrow?
0:34:10 Or have you seen enough historical evidence
0:34:13 to suggest that just doesn’t happen?
0:34:14 – By a lot of measures,
0:34:17 like things like black, white income gaps,
0:34:18 mass incarceration rate,
0:34:20 like a lot of these kinds of social problems
0:34:23 that people were upset about in the 1960s
0:34:24 are the same or worse today.
0:34:30 Now, that said, I do think that there are some ways
0:34:32 in which society and culture change
0:34:35 that are just beneficial.
0:34:37 And that are sometimes these changes
0:34:39 are kind of orthogonal to the,
0:34:40 in fact, they’re typically orthogonal
0:34:41 to the great awokenings,
0:34:43 but they are sometimes changes
0:34:45 that were done by symbolic capitalists,
0:34:46 sometimes in between awokenings,
0:34:47 so not during the awokenings,
0:34:52 but like actual good things that have happened
0:34:53 in institutions that we should celebrate.
0:34:57 So for instance, one of the things that bugs me out
0:35:00 in a lot of the conversations around DEI
0:35:04 and merit in higher ed,
0:35:08 is that there’s this kind of wild,
0:35:11 a historical narrative that seems to be at play.
0:35:14 So people will say things like the implicit argument
0:35:16 is like back in the day,
0:35:18 we used to make decisions based on things
0:35:19 like their people’s merit
0:35:22 for hiring and promotion in academia.
0:35:25 And today we pay so much attention to things like identity.
0:35:27 And it’s like,
0:35:30 and that’s kind of a ridiculous, a historical argument.
0:35:34 So until somewhat recently in US history,
0:35:36 pretty much the only people who could be professors
0:35:41 were like straight white men, especially wasp men.
0:35:45 And there were, if you were black, if you were a woman,
0:35:48 if you were like explicitly gay,
0:35:51 if you were even Jewish in many cases,
0:35:56 then you were not eligible to be a professor.
0:35:59 And it wasn’t even hidden, no one was ashamed of this.
0:36:03 Like these were jobs for wasp men.
0:36:07 A lot of jobs weren’t even, it wasn’t until the 1990s.
0:36:11 The 1990s when departments were actually forced
0:36:15 to conduct open searches and list their open positions
0:36:17 publicly until that time,
0:36:19 people would just give lifetime appointments
0:36:21 to people in their network.
0:36:26 And with no competition, meritocratic or otherwise.
0:36:30 And so before, during this period, the good old days,
0:36:31 it was definitely the case
0:36:34 where when the only people who could even be considered
0:36:37 for a job were straight white men
0:36:40 that no one talked about race, gender or sexuality
0:36:42 in hiring and promotion decisions.
0:36:45 ‘Cause why would you, what was there to talk about?
0:36:47 But that didn’t mean that hiring and promotion
0:36:49 wasn’t identity-based, it was more identity-based.
0:36:52 You had to belong to this very specific slice of society
0:36:54 to even be considered for the job.
0:36:57 So to say that that’s not identitarian is wild.
0:37:00 It was only when we stopped taking for granted
0:37:03 that the professors were straight white men,
0:37:06 that the question of who does get to become a professor
0:37:09 and in virtue of what becomes a live question.
0:37:11 – Well, can we also say to the extent
0:37:13 that what you just said is true and it is,
0:37:17 that is in fact a victory
0:37:19 of these sorts of social and cultural movements
0:37:22 that did produce an actual change in society
0:37:24 that was materially significant.
0:37:28 – Yeah, I mean, frankly, like the upshot
0:37:30 is that hiring and promotion today
0:37:32 is actually much more standardized.
0:37:34 It’s much more transparent.
0:37:37 It’s much more metrics focused
0:37:39 than basically it ever has been.
0:37:42 But the thing about it is a lot of these changes,
0:37:45 again, they weren’t necessarily the product of awokenings.
0:37:47 And you can see this for a lot of other positive changes.
0:37:51 So Colleen Aaron, a colleague of mine who’s a sociologist,
0:37:54 she has this great book on the First Step Act.
0:37:58 So the First Step Act was for readers
0:37:59 who are not immediately familiar.
0:38:01 It was one of the most significant pieces
0:38:03 of criminal justice reform that had been published
0:38:06 that had been passed into law in decades.
0:38:09 And as Colleen shows in this book,
0:38:12 the passage of the First Step Act was created
0:38:15 through this careful process of consensus building
0:38:17 across Democrats, Republicans,
0:38:20 all of these community organizations and legislators.
0:38:23 There’s this kind of gradual consensus building effort
0:38:27 that took decades, even before Black Lives Matter
0:38:29 and the Great Awokening and all of this kind of stuff
0:38:32 in conservative and Republican spaces.
0:38:33 There was growing awareness
0:38:35 that there were problems in the criminal justice system.
0:38:37 So it happened to get signed into law
0:38:40 under President Trump during the Great Awokening,
0:38:41 but it wasn’t caused by the Great Awokening.
0:38:46 And in fact, because it happened to get signed into law
0:38:49 during this period of heightened contestation
0:38:52 over social justice, and there were a lot
0:38:55 of symbolic capitalists who were kind of hotdogging,
0:38:59 striking these really extreme positions
0:39:03 that were out of step both with what most of the people
0:39:06 were trying to help want, like defund the police,
0:39:08 close all the prisons and so on.
0:39:13 That this long period of decades on consensus building
0:39:15 was destroyed by the way that symbolic capitalists
0:39:17 conducted herself during the Great Awokening.
0:39:19 And so rather than the First Step Act
0:39:24 being like the cornerstone upon which to build
0:39:26 other criminal justice reform,
0:39:29 it actually basically limped across the finish line
0:39:31 and there hasn’t been much change other than that,
0:39:33 which is to say, there are good things that happen
0:39:36 that symbolic capitalists often take part in,
0:39:38 but they tend to be orthogonal
0:39:39 to these periods of Great Awokening.
0:39:42 If anything, often the periods of Great Awokening
0:39:46 end up messing up social reform movements
0:39:48 that are already underway for a whole host of reasons
0:39:49 I discussed in the book.
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0:42:46 (gentle music)
0:42:52 – You know as well as I do
0:42:54 that anti-wokism has become
0:42:59 its own little cottage industry on the right.
0:43:03 With the caveat that we obviously can’t control
0:43:05 what bad faith actors do with our work
0:43:07 once it’s out in the world.
0:43:10 Do you worry about this book being misinterpreted
0:43:16 and perhaps adopted as a cudgel in the culture war?
0:43:19 – Yeah, I talk about this in the book,
0:43:22 that one of the perennial joys and terrors
0:43:24 of putting ideas out in the world
0:43:26 is after a while they cease to be yours to control.
0:43:28 I worry about that as much as anyone else
0:43:32 but what I tried to focus on for this book
0:43:34 was trying to answer the questions that I had
0:43:37 as kind of fully and comprehensively
0:43:40 and kind of fairly as possible
0:43:44 and kind of let the politics play out how they do.
0:43:47 That’s not my job.
0:43:49 But that said, I also tried,
0:43:53 I think a lot of the anti-woke kind of culture warriors
0:43:55 are gonna have a tough time
0:43:58 really mobilizing the book the way they might hope
0:44:03 both because it has a lot of very critical things
0:44:06 to say about the anti-woke kind of people
0:44:08 and the game that they’re playing as well.
0:44:11 I apply a very symmetrical lens to understanding them
0:44:13 and their behaviors and actions.
0:44:18 And the book also, you know that the reality is
0:44:23 a lot of work like in queer theory or critical race theory
0:44:24 or feminist standpoint epistemology
0:44:28 or post-colonial theory, like these modes of scholarship
0:44:29 deeply inform my own thinking
0:44:34 including on these questions about power and ideology
0:44:35 and how they relate to each other.
0:44:38 In a deep sense, what the book is doing
0:44:41 is taking the arguments from these literatures
0:44:43 to what I perceive to be their logical conclusions
0:44:47 which will lead us to ask of our own
0:44:50 ostensibly emancipatory ideologies
0:44:53 whether or not they might also reflect our class interests
0:44:55 whether or not they actually represent the values
0:44:58 and interests of the people that we’re trying to help
0:45:01 and whether or not like there’s no reason to think
0:45:04 that our own belief systems are exempt
0:45:05 and a lot of these other related literatures
0:45:08 and not to villainize them or mock them or demean them
0:45:11 but in fact to show how they can be valuable.
0:45:14 And so in this and a lot of other ways
0:45:18 I think the book is not easily digestible
0:45:21 into the culture wars and the ways that people might hope.
0:45:23 – You said something a second ago and I’m glad you did
0:45:27 because I wouldn’t normally mention this.
0:45:30 This is not in my little prep doc I have on hand
0:45:35 but it’s relevant and you gestured to it just a second ago
0:45:36 and you also addressed it in the book.
0:45:38 So I’m gonna broach it here.
0:45:44 You’re a black Muslim American challenging
0:45:47 some of the orthodoxies on the left and the right
0:45:51 and there’s this thing that often happens on the left
0:45:55 and I don’t like it where whenever a black person has views
0:45:57 that aren’t doctrinaire or that aren’t the views
0:46:00 of white progressive thinks a black person is supposed
0:46:03 to have they get dismissed or attacked.
0:46:07 And I think you even say in the book that you’re emphasizing
0:46:10 your blackness and the influence of black scholarship
0:46:13 on the book to push readers to listen to you
0:46:16 in a way they might otherwise not.
0:46:18 What is it that you want those readers in particular
0:46:21 to hear that they might otherwise not?
0:46:26 – Yeah, so the thing that they need to hear
0:46:34 is that the values and interests of people like us
0:46:38 are often out of step with those of the people
0:46:39 that we want to help.
0:46:42 Our views of politics, the solutions that we have
0:46:45 to social problems are often out of step
0:46:49 with what other people want and need in some ways
0:46:51 and often ways that cause them harm.
0:46:55 So quick example, I was at a conference
0:46:56 on political polarization.
0:47:00 They had four black people taking part in this conversation
0:47:05 alongside the whites and the four of them
0:47:08 and four of us, there was me who’s half white.
0:47:11 There was two Afro Caribbean folks
0:47:14 and then there was someone who was Kenyan and Nigerian.
0:47:18 So not one person out of the four black people
0:47:21 who were part of this panel, not one person
0:47:23 was a mono racial non-immigrant black person.
0:47:26 They’re the overwhelming majority of America
0:47:28 of America’s black population.
0:47:30 There were nowhere represented on this panel
0:47:32 setting aside the class dimension of it.
0:47:35 But even just looking at ethnicity,
0:47:37 we were not even ethnically remotely representative
0:47:39 of blacks in America.
0:47:43 And in that panel, while unrepresentative
0:47:47 of black America was perfectly representative
0:47:50 of how almost all of the spokespeople
0:47:52 in symbolic capitalist spaces are.
0:47:54 Almost all of the black spokespeople
0:47:58 in symbolic capitalist spaces are either mixed race
0:48:03 or recent immigrant black heritage.
0:48:07 And the few exceptions to that rule tend to be people
0:48:10 who are themselves like from really relatively
0:48:11 affluent backgrounds.
0:48:17 And so the problem with turning to people like myself
0:48:22 to understand like how all black America thinks
0:48:25 is just that we’re not representative of black America.
0:48:26 Our experiences are not the same.
0:48:28 Our challenges are not the same.
0:48:31 Our values and interests are often very different
0:48:32 from the modal black American.
0:48:35 If you look at the modal black American,
0:48:38 black people in America vote overwhelmingly
0:48:40 with the democratic party,
0:48:41 but not because they’re super liberal.
0:48:44 They’re some of the most culturally conservative folks
0:48:46 in the democratic block.
0:48:48 And in fact, this is one of the big problems
0:48:51 that a lot of institutions have
0:48:54 when they try to promote diversity and inclusion
0:48:59 is that we often create these spaces
0:49:02 that are really hostile towards traditional
0:49:05 or socially conservative or religious views
0:49:07 in the name of diversity and inclusion.
0:49:10 But the people who are most affected by that
0:49:13 are people who are already underrepresented in these spaces.
0:49:15 The kinds of people who are already the dominant population,
0:49:18 so relatively affluent, highly educated,
0:49:21 background, urban and suburban white people and so on.
0:49:24 The people who dominate these institutions demographically
0:49:26 also tend to share the dominant ideologies.
0:49:28 They’re products of the same kinds of childhoods
0:49:30 and institutions and so on.
0:49:33 If you look at the Americans
0:49:35 who are most likely to self-identify
0:49:38 as anti-racist, as feminist, as allies to LGBTQ people,
0:49:40 as environmentalists and so on,
0:49:43 it’s highly educated, relatively affluent,
0:49:45 urban and suburban white people.
0:49:47 And so if we create an environment
0:49:49 that if you’re not those things,
0:49:51 you’re gonna be suppressed or villainized
0:49:53 or socially sanctioned and whatever.
0:49:56 The people who are gonna be most adversely affected by that
0:49:59 are gonna be non-traditional students, rural students,
0:50:02 less affluent students, immigrants, non-white students,
0:50:04 religious minority students and so on.
0:50:07 So we do all of these policies
0:50:09 in the name of diversity and inclusion
0:50:12 that are often devastating for the people we want to help.
0:50:15 – Well, look, I’m not gonna ask you to solve
0:50:17 all of our political problems,
0:50:20 but I guess I am curious what you think
0:50:25 or what you see on the other side of this awakening.
0:50:28 I mean, our politics feel pretty dysfunctional right now.
0:50:33 It feels pretty stuck and hopelessly polarized.
0:50:39 Do you have any reason based on how these previous eras
0:50:42 have played out to think we might end up
0:50:45 in a healthier place after all this?
0:50:47 – So in the book, I talk about how there are these things
0:50:51 that are very much the same across the Wokenings.
0:50:55 But there are also a couple of things that are different,
0:50:56 that are different in an important way.
0:51:00 For all the parts of the awakening that’s cyclical,
0:51:03 there is actually this set of trend lines
0:51:05 that I think matters a lot for thinking through
0:51:07 what the legacy of this awakening might be
0:51:09 and what the next one might look like.
0:51:11 One thing that I think is importantly different
0:51:15 that has been increasingly different each awakening
0:51:16 is that the share of Americans
0:51:19 who take part in the symbolic professions has changed.
0:51:23 So in the 1920s, at the time of the first great awakening,
0:51:25 symbolic capitalists were like 3% of workers.
0:51:29 And now it’s about a third of workers.
0:51:33 And so still a minority, not close to a majority,
0:51:36 but a really big minority.
0:51:36 And that matters.
0:51:40 That matters because when you’re only 3% of a population,
0:51:42 you can’t just write off the rest of America.
0:51:45 If you’re a third of all workers though,
0:51:47 and you tend to be the most affluent workers
0:51:50 and you’re concentrated in these very particular communities
0:51:52 and you’re taking part in these really interconnected
0:51:55 institutions like academia and the nonprofit sphere
0:51:57 and policy-making circles and so on,
0:52:01 then it actually is, you absolutely can.
0:52:03 So you can just totally write off the values
0:52:06 of most of America and make money hand over fist.
0:52:10 You can be a political party that increasingly alienates
0:52:14 or is increasingly distant from mainstream America.
0:52:19 And you can win lots of elections of national city elections,
0:52:22 state elections all across the country,
0:52:25 be flush with funds and even be competitive
0:52:28 on the national stage if you can just get enough normies
0:52:29 to kind of get along with you
0:52:32 in addition to your kind of core constituency.
0:52:38 And so one of the things that’s become increasingly the case
0:52:40 that’s been different from awokening to awokening
0:52:44 is that symbolic capitalists have been a larger share
0:52:48 of the overall workforce
0:52:51 and more resources have been consolidated in our hands.
0:52:52 And as a result of that,
0:52:57 we have a lot more autonomy from the rest of the public
0:52:59 in a way that is sometimes pernicious.
0:53:00 And more broadly,
0:53:05 I just think that some of the current bifurcation we see
0:53:08 between us and most of the rest of society
0:53:10 is probably not sustainable.
0:53:14 I think one of the things that you see very clearly
0:53:18 is that growing shares of Americans feel like
0:53:21 they don’t have a voice or a stake in our institutions.
0:53:23 They think that their values are not represented
0:53:24 in our institutions.
0:53:26 And in fact, they think that our institutions
0:53:29 are hostile towards their interests.
0:53:32 And there’s lots of research in the United States
0:53:33 and around the world that suggests
0:53:36 that when people feel that way,
0:53:39 what they do is they try to burn down those institutions.
0:53:42 They try to marginalize them, defund them,
0:53:46 delegitimize them and otherwise burn them down.
0:53:48 And that’s a very rational response.
0:53:50 And it doesn’t matter what the institution is.
0:53:52 If you don’t have a voice or a stake in it
0:53:54 and you think it’s committed to the destruction
0:53:57 of people like you, why would you not resist it?
0:54:01 It would be crazy to actually conspire with that institution
0:54:04 towards your own destruction and immiseration, right?
0:54:05 You would of course resist it.
0:54:07 That’s the natural normal thing to do.
0:54:09 And it doesn’t matter what that institution is.
0:54:11 So often symbolic capitalists,
0:54:14 when we’re met with distrust,
0:54:16 when we’re met with this kind of resistance,
0:54:21 we pathologize it as like for instance, anti-intellectualism.
0:54:26 And instead of really reckoning in a serious way
0:54:29 with the fact that a lot of people feel not wrongly
0:54:32 in many cases, that they don’t have a voice or a stake,
0:54:34 that people like us look down on people like them,
0:54:36 that people like us are actively hostile
0:54:39 towards people like them, that we write off their suffering.
0:54:41 And we actually hope in many cases
0:54:43 that their suffering continues or grows worse
0:54:45 because they think the wrong things
0:54:47 or say the wrong things or vote for the wrong people
0:54:48 and so on.
0:54:51 And so I think this kind of,
0:54:55 this bifurcation is not sustainable in the longterm.
0:54:57 Something’s gonna give one way or another.
0:55:01 And I hope that it gives in a,
0:55:05 I hope that we can make choices
0:55:07 that allow something to give
0:55:10 in a way that’s not highly destructive.
0:55:13 – I do wanna say that I think this book is as,
0:55:17 intellectually honest as a book on this topic
0:55:18 could possibly be.
0:55:23 And for that reason, I think it’s a genuinely worthwhile
0:55:26 contribution to this conversation.
0:55:28 So I commend you for that.
0:55:29 – Thank you so much.
0:55:30 Thank you.
0:55:33 – Once again, the book is called “We Have Never Been Woke,
0:55:37 “The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.”
0:55:38 Musa Algarbi.
0:55:39 Thank you.
0:55:40 – It’s been great.
0:55:41 Thank you for having me.
0:55:44 (upbeat music)
0:55:55 – All right, I hope you enjoyed that conversation.
0:55:57 I most certainly did.
0:55:59 As always, we do wanna know what you think.
0:56:03 So drop us a line at the gray area at box.com
0:56:05 and please go ahead, rate, review
0:56:07 and subscribe to the podcast.
0:56:09 That stuff really helps us grow.
0:56:12 This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey
0:56:13 and Travis Larchuck.
0:56:16 Today’s episode was engineered by Patrick Boyd,
0:56:20 fact-checked by Anouk Dussot, edited by Jorge Just
0:56:23 and Alex Overington wrote our theme music.
0:56:29 New episodes of the gray area drop on Mondays,
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