Continuing with some common blog themes I am here reviewing We Have Never Been Woke by sociology professor Musa al-Gharbi. The book, though provocatively titled, is actually a detailed and substantial discussion of the professional class in America, what al-Gharbi terms “symbolic capitalists.” These are, more or less, the top quarter or so of American income earners, who mostly have (at least) a bachelor’s degree and work with ideas. As he says in an interview, symbolic capitalists are “people who work in fields like consulting, finance, law, education, media, science and technology, or human resources.”
His book has a wealth of data, is very informative and thought-provoking, and contains damning criticism of professional class elites, their political influence, and their self-regard.
Why read this book? Simply put, it will help you better understand America, especially the 2024 Presidential election and the ongoing political realignments currently roiling American politics. In addition to the book I will draw on al-Gharbi’s interview with Nathan Robinson because it is also helpful at times to have him describe these ideas in a more conversational manner.
As he asks, “Why is it that the winners in the prevailing order seem so eager to associate themselves with the marginalized and disadvantaged in society? What functions does “social justice” discourse serve among contemporary elites?” (302). These are the questions that drive the book.
As al-Gharbi says in the interview with Robinson, “the Democratic Party has reoriented itself around knowledge economy professionals. This matters because, as I show in chapter four of the book, especially for this group of elites that I call symbolic capitalists, we talk and think about politics in ways that are very different from how most other Americans talk and think about politics. And so, as the Democratic Party has reoriented itself around symbolic capitalists, many other Americans have started to feel like their values and perspectives and interests are not well aligned with the Democratic Party, and they've been migrating the other way.”
This helps to explain how, especially over the past decade, as a movement toward more “woke” rhetoric, focused on identity, came to influence the professional class, it drove working class voters away from the Democratic Party and drew in more professional class voters. This all leads to 2024 where there is a huge education gap in voting, where Americans with BA’s heavily favor Harris and those with high school diplomas heavily favor Trump. This education gap persists, to varying degrees, across all racial groups.
Okay, this is true, if well-known by now. The novel point that al-Gharbi makes is that these “awokenings” as he calls them, have happened before. In brief, you get “awokenings”, i.e. elite-driven justice movements, when there is an overproduction of elites and they struggle to secure a livelihood. These struggling elites then seek to condemn the system they struggle in. There is plenty of truth to this. In the 1960s the draft drew thousands of young people, including elite college students, to the anti-Vietnam War movement. Was this partly driven by self-interest? Sure.
More recently, the recession and post-recession economy hurt millenials. As al-Gharbi notes, “nearly half of upper-middle-class children born in the 1980s failed to replicate their class positions by age thirty”, including yours truly. (p. 96).
These economic “anxieties were then channeled into a Great Awokening. Frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants sought to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” (96).
I think there is great truth to this and it helps to explain young, well-educated people, struggling with student debt and grim post-recession job prospects, joining Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and then flocking to the Sanders campaign in 2016. It doesn’t explain as well the Great Awokening though, from say 2014-2024. Certainly they overlap heavily. And a feeling that America is unfair informed both OWS and woke identity politics on campus a decade later. But they are also different.
The awokening focus on identity politics has been driven, arguably, not by precarious, downwardly mobile elites who are struggling (adjunct professors, unemployed lawyers, English majors working at Starbucks), but rather by the most successful elites—faculty, staff, and students at premiere colleges, staff employed in HR and DEI departments at major corporations as well as in medicine, media, publishing, etc.
The woke movement, I would argue, was not led by adjunct professors at state colleges commuting up and down the freeway, working out of their cars, and struggling to pay the bills. Rather, at universities, just to give one example, it is high-level staff, tenured and tenure-track faculty, and high-status, ambitious students leading the woke identity push.
Even if the latest awokening was driven more by successful elites than struggling ones, al-Gharbi’s basic analysis still rings true. Times of struggle for elites lead to broad dissatisfaction within the educated professional class, which then in various ways filters into and informs social movements among them.
Why do elites struggle at times? Because of elite overproduction. Here is Al-Gharbi, drawing on Peter Turchin’s ideas: “elite overproduction occurs when a society produces too many people who feel entitled to high status and high income relative to the capacity of that society to actually absorb elite aspirants into the power structure. Under these circumstances, growing numbers of frustrated erstwhile elites grow bitter toward the prevailing order and try to form alliances with genuinely marginalized populations in order to depose existing elites and install themselves in their stead.” (99).
As an example, consider that from 2000-2019 America produced 22 million new college degree holders but only 10 million jobs requiring a college degree. So I think clearly this is a key part of the story. And higher degrees tell the same story—too many JDs, not enough jobs for lawyers, too many PhDs, not enough jobs for professors, too many MAs, not enough jobs in publishing and journalism. And on and on it goes.
This explains a huge part of the discontent of the past ten years, especially among young people on the left. It is a counterpart to the decades of frustration among working class people whose towns have been deindustrialized and hollowed out and who have flocked to the right in recent years. These groups are not the same but they are each part of the story of America’s changing political and economic dynamics. To simplify, the struggling educated young flocked to Sanders and the struggling older working class flocked to Trump.
The problem, again, with Al-Gharbi’s account is that it is precisely not “disenfranchised elites” leading the awokening. Harvard Law students are not disenfranchised elites. High level admin at elite universities, high level HR staff at global corporations, are not disenfranchised elites. It is successful elites pioneering the awokening. The adjunct with a PhD, the barista with an MA, regardless of their individual beliefs, don’t have the power to lead the way on these issues. I and many of my friends are confirming examples of this. (I suspect the downwardly mobile PhDs are much less woke than the conventionally successful ones.)
With that said, I think al-Gharbi is onto something profound here. His analysis, as much as any in recent years, offers key insights into American politics. He is right that when symbolic capitalist professionals get involved in justice movements they often focus on symbolic topics that don’t matter rather than real, material issues. He rightly gives the example of renaming schools and buildings as a cause celebre for woke elite. A cause, of course, that neither matters to nor helps poor people of any race.
And more broadly, he argues that all these social movements and “awokenings” have achieved little, for “America in 2020 eerily resembled the United States of the gilded age in many respects.” (105). I largely agree with this, though I would place the emphasis more on the successful implementation of neoliberal economic policies and less on the failures of social movements. But it is true that by many metrics America has become much less equal since the 1970s.
In sum, he argues that “awokenings tend to be driven by elite overproduction, and they tend to collapse when a sufficient number of frustrated aspirants are integrated into the power structure or come to believe their prospects are improving.” (110). Again, although I don’t agree with all the specifics, this does by and large seem to be true.
There is much more that could be said in a review of al-Gharbi’s engaging and provocative book. (I have many pages of notes). I will conclude by saying that al-Gharbi’s account of elite behaviors and attitudes lends much insight into some of the central political, economic, and cultural changes of the past couple decades.