We Could Use Some Real “Wokeness”

Musa al-Gharbi’s important book offers an honest critique of progressive elites that is free of right-wing diatribes

Musa al-Gharbi, author of We Have Never Been Woke (Princeton University Press, 2024). The UnPopulist illustration.

Book Review

“Wokeness is very bad and everything I don’t like is woke.” So summarized are a million faceless diatribes against popular progressive idolatries. Given this, I was very wary of reading and reviewing Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. I was worried I’d be confronted by another shrill, mindless anti-woke screed presenting Robin DiAngelo as the single, biggest threat to Western civilization. (Reading through the countless anti-woke polemics feels like a kind of penitential self-flagellation at this point.)

This is why the book was such a breath of fresh air. For once, the Socratic self-description is quite accurate. Al-Gharbi claims the picture he paints will be:

complicated and messy—it won’t be something that lends itself easily to stories about “good guys” and “bad guys.” Nor will it generate some kind of clear social or political program, concluding in a set of action steps or policy proposals. [The book] is not intended to provide people with clean answers, but rather to unsettle much of what is taken for granted.

Why Have We Never Been Woke

Reading al-Gharbi’s book, I was reminded a great deal of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s Attack on Christendom. In this late-period polemic, Kierkegaard did something much more shocking than either rejecting or offering apologetics for Christianity. He insisted that there was actually very little Christianity in the world. What passed under that name of Christendom was in fact a mockery of Christianity. Self-professed Christians would ceremoniously mouth the words of the creed and surround themselves with religious symbology and ritual. But their “faith” was in fact nothing of the sort. Instead, it was tied in with all-too-human needs for psychological stability. Or worse, they were aligned with the vulgar forces of petit bourgeois moralism and conservative nationalism. A creed that had called on its followers to give up everything and follow Christ had become an opiate consoling the alienated middle class, boiled down to an injunction to donate a little money every Sunday followed by prayers for king and country. Kierkegaard lamented that in a Christendom of hundreds of millions there might not even be a single real Christian.

Al-Gharbi is less harsh than the moody Dane, but the thesis is much the same. Contra those who would condemn or reject wokeness, the titular theme of his book is that we’ve in fact never been woke. Al-Gharbi focuses on those he calls “symbolic capitalists”—folks (and he includes himself in the mix) who profess a commitment to principles of “social justice” and equality but do little to advance them.

The problem, in short, is not that symbolic capitalists are too woke, but that we’ve never been woke. The problem is not that causes like feminism, antiracism, or LGBTQ rights are “bad.” The problem is that, in the name of those very causes, symbolic capitalists regularly engage in behaviors that exploit, perpetuate, exacerbate, reinforce, and mystify inequalities—often to the detriment of the very people we purport to champion. And our sincere commitment to social justice lends an unearned and unfortunate sense of morality to these endeavors.

This claim is not intended as a sneering, cynical accusation of hypocrisy—a la Thomas Sowell, the right-wing economist who has made a career out of lampooning the social and personal failings of progressive liberals. In Musa’s case it is closer to a disappointed lament. He is remarkably clear eyed that the United States falls very short of realizing social justice goals that “symbolic capitalists” claim to stand for. Indeed, in some respects, things have gotten worse, not better.

Progressives Thwarting Progress

Al-Gharbi notes that since 1970 “cities have grown increasingly segregated along the lines of race, wealth, employment, and education status. Whites, the affluent, and the college educated have concentrated heavily into particular regions of cities, while racial and ethnic minorities, the poor, the less educated, and the unemployed or underemployed are concentrated in others.” He grimly observes that in 2022, the top 1% of earners controlled about 26% of the wealth in the United States—a “radically disproportionate share” that has grown dramatically since the late 1980s.

More than just income, those at the top also engage in “opportunities hoarding” by ensuring enormous advantages are concentrated in their hands and those of their children and friends, making a mockery of American meritocratic mythologies. Indeed, in an interview with Vox’s Sean Illing discussing We Have Never Been Woke, al-Gharbi points out how odd it is to nostalgically assume the country ever has been anything like a meritocracy. Until the post-Civil Rights era, for example, academic jobs were very much allocated to applicants on the basis of race: qualified candidates who were not white and Christian needn’t even bother applying. Affirmative action for the rich, white, and male has proudly been the American way down to Jared Kushner.

So the problem isn’t with the egalitarian principles of “wokeness.” Musa would observe, and I think he would be right, that America is not a country where people have ever had anywhere near equal opportunities for social mobility. To be clear, America has more formal equality and has made more advances in delivering real equality than aristocratic Europe, feudal India, or practically any other liberal democracy. But real gaps persist and no one is doing much about them, including the “woke.” Al-Gharbi offers the vivid microcosm of a group of overwhelmingly white BLM demonstrators on Manhattan’s Upper West Side who crowded out the Black homeless men sitting on the benches the protestors wanted to use. As he put it: “in order to cheer on BLM … the Black guys right in front of them seemed to be invisible.”

Out-of-Touch Progressives

There are many reasons for the failure of “awokenings” to challenge inequality, according to al-Gharbi. Most of them relate to the class situatedness of many American progressives. As he points out, it has by and large become a fact that the vehicles that are used to advance progressive causes—academia, journalism, the Democratic Party—consist almost entirely of the affluent and well educated. He points out that it is important not just to look at the 1% of millionaire plutocrats but also the 20% of “symbolic capitalists” aspiring to elite status by signaling fealty to the “right” causes. Even though they come from comfortable, middle-to-upper-class backgrounds, average progressives imagine themselves to be egalitarians. They express solidarity with feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ activism, environmentalism, and more. And, of course, they vigorously condemn conservatives as ignorant bigots who want nothing more than to turn the country back into a series of golf courses for cigar smoking white male plutocrats stretching from sea to polluted sea.

They are not wrong about that but the problem for al-Gharbi is that while we, progressives, may symbolically talk a big game on equality, we don’t in fact materially walk the walk. Progressives are no longer typically “organic” activists and intellectuals who arise out of the working and troubled classes—a la James Baldwin or Gary Dorrien or Angela Davis. They sympathize and want to publicly be seen to sympathize with the plight of the lower orders … but from our well-furnished apartments in downtown Manhattan. Al-Gharbi notes, “U.S. cities associated with the symbolic economy are not just places where vast and ever-growing sums of wealth are consolidated; they are perhaps more uniformly ‘liberal’ than they have ever been, and tend to be starkly segregated along political lines.” Possessing money and know-how, we tend to congregate almost exclusively with other well-heeled progressives in culturally rich urban spaces, making plans to go see the next New Yorker-recommended indie film about the rough lives of the poor minorities who live many miles away. We also tend to eschew professions that are associated with low status, low education, and boredom, aspiring to become journalists and influencers, perhaps even academics writing for magazines like this one.

This disconnect means that progressives have an often distant, indirect understanding of the actual people they claim to speak for that is reflected in the approaches they propose for resolving social problems and ameliorating inequality. Al-Gharbi blasts elites of both sides for their failure to mount a more fundamental critique of the cultural and economic consensus around what passes for “free market” on which their status and privilege depends:

As statistician Andrew Gelman showed, elites in the Republican Party tend to be significantly more liberal culturally and symbolically than the rest of the GOP, yet more dogmatic about free markets. Meanwhile, Democratic-aligned elites tend to skew significantly further left on cultural and symbolic issues than most Democrats, but tend to be much warmed on markets. The primary difference between Democratic and Republican elites seems to lie in how they rank free markets relative to cultural liberalism: those who prioritize the former have tended to align with the Republicans; those who prioritize the latter have consistently aligned with the Democrats.

In other words, whether Coconut-pilled or MAGA-fried, it’s symbolic capitalists all the way down!

The Right’s Symbolic Capitalists

As the reference to GOP elites suggests, al-Gharbi is very far from suggesting American conservatives are any better on these points. They are profoundly responsible for doing nothing about inequality and elitism, even for their own constituencies.

Indeed, part of the undercurrent of disappointment that permeates We Have Never Been Woke results from his sense that no one with power really wants to tackle inequality—particularly economic equality—though al-Gharbi is well aware of how wealth translates into cultural capital as well.

Al-Gharbi wryly points out that, no matter how many cowboy hats Elon Musk puts on or how much cheap beer Ted Cruz pretends to guzzle, conservative “populist” influencers are very like their liberal counterparts even if they service different cultural constituencies. By and large, conservative elites come from highly educated and affluent backgrounds, aspire to go to the best colleges to network with a vast and very well funded array of right-wing think tanks, and are upwardly mobile. They expect genteel work in the “symbolic” professions—law, science, public advocacy, media—even as per current fashion, they diss fancy colleges and uppity professionals. Conservative “populists” lionize coal miners during election season. They’ll insinuate that but for the strange immigrant or the minority DEI hire, white working-class jobs would be better paid and renumerated. But beyond eating the odd Big Mac on a private plane, conservative influencers would agree with Trump that they’re far too smart to ever wind up doing anything as low as the constituents they claim to serve. As Trump put it in a 1990 interview, if he’d been born in a coal town he’d have “left the damn mines” but “most people don’t have the imagination” to do so. And of course conservatives in office will certainly never push for legislation that would actually meaningfully improve the lives of poor Americans.

Awokenings and Backlash

Al-Gharbi discusses several great “Awokenings” that have taken place in American politics, where progressive and liberal elites mobilized a populist base to push for greater equality. During the 1960s, for example, baby boomers formed an enormous youth movement led by middle class students who mobilized enormous energies to demand socially liberal, feminist, and anti-consumerism reforms. This in turn provoked conservative responses where “right-aligned symbolic capitalists and their allies painted themselves as populists who would restore order, sanity, and dignity to the country and its institutions or, failing that, defund, dismantle, and disempower them.” This is sometimes framed as a “backlash against progress.” But al-Gharbi argues the term is wrongly applied given that, awokening or not, little progress has actually been made since the Civil Rights Era. To the contrary, “relationships between Blacks and whites, rich and poor” are “roughly the same as they were 60 years ago. There is no meaningful relationship between Awokenings and material gains for marginalized and disadvantaged populations, nor is there a meaningful connection between Awokenings and durable attitudinal changes among the general public.”

It’s in moments like these that al-Gharbi’s thesis sounds most conservative. In characterizing progressive “awokenings” as largely impotent in the face of structural inequalities, he echoes Albert Hirschman’s famous futility thesis in The Rhetoric of Reaction. Hirschman noted that conservatives have long tried to negate the left’s calls for equality by asserting or arguing that they are futile. Inequality was simply baked into the fabric of society, nature, and perhaps even God’s cosmic order and wasn’t going to change, in this view.

But that is not in fact al-Gharbi’s intention. His is much closer to an immanent critique of privileged progressives who have occasionally had a real opportunity to make materially significant egalitarian changes but defaulted to symbolic gestures instead. Al-Gharbi identifies with Black radical liberals like W.E.B. Du Bois, who had more than a little sympathy for Marxist ideology critique and complained that “liberals exploit social justice advocacy to make themselves feel good, but ultimately offer little more than symbolic gestures and platitudes to redress the material harms they decry and exacerbate.” This isn’t because they are hypocritical, since Al-Gharbi has no doubt many progressive do sincerely believe in equality. It is because they simultaneously want to be committed to equality while also being elites, and enjoying elite status means not challenging the material bases of their success. Put more simply, we could do something but at a cost to ourselves. Or at least, to no personal benefit. So, instead, we talk a lot about doing something without actually doing it. All aspirations for equality are projected to the symbolic level.

The book closes with a call for more equality, but in a real sense, stressing that “equality is not something to be believed in, but rather something to be enacted. It’s not a cause to be supported in the abstract. It’s something we do.”

Understating Progress

There are some respects in which I think al-Gharbi’s thesis is overstated. For instance, very real and tangible gains have been made by and for women and LGBTQ persons in the last few decades, which do indeed look dangerously at risk of a backlash. Moreover, and ironically, the lack of a concrete political program means the book itself has something of a symbolic quality to it. Al-Gharbi is morally critical of his fellow symbolic capitalists for not listening enough to ordinary people and pushing for real material changes that would actually benefit them. But We Have Never Been Woke is itself unapologetically written by and for symbolic capitalists. Given his concerns with equality, al-Gharbi might benefit from a more vigorous social-democratic commitment to help us think through how to walk the walk. As Marx would put it, ideas become material forces when they are gripped by movements that want to implement them. But to do so we need those ideas.

Nevertheless, I found the book an exhilarating, challenging, and reflective read that truly is one of a kind. There’s really no other book on “wokeness” quite like it, and that is very high praise. In a media landscape filled with pundits who claim to speak truth to power before parroting all the recycled pieties, al-Gharbi’s book is genuinely daring.

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