Your awokening isn’t special Elite moral panics are nothing new

In the intervening years, al-Gharbi has gone on to become an advocate of viewpoint diversity in universities, as well as an outspoken critic of the liberal media’s ideological monoculture. His new book, We Have Never Been Woke, is a culmination of these efforts: a systematic critique of the dogmas that took hold in progressive culture over the past decade, and an examination of the institutional contexts in which they arose. Not, of course, that he’s alone here. Books scrutinising identity politics and Left-wing ideological intolerance have proliferated in recent years. But al-Gharbi avoids denunciation in favour of sober, rigorous analysis. For this and other reasons, I suspect it is the only book on the subject that will still be worth reading in a decade.   

Al-Gharbi’s cancellation squeezed him out of further work and study at Arizona, but he was later accepted into the doctoral programme in sociology at Columbia University, then as now a hotbed of social-justice activism. (As much ink was spilled on the performance art project of Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz in 2014 as on the university’s “tentifada” earlier this year.) His arrival there, in 2016, afforded him a front-row seat for the “Great Awokening” — which kicked off in the final years of the Obama administration and crescendoed after Donald Trump’s election.  

An older student, who hailed from a small-town Arizona military family, al-Gharbi sold shoes at a department store in between losing his job at Arizona and making it to the Ivy League. He arrived at Columbia as an outsider suddenly confronted the customs, taboos, and beliefs of an unfamiliar culture. What he discovered was a tribe that treated social — especially racial — justice as sacred, yet one that remained oddly blind to the apparent injustices in its own immediate surroundings. 

What al-Gharbi called a “racialized caste system” operated in plain sight. That is: “[y]ou have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you,” and these servants are “mostly minorities from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds… while people from other racial and ethnic backgrounds are the ones being served.” 

The “Democratic-voting professionals” who are the beneficiaries of this arrangement “conspicuously lament inequality” at every opportunity — while never really doing anything to remedy it. 

Likewise, when Donald Trump won the election soon after al-Gharbi’s arrival in New York, he noticed that well-off students ostentatiously presented themselves as “somehow uniquely vulnerable to Trump and his regime”. They demanded accommodations to deal with their trauma and terror that fascism had arrived in America. But they didn’t demand any special treatment for, say, the immigrant labourers who served them their meals, who had a far more plausible case that they were at risk from the new president, what with his threats to ramp up deportation.   

Al-Gharbi saw the callow racial-justice concerns of affluent New Yorkers crest after George Floyd’s murder, even as the massive protests that flooded the streets in 2020 did nothing to address any of the inequalities they denounced. The author describes Black Lives Matter demonstrators crowding the medians of Manhattan thoroughfares, holding up signs to elicit honks from passing drivers. All the while, they were “literally right in front of” homeless black men without shoes.

The question animating al-Gharbi’s book, then, is this. If most elite social-justice activism isn’t doing what it claims to be doing — creating a more just and equal society — what is it, in fact, doing? This has long been of interest to sociologists. Consider Max Weber’s famous thesis that John Calvin’s theological argument for predestination served as a way for early capitalists to legitimise their own accumulation of wealth. As a-Gharbi puts it: “the practical ways that ideas function ‘in the world’ are often very different than what their creators may have anticipated.” 

This is why the most common recent approach to understanding “wokeness” — tracing it to the ideas of particular thinkers — ultimately offers limited insights. In al-Gharbi’s telling, wokeness doesn’t spawn from people reading dense philosophical tracts. Rather, it’s less important that students at elite understand the ideas of Foucault or Kimberlé Crenshaw than that they “interpret and mobilize these social justice discourses in ways that serve their interests” by “creating highly novel forms of competition and legitimation”. 

To explain his point, al-Gharbi borrows a phrase from Pierre Bourdieu. What the sociologist called “symbolic capitalists” are “professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction”. To put it more simply, professions from journalism and education to social work and public health have always justified their existence on the basis that they served the public interest. From the Progressive Period onwards, al-Gharbi argues, they’ve purported to battle “capitalism run amok” and defend the masses from the greed of robber barons. In practice, of course, the exact ideological content has varied over time, but the basic self-serving purpose has not.

Taking a longer historical view than most critics of wokeness, al-Gharbi argues the “awokening” that peaked around 2020 was a symptom of the latest periodic crisis afflicting the symbolic professions. Along the way, he identifies four “awokenings” in the past century. The first, he says, happened from the late Twenties to mid-Thirties, when educated young Americans flocked to the Communist Party and other radical groups. The next happened in the Sixties, with the rise of the New Left. The third came in the Eighties and early Nineties: the era of political correctness. Our own awokening kicked off around 2015, peaked in 2020, and in al-Gharbi’s telling is now on the wane.

These cyclical moral ferments occur, the author argues, in periods “when symbolic capitalists find their own status or socioeconomic position threatened or highly precarious”. During such periods, a radicalisation of social-justice demands, a competitive striving for doctrinal correctness, a tendency to excommunicate heretics (“cancel culture”) all come to the fore. And certainly, these tendencies were present in prior awokenings: social media has simply made them more visible. 

The rational core of these seemingly irrational behaviours is simple to identify in the terms al-Gharbi proposes. Collectively, he writes, symbolic capitalists loudly advertise their own value, enabling them to extract concessions from the powers-that-be. One example might be the massive outlays of corporate and foundation funding through 2020. On an individual level, symbolic capitalists compete for status with each other through ostentatious displays of doctrinal purity. Not, to be clear, that this means their avowed beliefs are merely cynical ruses. As Weber understood of the Puritans, sincerely held beliefs can simply serve a different purpose than the true believers realise. 

If periods of elite social-justice ferment have occurred cyclically, that means they have certain predictable effects. For one, not only do they fail to achieve purported social-justice aims, they actually “correspond with a perpetuation or exacerbation of inequalities”. By securing new sinecures for symbolic capitalists, al-Gharbi suggests, they augment the dominant role white-collar workers already play in society. Those outside this privileged caste, it hardly needs adding, are marginalised. Another predictable result is that public trust in elite institutions declines — which could ironically prove counterproductive to symbolic capitalists in the long run, even if it allows them to reassert their status in a more limited sphere.  

A further result is a backlash, which in turn generates new counter-institutions to accommodate those squeezed out of increasingly intolerant elite spaces. This is how al-Gharbi explains the emergence of conservative think tanks in the Seventies, a moment when the New Left seemed to have squeezed conservatives from academia. He says something similar of Fox News, with the Nineties a moment when the liberal bias of mainstream outlets had become intolerable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, al-Gharbi sees the recent proliferation of “anti-woke” media spaces through a similar lens. Interestingly, the author adds, these counter-institutions are often the most lasting legacy of awokenings. But as al-Gharbi says, to the extent these are also organisations run by symbolic capitalists, they end up reproducing many of the same tendencies, including proneness to ideological mania and cancel culture — as his own run-in with Fox suggests.  

Al-Gharbi declines to offer concrete recommendations. His conclusion that ideological ferment follows predictable cycles seems to suggest we’re doomed to suffer some other madness in a decade or two. Yet his personal behaviour — especially engaging in dialogue with a wide range of audiences — suggests a certain optimism that it’s possible to be a better symbolic capitalist, and perhaps also forge a healthier symbolic capitalist culture. His book’s diagnosis of that culture’s deep pathologies also serves that end.

“Critics,” al-Gharbi writes, “are united in the erroneous perception that there is something special about ‘woke’ ideology.” If woke beliefs serve to obscure the class interests of those who espouse them, anti-woke critiques often reinforce the confusion. To depict elite identity politics as a vehicle for the establishment of communism, or as a fundamental threat to Western civilisation, is merely to flatter the radical pretensions of its adherents. What We Have Never Been Woke offers, in contrast, is demystification. In eschewing the self-aggrandisement and moralism typical of woke and anti-woke literature alike, al-Gharbi offers a model for others to follow. 

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Geoff Shullenberger is managing editor of Compact.

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