I like to be first with the news as much as anyone in the business, but this week I’m behind the trend. People who spend a lot of time taking issue with wokeness released their podcast interviews with Musa Al-Gharbi weeks ago, including Tara Henley and Andrew Sullivan.
I’m a less frequent combatant in the culture wars. I’ll use your pronouns, I’ll do a land acknowledgment, and I harbour no particular nostalgia for the “free-speech” ’80s, when bullying and exclusion were hardly uncommon. But one is stuck with the facts, and the fact is, Al-Gharbi looks prescient with regard to last month’s US presidential election, and insightful with regard to the broader context of culture wars in America and beyond.
“As symbolic capitalists have been consolidated into the Democratic Party, we have completely changed the party,” Al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, writes in his book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. “Its messaging and priorities have shifted dramatically. The party’s base has evolved in turn. Growing numbers of poor, working-class, and nonwhite voters are growing alienated from the Democratic Party and have been migrating to the GOP.”
As I say on the pod, that observation has become so banal since Nov. 5 that it would hardly be worth noting — except Al-Gharbi’s book came out a month before the election, and the half-chapter about partisan politics is only part of a broader, sustained broadside against the pretensions and achievements of the cultural elite in the U.S.
What he describes is something close to a cultural cartel in large U.S. cities, in which an overwhelmingly white, affluent class of “symbolic capitalists” — people who manipulate ideas for a living, be they academics, journalists, lawyers, consultants, advertisers — live off the underpaid toil of a much more diverse and barely-acknowledged underclass. “One of the first things that stood out to me [when he moved to New York’s Upper West Side] is that there’s something like a racialized caste system here that everyone takes as natural,” he writes.
“You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you. If you need something from the store, someone else can go shopping for you and drop the goods off at your place. People will show up outside your door to drive you wherever at the push of a button. It’s mostly minorities and immigrants from particular racial and ethnic backgrounds who fill these roles…”
In Al-Gharbi’s view, the constantly updating firmware of the “woke” vocabulary is like the password to a roped-off champagne room that only a small fraction of the population can hope to access. And a series of policy decisions by the beneficiaries of these inequalities ensure the inequalities will deepen. This is most obvious when it comes to zoning debates, but Al-Gharbi also points to the deeply segregated New York City school system and to the poor results for economic equality and opportunity in jurisdictions where it’s really hard to blame Republicans. He quotes from this New York Times video about the lousy results in jurisdictions where Republicans hardly ever get a chance to govern…
…. and, indeed, he quotes a lot of other stuff. His 300-page argument is followed by 100 pages of notes and references. He resists hyperbole: he stipulates the sincerity of the woke “symbolic capitalists” and says that many of the changes in attitudes toward “historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups” have been “unambiguously positive.”
But overall, Al-Gharbi depicts a self-satisfied generation of intellectuals whose record over the last decade shows signs of overreach and diminishing returns at the very best. For this effort, he’s received extensive coverage, most of it positive and a ready-made audience for his Substack newsletter, where he discusses the book’s themes and prepares the ground for what seems an inevitable follow-up volume.
This piece wraps a month of coverage on my own newsletter of themes in Democratic defeat, including the day-after discussion by The Panel, my long essay on the poisoned legacy of the pre-Trump consensus, my podcast interview with author Ross Barkan, and the international panel on North American trade I moderated for Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters. I suspect I’ll be exploring some of these themes for the rest of my career, but these five posts get the conversation off to a good start, I hope.
You can listen to this episode on Apple Podcasts and a bunch of other platforms via the “Listen On” button that you can see at the top of this post when you view it on your desktop browser. If you listen on a podcast platform, hit “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, and leave a good review, to help spread the word.
You can read a (machine-generated) transcript of this week’s episode via the "Transcript” button at the top of this page when you view it on your desktop browser.
I am grateful to be the Max Bell Foundation Senior Fellow at McGill University, the principal patron of this podcast. Antica Productions turns these interviews into a podcast every week. Kevin Breit wrote and performed the theme music. Andy Milne plays it on piano at the end of each episode. Thanks to all of them and to you. Please tell your friends to subscribe to The Paul Wells Show on their favourite podcast app, or here on the newsletter.
Share this post