🔒 Woke is fading, is Anti-Woke next? – Nia-Malika Henderson

Key topics:

• “Woke” became a political battleground, dividing elites and ordinary voters.
• Liberal elites often co-opt movements, making them more divisive.
• Voter backlash stems from cultural focus over real economic concerns.

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By Nia-Malika Henderson___STEADY_PAYWALL___

The idea of “woke” has animated US politics over the last few years. The word and the concept have become shorthand for the culture wars. At the Oscars, for instance, actress Jane Fonda offered her own definition, saying “woke just means you give a damn about other people.” Two days later, in his speech to a joint session of Congress, President Donald Trump declared “wokeness is trouble, wokeness is bad, it’s gone and we feel so much better for it, don’t we?” Sociologists and historians can often make better sense of political and social trends than journalists and the book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite  by Musa Al-Gharbi attempts to make sense of the woke and the post-woke era. Al-Gharbi is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. This transcript has been edited and condensed. 

Nia-Malika Henderson: Who is the ‘we’ in the title of your book?

Musa Al-Gharbi: The “we” is the elite constellation that I call symbolic capitalists — people who make a living based on what they know, who they know, and how they’re known. Think people who work in fields like finance, consulting, HR, media and education. They make a living by manipulating symbols and data and ideas.

The argument of the book is is that there’s a few interesting things about symbolic capitalists. We enjoy much higher pay than most people, more autonomy than more most people, more prestige than most workers. And if you look at the landscape of America today,  symbolic capitalists are pretty uniformly lined up behind the Democratic party and growing even more so over time. We’re the slice of America that’s most likely to self-identify as anti-racist, as environmentalists, as feminists, as allies to LGBTQ people and so on. We promised that if we had more power and influence over society, you’d see inequality shrinking. You’d see longstanding social problems getting fixed. You’d see growing trust in institutions.

And what the book shows is that over the last 50 years, we did get a lot more power and influence over society. But the the social world we promised is not the world we live in. Instead, we see growing inequalities over the last 50 years, increasing institutional distrust and dysfunction.

NH:  You trace the “Great Awokening” (a term you borrow from from Matt Yglesias, a Bloomberg colleague, whoin 2019 wrote about it in Vox) of the last few years back to 2010.

MA: There’s continuity between those who took part in Occupy Wall Street and those who took part in the later awokenings. They were overwhelmingly urban and suburban professionals and they overwhelmingly had college degrees or were in the process of getting college degrees.

These moments tend to occur during moments of “elite overproduction,” when society is producing more people that have expectations of being elites than we have the capacity to [sustain]. When we see a growing number of people who find themselves in that position, they often try to indict the social order that they think failed them.

In these moments, things have been growing worse for ordinary people for a while, and all of a sudden they’re bad for a significant share of elites too. And this is when awokenings are likely to happen. Because you don’t just have this frustrated group of elites, but there’s this whole other constellation of people around them who are also have a bone to pick with the people who are calling the shots.

NH:  One of the points you argue is that when liberal elites attach themselves to these movements, they can sometimes kill them.

MA: It often leads people who were longstanding participants in the movement to just bow out. It’s no longer theirs. I’ll give one quick example: criminal justice reform. Before the creation of Black Lives Matter, there was growing awareness in conservative and Republican spaces that there were big problems with mass incarceration in the United States, big problems with the way policing was carried out. There was growing appetite for reform. As symbolic capitalists took over the discussion and really started striking these extreme and off-putting positions, this made the criminal justice reform movement a lot more contentious. It killed the movement for criminal justice reform that had been underway. And by the way, it also alienated huge shares of nonwhite voters. And so the First Step Act [of 2018], rather than being followed by more criminal justice reform, was followed up by basically nothing.

NH:  You also argue that liberal elites missed this shift among core Democratic voters to Trump because we were so intent on seeing people who voted for Trump as racists or sexists or  defective.

MA: Yeah, absolutely. In 2016, Trump won the Republican nomination with the lowest share of votes of anyone who had ever won the nomination in recent history. He was not super popular. There are studies of Republican primary voters showing they found Trump’s racist, sexist language offensive. He would have done better if he struck a different posture, including and especially with White voters. Relatively affluent urban and suburban white voters, they’re in the slice of America that cares the most about things like decorum and civility and the president being presidential, and Trump was not that. 

NH: What about the shift of non-White voters toward Trump?

MA: That predates Trump and it’ll probably continue after it. It seems to be driven more by voters’ alienation from the Democratic Party than it does with the unique characteristics or appeal of Donald Trump. 

There are certain aspects of Trump’s policy positions that probably appeal to non-White voters in a way that progressives are often reticent to talk or think about. So for instance, if you look at who in the Democratic coalition was more supportive of, say, the Muslim ban when Trump was advocating it, well, that would be Black and Hispanic voters. Immigration, gender affirming care for minors, talking about sexuality in K-12 schools — who’s most skeptical of that? Religious minorities, ethnic minorities, folks who are more likely to subscribe to traditional views about gender and sexuality.

This is tough for progressives to reckon with because we tend to think all these social justice causes go together, and that there aren’t meaningful frictions or tradeoffs. But in fact, the people that we claim to be advocating for and representing, that’s not how they understand these issues at all.

NH: What do you make of the current backlash?

MH: One of the reasons that backlash is successful is because it it does draw on things that that are actually true. It is the case that many Americans don’t have a voice or a stake in a lot of our institutions. If you live in “fly over country” then it’s actually tough to have an impact on the national discourse in the media. That’s just a fact. 

So if you have these concerns about the way these knowledge-economy institutions are operating in society, if they seem hostile towards your values or way of life, the the normal consequence is to try to destroy those institutions. That’s actually a rational response.

And if you have these concerns, you get two different messages from political stakeholders. One of them being “There’s nothing to see here. Actually, these institutions are great, and the only reason you would think they’re not great is that you’re stupid or racist or sexist.” And the other party says, “You know what, you’re right. There are problems in these institutions. You can’t trust them to reform themselves. They refuse to even see the problem. You need to empower someone bring them back under control.”

If those are the two messages, then it’s easy to see which one is going to win.

I think sometimes, when we see our institutions under attack, we get into a defensive pose. This actually makes it worse. It is important for for us to try to defend some of our institutions and the work they do, but we also need to acknowledge some of the concerns that people have.

NH: So in this moment, what should lost-in-the-woods liberals be doing?

MA: The Democratic party is really oriented around [symbolic capitalists] and we have these kind of weird ways of talking and thinking about politics. We think it’s really important to focus on things like race, gender, sexuality differences. We think that if you don’t foreground and emphasise these things, that that’s a failure to be real.

[But] these identity-focused policies are just deeply unpopular. They just strike a lot of people as unfair. So if you have a program that’s supposed to, for instance, help disadvantaged people, but it’s focused on just helping Black or Hispanic disadvantaged people and excluding other ethnic groups, then that’s tantamount to looking at other disadvantaged people and denying them benefits on the basis of their race. It’s saying, “Hey, I know you’re a struggling White guy, but tough for you.” And worse than that, the way a lot of these programs are structured, you end up having a lot of not-disadvantaged racial minorities benefiting the most.

You can actually make progress on a lot of these issues through universalised policies. A policy that helps disadvantaged people as a whole will disproportionately benefit African Americans without needing to explicitly target African Americans. This is the kind of policy that “normie” voters tend to think of as being more fair.

NH: But you still have to persuade people to get on board.

MA: One of the ways that symbolic capitalists, activists, even journalists lost the plot is a lot of us have lost our confidence to engage with normie people. We we’ve lost our our confidence to persuade. If you look at the 1950s, you had groups like SNCC, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, they organized on campuses to go out into the community. Today, that is not the norm. You have organising that happens on campuses that are narrowly focused on that institution. “How can I get the university president to issue the right statement?” How is that gonna save anyone’s life? We’re just kind of narcissistically focused on our own institutions. 

Persuasion means going to people who don’t already agree with you and talking to them in a way that they will find compelling. I am a columnist for The Guardian and I write for The Nation and all of these other left outlets. But I also have bylines in the American Conservative and the National Review. A lot of my colleagues, they would rather lose an arm than have a byline in the American Conservative. And this is really undermines our ability to do the things that we say we want to do. If we want to actually move the meter and accomplish things in the world, you have to persuade.

NH:  So, we are in the backlash, or anti-woke era. What might be next?

MA:  Just as awokeings don’t last forever, these periods of anti-wokening also don’t last forever. The rival party often overextends, which is one of the reasons that we don’t have permanent majorities in the United States.  There are things that voters like about each party, but usually when a party gets voted into office it misunderstands its mandate. So you saw progressives doing stuff like focusing on renaming schools — something that just doesn’t matter. If you ask parents who live in these communities what their concerns are for their kids’ education, the name on the front of the building is never going be anywhere near the top of the list. And so we exert all this effort to change the name at the top of the building, and then we just go on to do our next culture war thing, and their lives continue completely unchanged. That’s the kind of thing that annoys voters. 

So Trump took office. What are some of the first things that he prioritised? Well, we’re gonna rename Mount Denali into, what is it, McKinley? We’re gonna change the gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. This is the same kind of symbolic crap that alienates voters and it’s kind of a loser, because you’re not really addressing people’s material concerns.

Read also:

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