Ideas - Why progressives may not be as 'woke' as they think

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Socialist and journalist Musa al-Gharbi identifies himself as part of an elite class of progressives that he calls: "symbolic capitalists" -- knowledge workers with elevated salaries and cultural status like professors, broadcasters, and bankers. He says it's the top 20 per cent, not the notorious one per cent, who pose a substantial impediment to progress.Fill out our listener survey here. We appreciate your input! 

We'd love to know more about our audience, what you like and how we can improve. Complete our short survey and you'll have a chance to win some CBC swag. Find the link in the episode description. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hi everyone. Thank you so much for coming. We're really excited about this evening. I know there's so many Nala Ayyad super fans in the crowd. And with that, I happily bring you Nala Ayyad.

At the end of September, ideas traveled to the University of Windsor for a live event hosted by the school's humanities research group. It featured a talk called We Have Never Been Woke by sociologist Musa El Garby. He's come here all the way from Stony Brook University in New York, so let's give him a Canadian and Windsor welcome. In addition to teaching at Stony Brook University, Musa Al Garby is also a journalist and contributes regularly to the Guardian, the Atlantic, Salon, and the Washington Post, among a slew of others. And as I told the crowd in Windsor, he's uniquely positioned to speak to the ideas you're about to take in.

Musa may be an established academic now. One site even called him a superstar, but he doesn't come from a long line of professors or researchers. In fact, he comes from a military family. His grandfather served in the Second World War, Korea, and Vietnam. His father held coordinate NATO operations in Desert Storm. His mother and stepfather served in the military as his own twin brother. In 2010, Musa experienced a sole searing loss with the loss of his twin brother when he was killed while serving in Afghanistan.

And that loss inspired him to examine national security and foreign policy as part of his work. And he paid a very heavy price for him. his fearless spirit of inquiry. In 2014, Musa Al-Garby wrote an article for the academic journal Middle East policy, arguing that American foreign policy was as destructive as ISIS, because its policies produced the conditions in which a group like ISIS could thrive. Fox News castigated him as an Islamist fanatic, and at the same time, he was blacklisted from academic jobs and opportunities.

So Musa has what must be the rarest of distinctions for any public intellectuals of being canceled by both the left and the right. And he is firmly committed to writing the kinds of articles and books that he'd actually like to read himself. That's no easy task. But as you'll hear, he does it naturally, sometimes even making himself laugh. And his voice, in all the senses of that word, is singular. In Musa's own words, I'm black, I'm Muslim, I was, and continue to be allergic to

idealism, secular moralism, utopianism, and positivism. So buckle up and enjoy your time with one of the most dynamic, original, and truly provocative thinkers around today. Please welcome the author of We Have Never Been Woke, Musa El Garby. That was a very kind interesting. Thank you so much for having me. The trust of Musa's talk and book is as arresting as it is counterintuitive, at least until you hear him expound on it.

It's that the class of people you might call progressives, including himself, are actually an impediment to achieving real progress. It's not so much the billionaires are the 1%. It's another class entirely. So the main character of my book, is a constellation of elites that I call symbolic capitalists. They've been known by other names. They've been called a professional managerial class, the new class, class X, a lot of classy terms.

So symbolic capitalists are people who make a living based on what they know, who they know, and how they're known. Basically, they cultivate and leverage what sociologists call symbolic capital on behalf of themselves and other people. A less nerdy way of saying that is that symbolic capitalists are people who manipulate symbols and ideas and impressions and data and stuff like this instead of providing physical goods and services to people. If you work in fields like finance, consulting, law, media, HR, education, and so on, you're a symbolic capitalist. I'm a symbolic capitalist on at least two counts. I'm a journalist and a professor. If you're in this room, the chances are high that you're a symbolic capitalist, or you will be soon.

nine out of ten college graduates go on to the symbolic professions. Now, there's a number of things that make symbolic capitalists really interesting as a group. One of the things that makes us interesting is that a lot of our professions define themselves in terms of altruism and the common good. So if you look at symbolic capitalists as a group, we tend to get paid more than most other workers. We have a lot more autonomy than most other workers. We have a lot more social prestige than other workers. workers. And from the beginning of our fields, we said the reason you should give us these things is not for our own sake, God forbid, but you should give us these things to better empower us to

help other people in society, including and especially the least among us. As a journalist, I'm supposed to speak truth to power and to be a voice for the voiceless. As an academic, I'm supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads and to tell the truth without regards to anyone else's political or economic interests, and so on. If you look at the United States or pure countries, at who in those countries, in Canada, this is true, in the UK, this is true, in France, this is true. If you look at who it is, that's most likely to self-identify as an anti-racist, as a feminist, as an ally to LGBTQ people, as an environmentalist, it's us. Overwhelmingly, we self-identify ideologically as left, progressive, liberal, anything that

suggest not right wing. And we're overwhelmingly and increasingly aligned with left-leaning political parties in the U.S., that's the Democrats. But the same thing is true. Again, in Canada, in the UK, in France, and any other pure country that you observe, symbolic capitalists tend to be strongly aligned and increasingly aligned with left-leaning political parties. So that's interesting for a number of reasons, not the least, being that symbolic capitalists have a ton of influence over society, and our influence is growing constantly. So starting in the interwar period, in the period between World War I and World War II, and then accelerating after the 1960s, there were these changes to the global economy that radically

enhanced the position of symbolic capitalists relative to other workers in society. Today, systems and institutions increasingly function with us and through us and couldn't function without us. If you look at the super rich and the super powerful, they're increasingly drawn from our ranks. Fun fact, literally every single Democratic nominee since Jimmy Carter has not only been a symbolic capitalist, but they've been one type of symbolic capitalist, a lawyer. Even if you look at the Democrats who lost every single nominee since Jimmy Carter has been a lawyer with the exception of Al Gore, who was a journalist, God bless him, but a symbolic capitalist nonetheless. So given how much wealth and power is increasingly consolidated in our hands,

and given the ways that we like to define ourselves and think about ourselves, what you might expect is that as people like us gained more power and influence over society, you'd see inequality shrinking. You'd see long-standing social problems getting fixed. You'd see growing trust in institutions because of all the good work that we're doing. That's not what you see. Over the last 50 years, we've instead seen growing. inequalities. Longstanding social problems have festered and grown worse. We've seen growing affective

polarization, increasing institutional dysfunction, increasing institutional mistrust. And so the core question that the book is trying to answer basically is like, what's going on here? Why do we see the world we actually live in, rather than the world, previous cohorts of symbolic capitalists promised. If you give us this money and power, all these good things will happen. We got the influence, we got the power. That's not where we're living. And so my working hypothesis, as I was trying to wrestle with that question, was that if we want to see how and where things went off the rails, how this disjuncture between the ways we define ourselves

and the realities on the ground of how we operate, of how our institutions operate, and so on, that looking at this period of great awakening that we were living through at that time might be a good place to start. That term Musa Al Garby uses awokening has a few layers to it. It's obviously based on the much-contested term, woke. In its simplest sense, he means a period of growing concern over social justice issues. So starting after 2010, there was this significant period of cultural tumult.

And initially, in the wake of increased protests on campus or something would happen at Yale, or at Middlebury College, and there'd be these really historic claims about kids these days who don't understand free speech or the decline of Western civilization, these kind of really big claims drawn from like random anecdotes and based largely on vibes. And as a social scientist, I thought, well, if there has been some massive shift in the culture, it should be something that we could measure. And so my colleagues and I said about trying to measure, to see, is there, there, there? Did something shift? We analyzed, for instance, tens of millions of

news articles from 47 media outlets over the past 50 years, millions of academic outputs. We looked at changes in protest activity changes in political alignments and on and on and on. The first thing that jumped out was that something did in fact change. It's not just vibes. Something shifted. The second thing that became very clear was that the shifts that occurred, though, they weren't broad-based. It wasn't everyone in society that shifted. It wasn't even most people or institutions in society that shifted. The shifts were confined to a very narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society, namely the people, the institutions, and the communities that are deeply connected to the knowledge professions. You saw radical changes in the kind of work that academics

and journalists put out. You didn't see radical changes in the way construction workers built houses, in the way that beauticians cut nails, in the ways that Waffle House employees produce food, they were pretty steady. They were pretty steady in their political attitudes and their political behaviors. They weren't radically shifting parties. They weren't radically changing how they answer questions on opinion polling. That was us. Symbolic capitalists shifted. Most other people just kept chugging along how they were before. The third thing that also became clear, is that this period of rapid change we saw after 2010, it wasn't a unicorn. It wasn't caused by phones.

It wasn't caused by Gen Z. It was a case of something that's repeated at least three times in the 20th century, starting in the 1920s. And so the beautiful thing about understanding this as a case of something is that if we compare and contrast these different episodes then, we can get leverage on questions like, well, why do these awakenings happen? Why don't they go on forever? Do they actually change anything?

What do they change? So why do the awakenings happen? So when I looked across these episodes, there seemed to be two things that predicted an awakening. They tend to occur when you have elite overproduction that grows especially acute and popular immiseration. So what is elite overproduction? Elite overproduction is when society is producing more people that have a reasonable expectation to be elites, then we have the capacity as a society to actually give them the lives they

were expecting. So when you have growing numbers of people who did everything right, they went to college, they majored in the right things, they got good grades, they did the right extracurriculars, so on, so forth, and they were expecting that when they graduated, they would have a six-figure income and a stable job, and they'd be able to buy a house and get married and have kids, and then it turns out this life that they were taking for granted their whole life just doesn't seem to be in the cards. When you have growing numbers of elite aspirants who find themselves in this position, what they often do is condemn the social order that they think failed them. and try to tear down some of the existing elites to make room for themselves. And I argue this is fundamentally what's happening during these periods of awakening. That's why cancellation is such a big part of them. But elite overproduction isn't sufficient to predict an awakening, in part because there tends to be a countercyclical relationship

between the fortunes of elites and non-elites, which is to say often when times are good for elites, they're kind of rough for ordinary workers, but on the flip side, when times they're lean for elites, They often are pretty good for ordinary workers. And so if you have a period of elite overproduction, but most other workers are doing fine, then no one cares about elite problems. No one's breaking out their violin to play a sad little song.

Oh, poor elite, you have to get a normal job. Like, no one cares. But there are some moments when these trajectories get collapsed. When things have been bad and growing worse for ordinary people for a while, and all of a sudden they're bad for a lot of elites too, those are the moments when awoken are likely to happen because you have these frustrated elites, but they're surrounded by this pool of other people who are also really angry with the way things are going,

who also have a bone to pick with the people who are calling the shots. And this gives them more leverage over the system than they would ordinarily have. And it also allows them to engage in their struggles for power and status and resources without saying, I'm doing this for me because I want to be an elite. They go, look at all these people who are suffering and having a hard time.

I'm their voice. I'm their representative. That's why you should give me money and jobs and opportunities in power. So those are the two conditions that consistently repeat, elite overproductions plus popular and then they tend to end when one or both of these conditions eases. So that's where they start. That's why they end. Okay.

Now here was probably one of the more disturbing elements of my research. When I looked at what are these periods of awakening actually change, the answer was not much and little good. They are not associated empirically with any kind of meaningful allocation of resources and opportunities from the rich in society to the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society. After the current Great Awakening, there were some boards that were created, for instance, in McKinsey and Company for women. Now, in order to be considered for the board of McKinsey and company, you need to have already had a really successful career in finance and consulting, which means you're probably a multi-millionaire. Is it bad to create more board positions for multi-millionaire women who wouldn't have been on the board before? No.

Does that help the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in any meaningful way? No. And so if you look at the fates of the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society, there's basically no meaningful reallocation of resources and opportunities downwards. There's also no meaningful, durable shifts in public opinions. So you might think, well, even if they don't get money and opportunities and resources, maybe as a result of all this cultural tumult, people feel better about women and queer people and trans people and non-whites and so on than they did before.

Like, their consciousness has been expanded. Not so much. You can see pretty clearly in the polling. Most of the time, the things that change as a result of the awakening tend to change right back. When the awakening is finished, nada. So what does stick around? Well, unfortunately, durably reaffirably reaffirmed. reduce trust in institutions like journalism and academia. You usually see gains for the political

right in the short to medium term. And you often see the creation of alternative knowledge economy infrastructures like Fox News or more recently Donald Trump acquiring and launching truth social and Elon Musk's anti-woke takeover of Twitter. These are the kinds of things that you often see in the aftermath of awokenings. Now our story about why you see these things, why you see these gains for the right, why you see this kind of lowered trust in institutions, our story is that what's going on here with this backlash is that you have a bunch of privileged,

cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, rich, white people who were like really mad about all the gains that were being made for all these other marginalized groups, and so they're joining the right-leaning parties to burn it all down and reclaim their privilege and protect their... Okay, there's a few problems with the... The first and probably most glaring problem with that account is that when you look at who's often driving the backlash, it's actually the very people that we claim the awakening was supposed to be serving. So if you look in the United States, at whose vote shifted over the last decade, what you see is that the privileged people, highly educated people, rich people, white people, guess which direction they shifted towards the Democrats, actually?

So how is it that the Republicans were able to make gains? Well, that would be because there have been significant shifts among non-white voters across the board. Black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian voters, Indigenous Americans. Trump wanted the Indigenous American vote by a huge margin wasn't even close. This is true for men and women. So it's not just, you know, Hispanic Latino men. You see the same thing, actually, with Hispanic women. Less affluent people, working class people, and poor people have been shifting

consistently to the GOP. Young people being alienated from the Democratic Party very pronounced in this last election. So what is driving the backlash? Even under ordinary times, symbolic capitalists tend to be pretty weird. Like the ways we think about politics, the ways we talk about politics and morality,

they're like objectively funky compared to the rest of society. And most people in society, even under ordinary times, often find us to be kind of weird and off-putting. During these periods of awokening, the gaps between us and other people grow a lot wider because we shift a lot while most other people stay on the same trajectory that they were on before. Now, we're often aware of this gap opening between us and other people. Our narrative of what's happening isn't that we're changing. It's that those people are growing more racist, more sexist, more authoritarian, and so on.

They're changing. We're not changing. And so this is an unfortunate consequence of the fact that the people who are undergoing this radical shift are also the people who are producing cultural narratives about that shift. We're the journalists, we're the academics, we're the ones producing knowledge and narratives about what's going on here, and we're also the ones who are changing radically. Now, not only does the gap between us and other people grow really big during these times of awakening, but people also care about it more. It becomes more salient in their minds, and that's largely because of how we ourselves conduct ourselves. We become really militant

about mocking, demonizing, trying to censor anyone who disagrees with us about these core moral and political issues, even for issues that we adopted 10 minutes ago. Like, 10 minutes ago, we decided that it's not enough to reform the criminal justice system. We need to abolish the police, right? So this kind of a thing causes people to notice the gap between us and them more and to care about it more, and that creates an opportunity for political entrepreneurs, usually associated with the right to basically campaign on bringing us and our institutions back under control. So these kinds of narratives, like the media doesn't trust you, they don't respect you,

they're lying to you, they're not telling you the whole truth, or in academia, they're just indoctrinating the young people rather than teaching them useful knowledge and skills. It's all these armchair radical professors. So these kinds of narratives become popular, usually in the aftermath of each of the awakenings. And I should say, part of the reason they become popular and compelling is because during these periods, we are in fact behaving in ways that are not exactly the best example of the ideals of our professions. Now, the problem is, for the right, is that just like the awakenings don't go on forever, the anti-wokenings tend not to go on forever either. And there's a few reasons for this.

The first reason is that although most symbolic capitalists are on the left, there are right-leaning symbolic capitalists. There are some conservative journalists. There are some conservative academics. But what's interesting is that bright-leaning symbolic capitalists tend to think about politics and morality and engage in political issues in exactly the same way as the peers that they're criticizing. They're sitting there on their keyboards going, er, wokeness, and using that as a stand-in for actual politics, which is to say they're not doing anything different from the people that they're criticizing. And the message that they take from winning power is usually not.

Well, it seems like ordinary people are tired of the culture wars. We should stop doing that. The message that they take is, oh, the public is tired of left-leaning culture wars. What they must really want is right-leaning culture wars. It should be noted. Donald Trump, by the way, is a symbolic capitalist. People think of them as this real estate guy.

His real estate companies were losers. Like, he went bankrupt, almost all of his money. It's from, like, television and entertainment and stuff. like that. He's a symbolic capitalist through and through. And you can see this in his priorities in office. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America. He renamed Mount Denali into Mount McKinley. He threw a $45 million military parade. Why? Because these kinds of symbols are very important to him. This is one of the reasons why right-leaning symbolic capitalists misread the political moment. They also tend to take symbols, impressions. This

kind of thing very seriously. It's why you get these kind of hyperbolic anti-woke narratives in the first place that present random crap happening at Harvard University as being a major threat to Western civilization. The only way that you can arrive at that conclusion is if you take symbols much more seriously than any regular person. And so you can see this in a number of ways. The same people who are complaining about cancellation have been canceling like crazy. In fact, over the last few years, left-leaning cancellation campaigns have been significantly decreasing on campus. Right-leading cancellation campaigns have been increasing such that the political right

is now driving most of the censorious behaviors. What often leads symbolic capitalists and their preferred political parties to see electoral losses in the aftermath of awokenings is that a lot of normy voters say, hey, I have bread-and-butter concerns that aren't being addressed because you guys are culture warring like crazy. But when they elect the opposition party and their opposition party goes into the anti-woke culture war, those practical needs still aren't being addressed. And so part of what led to Joe Biden's defeat in 2024 was that a lot of Americans were dissatisfied with the Biden administration's policies on immigration. What you can actually see from a deep dive into the polls and surveys is that

what Americans wanted was pretty much better enforcement of existing laws, a streamlining and improvement of our Byzantine immigration system, and deporting dangerous criminals. Okay. But if that's what they wanted and what they get on immigration when they elect Donald Trump is kids in cages, family separations, legal permanent residents being deported for writing an op-ed, if that's what they actually get, they tend to react. Somewhat negatively to that. And you can see this in the polling. Now, one of the things that helps the anti-wokes stay in power, of course,

is that every election is always a question of, if it's not you, then compared to who. And so a challenge for Donald Trump's opposition is that unless and until the Democratic Party seems closer to the median voter on immigration, then someone like Donald Trump can continue to make gains because the other person's perceived policies are even less popular. Even if what the anti-woke people are doing is unpopular, they need to come up with an actual positive vision

that's not more alienating than the people they're trying to depose. Journalist and sociologist Musa Al Garby, on stage at the University of Windsor, giving a talk based on his book, We Have Never Been Woke, The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. These new elites comprise what he calls symbolic capitalists, journalists, academics, and maybe surprisingly bankers, anyone who works with symbols in comparatively high status, high-salary jobs.

He argues that they, or we, have increasingly identified with social justice issues and that we're actually one of the impediments to achieving it. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. All right. It is October. It is officially spooky season, which is great timing because there is a new Canadian thriller series out. It's called Wayward, and I think we should be talking about it. My name is Alameen Abdu Mahmood, and I love pop culture. And this week on my podcast promotion, I called up some of my favorite critics to get into the show about a school for troubled teens, and then things start to go wrong. It is just wonderful. and it's bringing something new and interesting to the thriller genre. For that episode and a whole lot more, you can find and follow Commotion with Elamid Abdu Mahmoud on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

I mentioned earlier how Musa Al Garby used the term awokening in his talk. It's obviously a combination of woke and awakening, but it's meaning? I decided to ask him about it. What do you mean exactly when you talk about awokenings? Yes, so an awokening is a period of rapid change in how symbolic capitalists talk and think about social justice issues, and you can measure it in a few ways. Musa Al Garby holds that it's this class of symbolic capitalists, often referred to as the knowledge class, who are responsible for the awokenings he's charted over recent history. You can look at changes in political alignments. You can look at changes in protest activity. You can look at changes in the kinds of outreach. You can look at changes in the kinds of outreach.

outputs we do. So I analyze tens of millions of video games, news articles, academic outputs, and so on and so forth. I joined Musa Al Garby on stage immediately following his talk at the University of Windsor. And I wanted to press him a little on what he began with, the main character of his book, symbolic capitalists. I want to go back to the very beginning as another sort definitional question of the category of symbolic capitalists. You know, you define it as people who deal with knowledge, words, numbers, you know, journalists, academics, people in banking and finance. You mentioned Trump. You mentioned CEOs of big tech companies whose bank accounts have more digits than my social insurance number. I'm wondering how well that category actually

holds together. Yeah. Pretty well, I would say, no, okay, but here's why I think that. One of the things that's really interesting about a lot of the political realignments that are happening right now and so on, is, well, for one thing, during this period of awakening, there's this narrative that became popular, basically, that drew a distinction between the millionaires and the Billy Jeff Bezos at all and everyone else. So in the U.S., you had the Occupy Wall Street movement, and there's this refrain, like, we are the 99%. This was discussed as a class-based kind of narrative. It's not really class-based in a meaningful sociological sense. Like, if you're lumping in someone with the $200,000 income and $2 million in assets, but who's not technically

in the top 1% and comparing them to, you know, again, someone who works at Waffle House and saying they're in the same boat together. That's not really a, and it doesn't serve the guy working at Waffle House to have the guy who has $200,000 a year, poverty larping and pretending he's just an ordinary Joe. But one of the things that I try to stress in the book is that you actually can't explain as much as we might think or hope by only focusing on the millionaires and the billionaires. For almost all social trends that you observe, you really need to zoom out to the top 20 percent. It's the top 20 percent that are responsible for the declines in social mobility for growing inequality. And so on, I'll just give one quick example. There's a great book

by Anon Jared Herodas. It's called Winners Take All. And what Anand argues in that book is that the millionaires and the billionaires and multinational corporations, they create all of these social problems. And then they use big philanthropy to paint themselves as a solution to the problems that they just cost. So they create all this devastation and then they make these big nonprofit donations and they go, oh, look, we're the solution. Everyone goes, well, okay. It's a good book. But one thing that's interesting, if you read this book, is that the billionaires don't actually do much of anything in the story. Like, who is it? that when they make these donations

is writing these glowing op-eds, praising them as the good guys. Are they writing those op-eds themselves and then editing them themselves and then distributing them on their own social, through the social media channels themselves and all of that? No, it's a whole media team at the Washington Post or the New York Times

or wherever. It's journalists who write these fawning interviews and then the whole media apparatus team of that publication who distributes and frames these fawning interviews Who is it that's writing the PR after bad things happen that allowed them to absolve blame and take credit? Well, the PR firm folks are us too. Who is it that is moving the money around that lets them and doing the paperwork that helps them launder their reputations and launder their finances and stuff?

Oh, that's us too. Almost every single part of that story that he tells it happens with us and through us and it literally couldn't happen without us. And so if you only focus on the rich guy and not on us, then you're actually missing how stuff actually happens. And you're also missing who it is that the social order actually serves, who benefits from a lot of this stuff, and how. But what about the fact the billionaires buy politicians? Well, so this is one of the funny stories.

So on my substack, I have this essay called A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives. And what I show is that one of the ways that in the United States, people have tried to explain the 2024 election. It's to say, well, you know, Elon Musk is a billionaire buddy of Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is himself a billionaire, so you just had all these plutocrats that just bought the election. Well, one thing that's striking, when you actually look at, you know, data, is that, in fact, Kamala Harris had a much higher number of billionaires

who donated to her campaign, a much larger share of her total campaign donations, were from rich people. she outraised Trump three to one during the period when she was on the top of the ticket and during the whole cycle, including the time Biden was in charge, two to one. Like the plutocrats, the money and all of this was on the side of the Democrats and they lost. It turns out it's actually kind of hard to buy elections. That's a good thing. But yeah, so that's one problem.

Oh, last thing I'll say. Sure. This is kind of important. One of the problems with traditional class analysis is that, according to traditional class analysis, what you would expect is that because workers and bosses have very different incomes, very different risk exposures and stuff like that, that they would sort into different political parties. And traditionally, that's been the case. That's not the case anymore. So on the symbolic capitalist side, you have one group of people who has a lot of

pay, a lot of autonomy, a lot of prestige, and you have another group of people who tend to have more precarious employment relationships. They get paid less. They have less status. They still, compared to normie workers, they still make a lot more, as I show in the book, but setting that aside, what you see is this big divide between within this professions. And so what you would expect on traditional class analysis is that because of this big divide, the wealthy people would vote for maybe one party, and the more precarious, less rich, less prestigious people would have different political leanings. That's not what you see. I mean, it's the case that during the Democratic primary, maybe, the rich people really love Pete Buttigieg and the more precarious symbolic capitalists like Bernie Sanders, but they both vote for Kamala Harris in the end. And you see the same thing on the Republican side, actually. So the bosses of traditional capitalist enterprises that involve the production of physical goods and services, extraction, all that kind of stuff, those folks have voted Republican.

for a long time in the service of deregulation, tax cuts, this kind of stuff. But what's interesting, it's actually people who are less affluent, less educated, and communities that are not in major knowledge economy hubs and so on. Those are the people who have been moving Republicans. So increasingly, the workers and the bosses on that side of the equation have actually been in the same party as well. And this is unusual because the workers and the bosses, in that case, they actually do have divergent interests around things like, say, I don't know, work or pay. And so there's this kind of

really unusual situation, this remapping of the political landscape, where the core divide actually doesn't seem to be class per se, but rather, what kind of work do you do? And you can see this on so many different levels. You point out in your book, and you've said in many of your appearances, that it is not your intention to be prescriptive or to provide a, roadmap for this large swath of society. But we can't let you off the hook that easily. So how do you bridge the gap between, I guess what you're pointing out is a fundamental issue here, which is this gap between action, behavior, and belief among symbolic capitalists? Well, I should start by clarifying. Yeah. So there's this big gap between what we say

and how we actually live our lives and what we do. And the kind of, most common way that people try to reconcile those gaps is to say, well, you know, that must mean that symbolic capitalists are, you know, they're cynical or they're insincere, they're not really committed to these social justice causes. I think that's a bad way to think about any of this stuff. And so for instance, you know, the core thing, I think symbolic capitalists are absolutely sincere. When they say things like, we want the people at the margins of society to live lives of dignity and inclusion, I don't think they're lying. When people were crying after George Floyd was murdered, like, that was a performance, but it wasn't just a performance. They were

actually sad, right? When people say they want the poor to be uplifted, I don't doubt they want the poor to be uplifted in principle. The core tension, the main cultural contradiction in a way that the book explores is that this set of sincere commitments we have towards egalitarianism and so on, you know, we're committed to that, but that's not our only set of sincere commitments. We're also sincerely committed to being elites. And by this I mean, we think that actually we should have a bigger say in society than the people checking us out at the grocery store, that our opinions should count more, that our priorities should set the direction of society more than the people cutting our nails or watching our kids.

And we think we should have a higher standard of living than the people delivering packages to our door and the people driving us around or the people or the private chauffeurs that we summon with the press of a, we think we should have a higher standard of living than those people. And we want our children to do the same as us or even better. This set of commitments, these desires to be an elite, are also very sincere. And they're in a fundamental tension with each other. You can't actually be an egalitarian social climber.

What would that even mean? And so when these two sets of fundamental, sincere commitments come into conflict as they often do, what I argue is that it's often this commitment to be an elite that ends up winning out and kind of transforming how we pursue these social justice goals. So we mostly end up trying to pursue them in ways that, again, don't cost us anything, risk anything for us,

us to change anything about our own lifestyles and aspirations? In fact, our dream, our dream from the beginning of our symbolic professions, the dream has always been that basically if we just tax Elon Musk hard enough, we can solve all the world's problems. The problem with this as a strategy is twofold. The first, playing with the top 1%, actually just is insufficient to address all these problems. The second issue, though, and the bigger issue, you in a way, is that it's actually tough to just take money from Elon Musk and give it to the poor. It's a little easier now. There's platforms like give directly and stuff, but like most of the time, what happens is we take money from Elon Musk and then it goes into institutions

that symbolic capitalist control and we eat most of it and we sprinkle the crumbs on the marginalized and the disadvantaged. As my sociology colleague Matthew Desmond showed in his book Poverty by America. For every dollar that's earmarked for the poor, only 25 cents of it actually gets to the poor. Symbolic capitalists eat 75 cents out of every dollar. Most workers in America prefer what social scientists call predistribution. So they want solid wages, job guarantees, things like this, so they don't have to rely on the state. Most Americans don't want to rely on redistribution. Symbolic capitalists are unique because we strongly prefer redistribution over predistribution. And that's in part because redistribution is a really, really, really great

deal for us. On the one hand, symbolic capitalists rely on goods and services way, way more. Our idiosyncratic tastes and lifestyles are kind of premised on the exploitation of this disposable labor that we really need a whole bunch of poor, desperate, vulnerable people in order to keep these services that we consume more than almost anyone else in society at huge rates. To keep those services affordable to us requires a pool of desperate and vulnerable people. So the kind of redistribution scheme is great because we get access to this cheap disposable labor from this group of desperate and vulnerable people. And we don't have to feel too bad about it, though, because we just tax Elon Musk to make sure they don't starve to death.

It's best of both worlds. And in fact, even better, when we tax Elon Musk, we take 75 cents of every dollar, so we get richer in the process. It's a great deal. And it's really, really hard to address a lot of the social problems that we're committed to addressing if this continues to be the status quo, as it's been for a hundred years now. If we're going to take 75 cents of every dollar and sprinkle the crumbs on the poor, so again, there's good that we do, but the amount of good that we do is woefully inadequate, given the resources at our disposal. I guess what I would urge would be to focus less on symbols, on visibility, on getting people to think and feel and say the right thing, and more on behaviors and allocations of resources in a very laser-like, tight way. Often, when we engage in these kind of symbolic struggles, trying to fight racism and the patriarchy and so on, what we think is that these symbolic efforts will eventually,

somehow, they'll somehow benefit actual people in actual places, dealing with actual problems. But if the ultimate goal is to help actual people in actual places with actual problems, we can just go and focus on helping actual people deal with actual problems. And so if I were going to give people advice with trepidation, the general advice that I would have would be to focus more on concrete changes, on behaviors and allocations of resources, and on helping actual people in specific places who are dealing with concrete problems rather than kind of of these big macro struggles. I want to address the role of symbolic capitalists.

You know, specifically things that you critique in your book about, you know, marches like the Black Lives Matter protests, the Occupy Wall Street, the, you know, you'd kind of dismiss them all as kind of vapid gestures. But, you know, if we look at history, marches, protests, you know, aren't just gestures. In the past civil rights activists in the 60s, you know, black and white were beaten up, some were murdered at G20 protests.

We've seen here in this country and in other places. People have been injured and even thrown in prison. It's not just empty symbolism, is it? Well, protests in general don't have to be, and they're often not. But you can actually see a difference here. And so I'm really glad that you brought up some of these other examples. So, for instance, if you looked at the 1950s, well, for one thing, it's important. important to note that almost all the gains for the civil rights movement, almost all of the

substantive gains, happened before the outbreak of major protests on campus. There's just a ton of empirical data you can look at that show. It's been, it was a flat line and even declines at the time that the major, you know, the black power movement and all of that started. But that said, civil rights movement, you're absolutely right. This was a case where you had black people and white people, where you had symbolic capitalists and non-symbolic capitalists taking part in this movement together. And it was pivotal. There's almost no social. social movement that actually succeeds without buying and participation from elites. There's almost no social movement that can succeed without buying and participation of whites,

for instance, in the U.S. Now, one thing that's striking, though, and that makes it a really good example, is that during the 1950s you had groups like the student nonviolent coordinating committee or SNCC. They would organize protests on campus during the 1950s. But notice, they were organizing the protests on campus. but then with the intent of going out into the community, side by side with working people, appealing to a cause that was shared between them.

That is not the way that a lot of act, that's not the form that a lot of activism today takes. Consider the Gaza protests. Now, I say this as someone, my wife is Lebanese. Her family lives in southern Lebanon. Her family had to flee because Israel invaded her country. we were afraid they were going to die.

This is the thing that my family has skin in the game in here. I'm not blasé about what's happening in Gaza or the Middle East in general. But if you look at the Gaza protests in the United States, a lot of them, it's striking. On a lot of college campuses, the protests were organized on campus and then carried out on campus. With the goal of the protest being to some kind of change on campus, let's get the university president to issue a state. Like, the university president could issue the most radical statement you could imagine, and she could deliver it with the purest fervor of her heart, and it wouldn't save one person's life. It wouldn't change anything. It's a ridiculous kind of target to aim at. But these are the kind, it's an apolitical target. Let's adjust the campus portfolio. Let's get new teaching lines. Let's get the university administration to issue statements disconnected. And so this is a key part of the problem. One thing that seems clear. to me, and is also clear in the data, is that a lot of symbolic capitalists seem to have lost faith in their ability to go side by side with normal people and achieve common cause with them. There is data showing that protest has become increasingly gentrified in the United States.

Working class people do not take part in protest as much. And part of the reason they don't is because we often signal to people that we're happy to have working class people join our coalition if they become like us. If they don't, then we don't want any part with them. If they don't talk the way we want them to, if they don't engage in the kind of political behavior we want, then no things. You could see this in the Occupy Wall Street movement. So a thing that was popular in the Occupy Wall Street movement was this thing called the Progressive Stack, which was a series of arcane bureaucratic rules about, like, for instance,

who could talk and in what order based on whether you were black or queer, this kind of thing. Now, this is already a signal, this is not a working class movement. You don't see a bunch of dock workers like, you know what we've got to do? yeah we're going to stick it to the man yeah all right what's the first thing we should do well we should come up with arcane bureaucratic rules based on people's descriptive identity characteristics about who can talk it in what order like that's not a thing that appeals to working class like that's our thing um and if you were an ordinary dock worker who stumbled your way into an occupy wall street movement uh protests and again actually you can there's a ton of data on who took part in occupy it's us it's almost exclusively us

symbolic capitalist. But if you were a Normie worker who stumbled your way into one of those movements, and you tried to talk and someone said, hey, buddy, buddy, buddy, buddy, I noticed that you're a straight white male. So can you just hold it? And then all these other people are like snapping in response. You would look around and be like, what the heck is happening here? You would leave that movement immediately. You would hate everyone who took part in it. You might even vote for the party that they're against. And so the way that we engage in activism is often disconnected from the goals we want to achieve. It's often alienating to normy people. And often it doesn't even reflect the values and commitments and priorities of the

people we say we're trying to help. And so, yeah, in many cases, to the extent that these protest movements have an impact, it's often pernicious on the very goals that they're trying to advance. If you're trying to advance a goal, like Max Weber in his vocation lectures, he famously argued that the stakes of politics are ultimately life and death. And again, this is something that I have personal experience with, having known loss as a result of policy decisions. And if we take that seriously, then it actually matters how you do politics. Like if your goal is to achieve some kind of concrete political outcome,

then it's really important that, for instance, you should try to persuade people. You talk to the people who need to be convinced in a way that will resonate with them. That's obvious, but that's basically never happens. A lot of my colleagues, so I write for the Guardian, I write for the salon, a lot of left-leaning outlets, but I also have bylines in the National Review and the American Conservative, because if I want to convince conservatives about something, you've got to go to where the conservatives are and talk to them. A lot of my colleagues, if they had to choose between just preaching to the choir of people who already agree with them, persuading zero people, or having a byline with their name on it in the American

conservative, they would choose. Option A, six ways to Sunday, they would rather the purely sterile work than to even risk that any of their peers even might, under any loose circumstances, think they might be right wing, gross, right? Like, they would rather, and this is a big problem. If you want to actually achieve social justice goals, we've got to go where the fish are and we've got to actually try to persuade people. I'm glad you mentioned the personal, because I really do have to ask, in your lecture and even as we're discussing now and certainly in the book, it seems to me, and I don't, I'm not trying to be a therapist here, but it's, It feels very much to me that this is a very personal quest, that this stuff really gets under your skin. And I'm wondering if there's a story behind that at all.

Well, it's not so much that it gets under my skin, but I think, you know, part of what, I mean, maybe a little, but like the bigger thing to me, honestly, or I guess what gets under my skin is that when my father was growing up, segregation was still a thing in the United States, like actual segregation, not like there's a Confederate name on my school. I'm segregated. Like actual segregation. He went to segregated schools his whole life. And someone like me, I'm half white, like there was an actual crime, misgenation. It was illegal for black and white people to get married in the United States until Levens v. Virginia, which happened during his lifetime. And so the kinds of life that, that I live, the opportunities that are available to me would have been almost unimaginable for people of my father's generation and the kinds of opportunities that are open to my kids are still, you know, radically improved. And there are still a lot of social problems in this

world. And those problems are important to me. Again, the whole reason I do this work that I do is because I see that there are real problems in the world, life or death problems, and I want to help improve. And I've had impact. I mean, I had, as a result of engaging more, for instance, outside of my usual bubble after I got, I had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

Martin Dempsey, the highest ranking person in the U.S. Army, cite some of my novel statistics to explain why a no-fly zone in Syria was a bad idea. This is a kind of impact, practical impact on the world, that could never have happened if I was just kind of preaching to the choir and so on. And so what makes me angry was being in an institution and in communities who also explicitly seemed very committed to solving these social problems, but only in ways that don't risk anything for themselves,

cost anything for themselves, require them to change anything about their own lifestyles and aspirations, and only in ways that are kind of convenient for them. Right? Like this kind of a thing shows a fundamental uns seriousness about a lot of these problems, about what's actually at stake. And so this is the thing that, if something makes me angry or annoyed or whatever, it's that. It's that these are real problems.

And if you actually are concerned about these problems, then how you do politics matters, how you conduct yourself matters. I'll give one last example, and then I'll shut up. After Trump was elected in the United States, there were these big protests, this movement called the March for Science, where a lot of scientists, often like wearing white coats and stuff like dressed as scientists, you know, we're engaging in these political protests where they implicitly put science on one side and Trump on the other. So basically they were like, you know, either you support the science or, you know, if you're a

Republican, your choices are abandon your fundamental worldviews and commitments, abandon the political party you support for any number of issues, or be a science denier. basically was the way that this thing was structured. And so this political scientist, Matt Moda, was really interested because science and scientists before this were very popular, Trump controversial, just put it mildly. And so what he was interested in was, what was the effect of the March for Science?

Did it cause people to trust scientists less, more? Did it cause them to support Trump less? what he found was, no, the main effect of the March for Science was that caused people to trust scientists less. And this proved highly consequential because the March for Science and the subsequent erosion of trust, it happened right before the onset of a major global pandemic where trust in science was actually very important.

And so again, how we conduct ourselves, if we think the work we do actually matters, then how we conduct ourself actually matters. Musa, thank you very much for taking my questions. That was Musa Algarby, speaking to a live audience at the University of Windsor about his book, We Have Never Been Woke, the Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Special thanks to Kim Nelson, Director of the University's Humanities Research Group, which organized the event.

You heard her very generous introduction to the event at the very start of this episode. This episode was produced by Greg Kelly and Annie Bender. Technical support Trevor Pittman, Michael Hargreaves, and Sam McNulty. Web producer Lisa Ayuso, Senior producer Nikola Lukshic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyed.