The Paul Wells Show - A woke-up call for Democrats

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

In his book We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi argues that a new class of liberal elites uses the language of “wokeness” without actually helping the marginalized and disadvantaged.  He joins Paul to talk about a decades-long trend of the Democrats reorienting themselves towards a constituency of wealthy white people. It’s a message he was sharing well before Kamala Harris lost the election.  He also talks about how moving from a red state to New York City broke a lot of illusions he had about Democrats. He talks about wealthy Democrats who talk of lifting up marginalized people, while living a lifestyle that's dependent on exploiting their labour. And he talks about periods of “Great Awokening” over the last century, which have had mixed results in terms of creating real gains for marginalized groups.  Musa al-Gharbi is an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. You can read his Substack, Symbolic Capital(ism) here: https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/ Season 3 of The Paul Wells Show is sponsored by McGill University’s Max Bell School of Public Policy.

The Paul Wells Show is made possible by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy, where I'm a senior fellow. This might be a good week to start the show with a trigger warning. The Democratic Party has been weird and funky and getting weirder and funkier over the last 10 years, and that's driven a lot of people away. Today, a tenure track member of America's cultural elite on the contradictions of the cultural elite. We've got Musa Al-Gharbi to talk about his extraordinary new book, We Have Never Been Woke. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show. woke. I'm Paul Wells. Welcome to The Paul Wells Show.

Since Donald Trump got re-elected, it's become common in some circles to read sentences like this, quote, growing numbers of poor, working class, and non-white voters are growing alienated from the Democratic Party and have been migrating to the Republicans, end quote. But the author of that particular sentence didn't write it after the election. He wrote it many months ago in a book that was published a month before the election, which means he kind of called it. That author is Musa Al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University in New York. His first book has been getting a lot of attention. It's called We Have Never Been Woke. And it argues that while affluent, highly educated, and liberal Americans like to talk a good game on equality and inclusion, they demonstrably don't deliver. In fact,

he argues, people who use keyboards for a living, he calls us symbolic capitalists, a term he uses to include himself, live as well as we do on the backs of a vast network of service workers, delivery truck drivers, Uber chauffeurs, and warehouse stalkers. Those people have been falling behind. They notice and they're not impressed by the refined vocabulary we use to describe them, even as we keep making policy choices that deepen those inequalities. If you listen to this podcast a lot, you might have noticed I tend to stay away from the culture wars. They're on the long list of wars where I found I don't have much luck changing anyone's mind. But we've got this election result to deal with.

And with it, the news that a growing number of Americans have found somebody they like less than Donald Trump. That's his opponents. Musa Elgarbi, thank you for joining me today. That's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. I want to congratulate you for, among other things, this paragraph in your book. As symbolic capitalists have been consolidated into the Democratic Party, we have completely changed the party. Its messages and priorities have shifted dramatically. The party's base has evolved in turn. Growing numbers of poor, working class, and non-white voters are growing alienated from the Democratic Party and have been migrating to the GOP. Now, I've read a lot of analysis that say that, but they all came out after we knew how the election was going to end or how it had ended.

Your book came out a month before the election. What manner of magic allowed you to see how this was going to turn out? Well, after the election, I also wrote an essay called The Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives, where I showed that the reason Kamala lost was because she did especially poorly with working class and middle class voters and non-white voters and religious voters, including religious minorities like Muslims and so on. And even as the Democratic Party continued to gain with whites and relatively affluent people and so on. One of the striking things about this essay that I published after the election is that I published the same essay two previous times, once in 2016 and once in 2020,

producing the same charts showing the same trend lines that predated Trump. They go back to basically every single midterm and general election since 2010. We've seen these trends. The problem is people have had a hard time processing this information, in part because they view the Republican Party as fundamentally rooted in racism and Islamophobia and things like this. So they can't even conceive of how someone who is working class or non-white or whatever would even vote Republican. And also, they're really committed to the idea that they and their preferred party are the party of non-whites, working class people, and so on. And so even when the data starts, it's consistently showing that there's a trend line going opposite

of what they expect. They have a hard time processing that data. But this time, it's a little harder to ignore. In 2016, Trump won, despite stagnant turnout with whites and lower vote share with whites relative to Mitt Romney, because of gains he made with blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. But because that was a close election, and he actually lost the popular vote, it was easy for Democrats to find ways to write it off and ignore it and whatever. But in this election, he won not just the electoral college, but the popular vote. And these trends have continued to the point where now the kind of margins that the GOP was able to hold with non-white voters and stuff are margins they haven't seen in like a half century or more. So it's hard to ignore it at this point. But the data's been there. It's just people have

been locked into these frames to the point where it's been hard for them to acknowledge what's right in front of their face. Now, your book wasn't intended as sort of election guessing sleight of hand. The phenomena you describe are a kind of a product of a broader social trend that is the meat of your argument. But you end up essentially describing the Democratic Party, or at least the more moneyed elements within the Democratic coalition, as people who are so sure they're right, that fewer and fewer people can bring themselves to agree with them. That's a bit of a fix to be in.

And again, this is part of the reason why they haven't been able to perceive some of these trends is because they're so locked into these frameworks about who they are and who their opponents are, what motivates their opponents and so on and so forth. And actually, I'll add a second problem is that if you look at who journalists are and who academics are, almost all of us are on the blue line of charts. So almost all of us are Democrats or people who identify with the left and so on and so forth, by ratios of 10 to 1 or more. human impulse is to assume that if there's some kind of problem, we don't try to explain the problem by going like, oh, well, how are the blue line people contributing to this problem? Why are we so weird? Why have we changed so much over the last 10 years and so on and so forth? Instead, because we're all on the blue line, we want to explain anything that we think of as bad. We focused almost exclusively on the red line, on trying to explain how Republicans are driving almost anything that we think is bad about the social world, typically by appealing to deficits and pathologies. So what negative trait explains why someone would

vote for Trump or why they failed to vote for Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris? Is it racism or sexism or misogyny or homophobia and so on and so forth? And similarly, if we look at the gap that's been growing between symbolic capitalists and the rest of society, we've perceived this gap growing. But the reason that we think the gap isn't growing is because other people have grown more racist and sexist and so on over the last 10 years. Even if we look at our own charts, at our own data, we can see that that's not true. The reason why the gap is growing is because we've shifted a lot

while other people haven't shifted much. And so we're the ones driving polarization. But because we think polarization is bad, we don't start by going, oh, well, how are people like us contributing to polarization? We just assume that it must be these other people who are driving polarization. Now, the title of your book is We Have Never Been Woke. I have to say, I do not usually jump into debates over woke politics.

I figure it's essentially a can of worms. And I have been known to claim to be woke myself. But we're stuck with the results of this election. And I found as I read first some of the stuff on your sub stack, and then when I got the book and started reading it, that it's an elaborate indictment of a kind of wave of self-delusion that I had a hard time dismissing. that I had a hard time dismissing. When did you become interested in woke politics and how did you get so skeptical of what on the face of it is simply a claim

that we should eschew racism and pay more attention to the less privileged and check our own privilege? You know, I grew up in a red state and I thought, you know, if only people in Podunk, Arizona could be more like the enlightened denizens of Manhattan and places like that, things would be so great. And then I moved to Manhattan, and I realized that, one, it was very far from a progressive utopia.

There was extraordinary amounts of segregation and poverty and suffering, and I couldn't blame those damn Republicans. and poverty and suffering. And I couldn't blame those damn Republicans. The city council of New York is almost exclusively Democrat. The state legislature of New York is exclusively Democrat. The mayor of New York is a Democrat. The governor of New York is a Democrat. All of our federal, if you look at our delegations to the federal Congress and the Senate or the House, Democrats outnumber them two to one. So there's no story in which Republicans are driving any of the horrible things that hold in New York. It's clearly the Democrats. And everywhere I looked, I was confronted with this kind of racialized caste system, exploitation that people took for granted, that fell along the lines of race and gender in these kind of stark ways that everyone just took as normal, when in fact, in places like Podunk,

Arizona, where I grew up, these kinds of differences between the rich and the poor, the level of segregation that you see in Manhattan along the lines of class was just not present. Even exploitation and things like that track along the lines of race and gender is much more muted than a lot of these other locales. So we have this kind of racialized caste system, these gendered forms of exploitation that we just take for granted in places like New York, that even the most racist or sexist, bigoted person in a lot of other locales, they just wouldn't be able to exploit women and minorities and poor people the way that the typical liberal professional does in a city like Manhattan.

The infrastructure literally doesn't exist for them to casually exploit and discard people. It's these progressive bastions associated with the knowledge economy. We have these well-oiled machines to exploit and discard marginalized and disadvantaged people and their labor. The first several pages of your book draw this kind of harrowing portrait of modern-day New York City, a place where overwhelmingly white, affluent, knowledge economy workers can't get through their day without housekeepers and servers and Amazon drivers and Uber drivers, who can be sort of summoned at whim are overwhelmingly racialized and working class and having a hard time making it through their day. And folks who are calling up the Ubers and getting deliveries from Amazon and so on seem unaware of the contradictions in that situation.

Is that a sort of a fair summary? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, one, we don't recognize how insane the elite lifestyle we lead is. So for instance, the fact that we have these disposable chauffeurs. Before, a chauffeur was a luxury that was exclusively available to elites, like really affluent people. And you're responsible for a chauffeur. If their car broke down, you had to fix it or you weren't going anywhere. If you didn't have to go anywhere, you still paid your chauffeur.

They were your employee. What we have is a system where we can, with the push of a button, get a chauffeur to take us wherever we want to go. But without any of the attendant social obligations that would come with actually having a chauffeur. So we have a disposable chauffeur. And we take for granted that this is just a normal way that society works, is that we have disposable chauffeurs. Well, the only way you have

these disposable chauffeurs at rates that we would find acceptable or affordable is through extreme exploitation. As I show in the book, the overwhelming majority of people who work in these jobs, especially who provide most of the rides, are people who make below the state minimum wage. They're overwhelmingly undocumented immigrants and so on. And the same is true for the people who are personal taxis for our burritos because we can't trouble ourself to go to a store, let alone cook anything on our own, and so on and so forth. These things are only possible if you have this pool of desperate and vulnerable people whose labor you can exploit and undercompensate. And I'll add, these are the results of choices that we make. So take the number of symbolic capitalists who rely on

undocumented people to be house cleaners and babysitters and things like this. Part of the reason they rely on undocumented immigrants is so that they can pay them less than if they hired a native-born or a white person to do this job. But of course, there's no rule that says if you hire an undocumented migrant, you have to pay them less than a native-born white. That's a choice that we make. We see an opportunity that we can shaft this worker in a way that we can't shaft a native-born white worker. And so we choose to hire that person instead and to shaft them. These are a series of choices we make. They're not the inevitable results of just how economics works and all this stuff outside of

our control. These are aggressive maneuvers we make to target people who are desperate and vulnerable and pay them less than we would otherwise pay them if we hired people who are less desperate or less vulnerable to do these same jobs. And yet you also say that to the extent folks like us, right? The term you use is symbolic capitalists, people who make a living off of manipulating ideas, whether that's journalists or lawyers or consultants or academics. My shorthand is people who had an easy time working from home during COVID. You don't say that it's sort of

blatantly hypocritical for this class of people to appeal to social justice and equality, or it's not consciously hypocritical. These people are not sort of mustache twirling cartoon villains. They really do care about racism and gender equity and things like that. It's just that they happen to be doing very well in a society where a lot of the real problems are getting worse, even as the rhetoric is getting sort of more ritualized. of more ritualized? Well, one of the tensions is that we say that we like the workers and the common people and stuff, but we really just have no idea how other people live. Not really. So example, when I started at Columbia, they gave us a stipend of like $37,000. And this was $37,000 they gave us to be astute, which was wild to me. That was more money than I had ever made working full-time at real jobs before I came to Columbia. But my peers were like, huh, this is garbage money. This is trash money. How could anyone live on this?

And by the way, I was supporting a family of four on this graduate stipend, and most of them were single. But they were like, huh, garbage money. This is insulting. This is an insulting sum of money. But then it's like, if you actually look at how much money the people around you live, if you look at what the average salary for a single earner it is, or if you look at all of the people as you're walking down the street, if you're getting a slice of pizza or the

person, again, chauffeuring your burrito around and so on and so forth, if you look at how much they're making, they're making less than you to do real jobs. And you're sitting around saying it's insulting to get paid $37,000 to be a student, right? The reason that we can look at that money and think of it as trash money is because we kind of index ourselves, what the students were doing as they were looking at how much tenure line professors at an Ivy League school make. So they look at the professors and go, oh, we make a lot less than them. And of course you do. You're a student. But this is the point, as we look at people who are above us on the ladder, and we go, oh, we don't make as much as them. We must be just poor, ordinary Joes, working class people. Instead of looking at how

everyone else in society lives and the kinds of working conditions they face and the benefits and wages that they experience, we just have no idea how ordinary people get by in America. And so we have this kind of distorted understanding of our own social position. And then the second problem is, well, it's absolutely true that a lot of us really do want to help the marginalized and the disadvantaged. We also really want to be elites, which is to say, we think that our perspective on things should count more than the person checking out our groceries. Or we think that we should have a higher standard of living than the person delivering our packages. And we want our children to reproduce our own social position or to do even better.

And we want our children to reproduce our own social position or to do even better. And these tensions, I mean, these commitments, they're both sincere, the desire to be an elite, the desire to be an egalitarian, but they're in fundamental tension with each other. You can't be an egalitarian social climber. It's a contradiction in terms, right? And so when these two sincere commitments come into conflict, as they often do, the book argues that it's typically this desire to be an elite that ends up winning out so that we end up trying to pursue these egalitarian goals in ways that don't cost us anything or require us to change anything, ideally by taking things from other people or by focusing on these kinds of symbolic issues that allow us to feel a sense of progress, even if there isn't any actual change being made in terms of allocations of resources or opportunities and things like this. And so

when we say we want the poor to be uplifted, when we say we want people who are marginalized in society to live lives of dignity and inclusion, I don't think we're lying or insincere. It's just we have this other set of commitments too. We really want to be elites. And we're not willing to sacrifice that in order to allow other people to live lives, if that's what it costs, would be sacrificing that or compromising even on the extent to which we live these elite lifestyles. Up to now, it seems like we're not willing to make those kinds of changes to achieve these goals. I want to take a moment to thank the people who support this show. Tackling the complexity of global challenges demands a different approach to public policy. The Max Bell School of Public Policy's teaching, research, policy engagement, and public outreach

develops the skills and understanding to solve the most important issues facing Canada and the world today. They offer several public lectures and conferences throughout the year on current policy conversations and provide an 11-month intensive master's program to prepare the next generation of policy leaders. Learn more at mcgill.ca slash maxbellschool. You call the period that we're kind of coming out of, the period in essentially symbolic language to signal a commitment to justice became very important in American discourse. And then the other thing you say is that it's winding down. I mean, we're already, to some extent, getting past that. First of all, what is a great awakening? What were the other ones like? And secondly, how does it seem to be a phenomenon that's mostly in the rearview mirror at this point? Yeah, what a great awokening is, is it's a period of rapid change in how knowledge economy professionals talk and think and engage in social justice. So what I've shown in my research before the book and in the book

is that after 2010, for instance, you saw this dramatic change in things like journalistic outputs or academic outputs or arts and entertainment and cultural outputs, where all of a sudden they became really concerned with various forms of prejudice and discrimination and inequality. And the people who work in the knowledge professions became much more, the ways they answered polls and surveys, they became much more concerned about injustice and inequalities as well. Their political allegiances shifted further to the left. Their policy preferences, especially in cultural issues, shifted further to the left. They began to, especially in cultural issues, shifted further

to the left. They began to protest at much higher rates and so on and so forth. And yeah, as I show in the book, this period of rapid change in political activity and beliefs and outputs and things like this is actually a case of something. So there was the last time that we had a big awakening like this was in the late 80s to early 90s. That was the last time we had this dispute and contestation over what was called political correctness at the time, but which today we call wokeness. And before that, there was an awakening in the mid 60s through the early 70s. Before that, there was one in the 20s through the early 30s. There was one in the 20s through the early 30s.

And as I show in chapter two of the book, understanding this as a case of something is actually a really powerful lens for understanding what's actually going on in these periods of awakening. Because we can compare and contrast these cases then to get leverage on questions like, why do these periods of awakening happen at all? Why do they wind down? Do they change anything? What do they tend to change? Do they influence each other and so on?

And so on the point about them winding down, I argue in the book and I've shown in my sub stack and other essays that looking at the same kinds of measures that you can point to to see that something shifted after 2010, those same measures show that after 2021, things seem to be on the downswing. Now, by most of these measures, we're not back to 2009 or something like that. So we haven't reverted to where we were before the awakening. But the downtrend is very clear, and it's been persistent now for about three years on most of these measures. And so, the awakening does seem to be winding down. I'll add, one of the things that happens as awakenings tend to wind down

is that they're usually followed by gains by the right at the ballot box. So, we're seeing this now. This is actually a kind of modal outcome that happens after each of the awakenings. And the reason it happens is because even during ordinary times, there's this big gap between symbolic capitalists and kind of normie Americans in terms of how we think about politics, how we engage in politics, our moral and political views, and so on. During these periods of awokening, the gap between us and everyone else grows bitter than normal because we shift a lot while other people don't shift much. But people also care about the gap more because during these

periods of awokening, we become really militant about demonizing and censoring and villainizing and trying to suppress and ignore anyone who disagrees with us on these moral and political issues, often for views that we ourselves didn't necessarily hold until like last week. If people disagree with us about those things, we become really aggressive towards them. And so the fact that we engage with people in this way, the ways that we conduct ourselves during these periods of awokening, lead other people to not only perceive the gap more than they normally do, but to care about it more. And that creates a kind of opportunity for political entrepreneurs associated

with the right, typically, to basically run against us, to say things like, higher ed is out of control. You know, they're spending all their time indoctrinating young people instead of teaching them useful knowledge and skills. And the media, the media has become a propaganda arm for the Democratic Party, rather than telling you the truth. I'm going to bring these institutions under control. I'm going to take these folks and push them back to their right jobs, or else we're just going to burn all this stuff down. So these kinds of narratives that are popular today, they become popular in the aftermath of each of the awakenings. And again, as they wind down, usually there's significant gains for the political right as a result of how we conduct ourselves during these periods.

And that's what we're seeing today as well. So I think of the Nixon landslide in 1972, even as the elements of the Watergate story were becoming known as essentially a backlash to the excesses of the civil rights and campus protest era. Excesses is probably a terrible word to use, but the backlash. Yeah, I mean, so even there, there were excesses in the sense that one of the things that you can see looking at the data is that as the civil rights movement per se faded out, there was this shift that occurred where instead of being a broad-based movement that was kind of ecumenical and all of this kind of stuff towards the late 60s and onward, instead of the traditional civil rights movement, the civil rights movement that had been ongoing for more than a decade, there was a shift to what you could call the Black Power Movement, which was popular almost exclusively among highly educated, relatively affluent people, and was a lot more militant in its orientation, a lot more cynical in its orientation, and was a lot less popular, generated a lot more blowback,

both against the left broadly and even against the cause of civil rights in general. Okay. So the late decadent phase of an awokening is when it stops to be a movement that lifts people up and it becomes a vehicle for lifting me up. Well, so no, the thing is, in this case, most of the gains of the civil rights movement happened before the second awakening. Civil rights acts were cast in 1965. A lot of the big moves that the Chicano movement achieved in terms of actual progress in legislation occurred before, around the early to mid 60s, things like this. A lot of the actual gains of the civil rights movement,

both the Black civil rights movement and, again, also other ethnic minority civil rights movements, were already locked in before the Second Awakening really took off, before you saw major campus protests, before you saw a lot of these kinds of radical discourses around second-wave feminism and all of this kind of stuff. There just happened to have been a civil rights movement that occurred before the second great awakening, but it had already notched all of the successes that it ended up winning before the second awakening even took off in this case. And this is the problem is that a lot of these intellectuals then during the late 60s and early 70s basically took credit for movements that they themselves didn't create or

weren't the primary drivers of. And in fact, in some cases resisted. So as Martin Luther King emphasizes, when he moved north, you know, before, in the early stages of the civil rights movement, when it was in the south, all these people in the north, highly educated people, professionals, were all clapping, cheering him on, sending him money, and all of this kind of stuff. And then he tried to integrate places like Chicago. And he said he was met with a reception that was worse than anything he ever experienced anywhere like Selma. Public opinion of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement tanked. At the time that Martin Luther King was assassinated, he had like a 70% unfavorable rating, driven primarily by the fact that, in his own words, he said, once people in

the North were forced to reckon with the fact that racial justice also meant that they would have to make significant changes to their lifestyles and their aspirations, and this wasn't just a matter of pointing at people in the South and talking about how backwards they were and so on, but that it required painful transformations to the way things were operating if we actually wanted to achieve these goals. All of a sudden, a lot of people who are former cheerleaders of the movement turned sour on it. And a lot of people who remained, you know, making loose claims about civil rights and things like this, weren't really focused on a kind of broad-based movement like the kind MLK was talking about for everyone.

Instead, they were focused on establishing programs for themselves, jobs for themselves, various forms of reparations for themselves. And so the kind of tenor and goals of the Second Great Awakening were very different from the Civil Rights Movement in a way that's like you could actually measure it in terms of the kinds of people who were taking part in the second awakening versus the civil rights movement in terms of what their demands and aspirations were and so on and so forth. These are just two very different movements that just happened to occur in this case, kind of close to each other.

Now, I will have some listeners who are listening to all of this and they will say, okay, great. This is lovely. I have had just about enough of this shit. Because the Americans just re-elected a president who was impeached twice, has been adjudicated at court a perpetrator of sexual assault, made a glorious lifelong career of tax fraud, stays in the residence at the White House until noon tweeting smack about his opponents.

And you're going to tell me that this paragon of awfulness managed to get president again because some people in nice condos are guilt tripping people for using the wrong language. That doesn't seem like a sufficient provocation for what just happened. Well, no, it's not. So I think there are kind of two stories that the book helps us understand why Trump won. Part of it is that there's this kind of acute backlash against the post-2010 Great Awakening. Like I said, that follows each of the awakenings. But one of the things that's critical to note about this is that in our preferred telling of this backlash, what it is, is it's a backlash of privileged, wealthy whites who are upset at all the good progress that happened over the awakening and are trying to roll it back.

But as I show in the book, there's actually not a meaningful relationship between meaningful social progress in terms of reallocations of resources or opportunities or changes in law and things like that. There's just not a relationship between the Awokenings and anything that we would think of as practical, tangible progress. And the people who are participating in this backlash are actually not the whites and not the rich people. In fact, the rich people and the whites have moved more to the Democratic Party over this entire period, including in this election. The people who are participating in the backlash,

the people who are driving the right to the ballot box are the very people that we think of ourselves as being advocates of or allies for, non-whites, less affluent people, religious minorities, and so on. They're the people that have been defecting to the Republican Party. They're the people driving the backlash.

I think that's the first thing to know. The second thing, like there's kind of two trends Republican Party. They're the people driving the backlash. I think that's the first thing to know. The second thing, there's kind of two trends that are happening at once that are important to keep your eye on. One of them is that there's this longer kind of secular trend where starting in the late 1960s, the Democratic Party tried to transform its base. In particular, they tried to distance themselves from the white working class, which they thought of as being regressive and backwards and racist and so on, and reorient themselves around white professionals. And they hoped to have this coalition that was basically white professionals plus racial and ethnic minorities and so on. It turns out it's really tough to build that coalition

because if you orient yourselves around the preferences of white knowledge economy professionals, that tends to alienate non-whites and so on. And so actually, if you look at that long-term trends over the last basically 50 years, the Democrats have seen increasing losses with working class voters, especially white working class voters, but increasingly non-white working class voters as well. Increasingly, public perceptions of the Democratic Party are that the Democrats are not the party of the working class, are not oriented towards economic issues, but are more focused on cultural issues. So part of what's happening is that the Democratic Party reoriented itself around a different constituency, us, and that constituency tends to alienate a lot of other people. And this has been happening for like, again, for 50 years. But then during this period of awokening, those defections accelerated because we became really extreme and funky compared to normies.

And the Democratic Party shifted a lot in this period. If you look at the Democratic Party platform, if you look at the narratives and messaging from the Democratic Party, if you look at the kind of candidates that they put forward, they transformed radically after 2010 in a way that accelerated these defections. And so, yeah, I think there are kind of two stories to keep in mind here. There's this kind of longer 50-year story, and then there's this more acute story that happens after each of the awakenings over the last century, which is that they tend to be followed by gains by the right at the ballot box. Oh, and last thing I'll say on this. Sure. One thing that's important to note about working class people in particular is that if you look at who are the Americans who care about things like civility and decorum and the president being presidential and the following

of norms and things like that, that's educated, affluent, wealthy people, symbolic capitalists, basically. We're the only people who care about that. Most other Americans do not care about things like decorum and civ stability and whether or not the president is qualified or has the right credentials. They're not trying to elect an angel. They're trying to elect someone who's going to get things done for them. And so they don't care about a lot of that stuff that we care about a lot. Trump's rhetoric on race and gender, his lack of qualification, like that stuff matters less. If he seems like he's going to be more likely to actually get things done for them than the he seems like he's going to be more likely

to actually get things done for them than the Democrats, then they're going to vote for the person who's going to get things done. They care less about the personal stuff. And actually, it's a glaring indictment. It's a glaring indictment of the Democratic Party. You know, that in this milieu,

someone would look at someone like Donald Trump and think that he would be a better advocate for them and their interests than the Democrats. That's quite the thing. And as I show in my work, you can see that this alienation, that the Republicans have been beneficiaries of this alienation from the Democratic Party. It's alienation from the Democrats that's driving this. These movements predate Trump, and they'll probably continue after him. So it's not like Trump is some unusual political figure who has this great charisma that manages to draw in all these voters that Republicans wouldn't ordinarily get. No, it's that the Democratic Party has been weird and funky and

getting weirder and funkier over the last 10 years. And that's driven a lot of people away to the point where they'll vote for someone, even Donald Trump, rather than cast their ballots for someone like Kamala Harris. It's alienation from the Democratic Party that's driving this, because there's not confidence that the Democratic Party is actually going to deliver the goods for ordinary people. There's a sense that what the Democratic Party is actually going to deliver the goods for ordinary people. There's a sense that what the Democratic Party is actually focused on is a bunch of niche cultural stuff that most Americans actually disagree with the Democrats about. You talk in your book, in the first several pages, about an essentially academic decision

you made. You're a sociologist. You're rather new in the field. And this is your first book. And it is the product of a decision not to do the sort of narrow focus, highly academic, in-group rebuttals to analysis of someone's paper from 1972. And instead, you decided to do big sociology about the current moment in American culture. How's that working out for you? So far, so good. I mean, I will say it was an interesting process to go on the academic job market with this book as the primary thing that I was talking about. I did end up with a tenure line job, but it's not in a sociology department. So, you know, that's maybe something to note. But in general, the reception to the book has been

positive and I wouldn't do it any other way. I mean, there's this kind of lie that the people who play it safe tell themselves which run something like this basically i'm going to keep my head down and my tail between my legs and only do conventional small projects and stuff until i get tenure and then once i get tenure pew pew pew then i'm going to really you, let my freak flag fly or whatever. But like, the thing about it is, if you spent four years in undergrad, keeping your head down and your tail between your legs and doing narrow, unambitious projects, and then another six years in the PhD program, and then another six years on the tenure track, doing this kind of stuff, you're talking at the

end of this process, nearly two decades of keeping your head down and your tail between your legs and doing narrow, unambitious projects. By the time that whole process is done, you're no longer the kind of person who goes pew, pew, pew. You're the kind of person who keeps her head down and your tail between your legs. And probably if you're advising undergrads or graduate students, you're going to advise them to do the same thing because it worked out for you. Of course, what you're not seeing is all the other people who also kept their head down and their tail between their legs and didn't get a job, which is the modal outcome. So in my case, I just decided, look, I'm just going to be the kind of scholar I want to be and do the kind of projects that I want

to do. And if that's not compatible with doing something in higher ed, then I'll just do something else with my life. It's not like all I've wanted to be all my life was a college professor. In fact, a big struggle of mine has been coming to understand myself as an intellectual and not understand that in a pejorative way. Like in the context in which I grew up, if someone called you an intellectual, they weren't paying you a compliment. context in which I grew up, if someone called you an intellectual, they weren't paying you a compliment. And so, yeah, you know, so I just wanted to do the kind of work that I found value in and that I found interesting. And I hope that other people would find it interesting too. But if they didn't, and if they wanted to, you know, analyze me in some way for doing this kind of work

and I couldn't get an academic job or whatever, I'd just do something else with my life. So it goes. It's interesting, the notion that if you work hard to fly below the radar, at some point the radar won't be able to find you. It makes me think of Aristotle. Character is defined by habitual action. And something Wynton Marsalis says, which is what you do is what you will do. If you practice, you're going to practice. If you complain, you're going to complain.

Rather than fitting to the context, the context is just going to have to fit to you. And I have to admit, I admire that. It's a tough book to read. First of all, it's quite academic in style. And secondly, it makes me feel bad about me and my friends. But that's why I decided to have you on and to recommend that people check the book out. Musa Elgarbi, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. Thank you so much for having me. This is a real fun conversation. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Paul Wells Show.

The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica and supported by McGill University's Max Bell School of Public Policy. My producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producer is Stuart Cox. Laura Reguer is Antica's head of audio. Kevin Bright wrote the theme music and Andy Milne arranged Kevin's tune

for the closing theme. If you subscribe to my Substack, you can get bonus content for this show, as well as access to my newsletter. You can do all of that at paulwells.substack.com. If you're enjoying this show, give us a good rating on your podcast app. It helps spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday. dot com. If you're enjoying this show, give us a good rating on your podcast app. It helps spread the word. We'll be back next Wednesday.