We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite

by Musa al-Gharbi

How a new “woke” elite uses the language of social justice to gain more power and status—without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged

Society has never been more egalitarian—in theory. Prejudice is taboo, and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite—the symbolic capitalists. In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of antiracist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes. Their dominant ideology is “wokeness” and, while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged.

We Have Never Been Woke details how the language of social justice is increasingly used to justify this elite—and to portray the losers in the knowledge economy as deserving their lot because they think or say the “wrong” things about race, gender, and sexuality. Al-Gharbi’s point is not to accuse symbolic capitalists of hypocrisy or cynicism. Rather, he examines how their genuine beliefs prevent them from recognizing how they contribute to social problems—or how their actions regularly provoke backlash against the social justice causes they champion.

A powerful critique, We Have Never Been Woke reveals that only by challenging this elite’s self-serving narratives can we hope to address social and economic inequality effectively.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, Audiobook, Cultural, History, Race

433 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 8, 2024

Reviews

[mark monday · Rating 2 out of 5]

synopsis: financially comfortable Democrats (the "new elite" who are in the upper 20% of earners) think that they're woke, but they're not; this is because this sort of liberal is actually a hypocrite who lives up their own ass.

There's a particular tension in this book that is never addressed successfully: does the author think that wokeism is a good thing? al-Gharbi does make clear that his intentions are not to weigh in on whether wokeism is right or wrong. But this is, as the kids say, a problematic perspective. Particularly when the New Elite seldom proclaim that they are woke or even that they are identitarian (identitarianism being the foundation of wokeism). An analogy may be in order... let's say there's a book called We Have Never Been Fascist; its purpose is to illustrate how MAGA adherents are not genuinely fascist. Which, of course, would be a good thing. And quite different from a book about MAGA called We Have Never Been Conservative (conservatism being an ideology that is not automatically negative in the way that fascism is).

Of course this conundrum may entirely be in my own biased head, as I'm fairly anti-woke; I consider 'woke' to be a handy word that often describes a particularly illiberal, tribalistic, othering form of identitarianism. My impression is that al-Gharbi thinks similarly. This made for a rather intellectually incoherent book - despite the author saying, rather delicately, that he is not here to judge wokeism.

ANYWAY

This took me forever to read - over 3 months! Ideally this would have been read if the Democrats had won this year, because the book eviscerates them. I may have been more sympathetic to its viewpoints and criticisms if they were actually in power. But seeing how the current administration is performing (ugh), the book just left a bad taste in my mouth whenever I read it. He thinks the Democrats are bad... I wonder what he's thinking now. And so I began to avoid this book. It just seemed... unfair? And predicated on the idea that Democrats the New Elite AKA "Symbolic Capitalists" are basically the root of all of America's problems.

In general, I love books that criticize the Left - even though I often lean progressive (although not a Democrat, I'm an independent) - because I see so much room for improvement for "my side." The author himself is very much a progressive. But he paints the Democrats with such broad strokes: he sees all middle and upper-middle class Democrats as basically worthless, toxic hypocrites. I just don't believe in that kind of binary thinking. I don't dismiss all Republicans as bad and I'm not going to dismiss all Democrats either. I hate that kind of thinking, the turning of an entire group of people into The Enemy. I like critical sociopolitical books but I prefer it if they view their subjects as complex, like all humans are, regardless of their politics. But this book is a one-sided polemic in all ways.

Still, the book does make many, many interesting points...


Notes

- A central concept in the book is that of the "symbolic capitalist." The symbolic capitalist uses cultural, academic, or political capital to achieve status, power, influence, and/or financial benefits. They also weaponize "totemic capital" - which al-Gharbi defines as the ability to wield authority based on a "victimized" identity (e.g. woman, LGBT, person of color, disabled). Symbolic capitalists are "professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstractions (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services). For instance, people who work in fields like education, science, tech, finance, media, law, consulting, administration, and public policy are overwhelmingly symbolic capitalists." Per al-Gharbi, wokeism is almost exclusively popular among symbolic capitalists/the New Elite.

To that last point: LOL! I think al-Gharbi may need to extend his social circle a bit. Wokeism certainly does have some popularity among those who aren't in the top 20% of earners. Musa, come visit the social services agency where I work. Everyone there is woke, from the HR Director (who is arguably a member of the New Elite) to the direct service workers who are the majority of staff (and who are decidedly not in the upper 20%). Or maybe visit certain non-Ivy League colleges and talk to some students...

- Apparently, Peter Turchin's idea of "elite overproduction" is now commonly accepted as true. It certainly appears to be taken as a given in this book. (I've also seen it referenced as a given in various sociopolitical articles.) After reading Yascha Mounk's and Francis Fukuyama's respective takedowns of the theory, I figured it was still a controversial concept. Guess not! I'm glad about that.

- It was interesting to read the author's opinion that the 'Great Awokening' started with the Occupy Wall Street movement. A surprising assertion, as Occupy is commonly seen as a class-based progressive movement rather than an identitarian or woke movement. But al-Gharbi notes that the movement was primarily midcareer professionals who were majority white, disproportionately female, extremely well educated. Only a quarter of this movement came from blue collar, service, or retail jobs.

- "Black-white income disparities in 2016 were roughly identical to what they were in 1968"

- Per al-Gharbi, Symbolic Capitalists offload chores onto workers who are primarily low-income, from communities of color, often immigrants, and always underpaid. This affords them more time for 'personal growth', leisure, and making money. al-Gharbi specifically calls out domestic responsibilities like tending to children, preparing meals, cleaning the home, caring for the sick and elderly, tending to pets; he also calls out the use of purveyors of certain goods and services (per al-Gharbi, "disposable labor"), such as Amazon, Uber and Lyft, DoorDash and Grubhub, fitpros (fitness professionals), and purveyors of artisanal goods. The class-first progressive in al-Gharbi really comes out in this section as he extensively documents just how poorly paid and exploited these workers can be.

- "Within the symbolic economy, the possession of a degree (and where it is from) shapes which voices are deemed worth listening to or taking seriously; which candidates for a position are worth considering; and who has access to institutions of cultural or political influence as bureaucrats, politicians, teachers, journalists, researchers, artists and entertainers, and so on. Indeed, even religious leaders are increasingly expected to be credentialed"

- "...the regions symbolic capitalists dominate also happen to be the most unequal places in the United States - with an ever-growing share of denizens classifying as either extremely well off or impoverished." ... "despite having more discretionary income at their disposal than most, the relatively well off in symbolic economy hubs tend to be less likely to make charitable donations than other Americans."

- the power of 'totemic capital' (per my first note) explains why there have been so many examples of individuals who pretend to be a minority race in order to gain clout.

- "Contemporary elites demonstrate their worthiness - that they are the kind of people who belong among the Google, New York Times, and Ivy League crowd - by rhetorically (purely rhetorically) disassociating from their privilege. Conspicuous antiracism, feminism, and so on have become status markers among urban, highly educated elites... these professions of privilege are almost exclusively carried out by elites, and are virtually never accompanied by any costly attempts to actually shed their privilege."

- "...it is relatively well-off, highly educated, liberal whites who tend to be among the most zealous in identifying and prosecuting these new forms of 'racism.' Indeed... white elites play an outsize role in setting the agenda for contemporary antiracism..."

I'm going to have to strongly disagree here with that 'white' part. Whites may indeed have been the majority of, say, Robin DiAngelo followers (gross), back when she had actual influence. They are the majority of the population, so it follows that they are the majority of woke voices... but more importantly, he is letting woke non-whites off the hook way too easily. He's undercounting the numbers. I've seen the behavior he describes earlier in this section (seeing racism as endemic, microaggressions = actual harm, etc., basically all the hysterical woke bs) come from all the colors of the race rainbow. Or maybe I just live and work in a more racially diverse social and professional milieu than he does? But I don't think that's the actual case. There are plenty of examples out there, from published writers to DEI consultants to the woke cultists posting on Twitter circa 2012-2022. This sort of nonsense was once popular with all the races. And not just the so-called elite!

- I'm happy to see that al-Gharbi also loathes the terms "BIPOC" and "Latinx." And that he sees land acknowledgements as laughably performative. Totally with him on all of that. But this also is a reminder of my suspicion that he thinks 'woke = bad.' Which again calls into question his whole thesis. If the purpose of the book is to show that the New Elite/symbolic capitalists/financially comfortable Democrats aren't actually woke... isn't that a good thing? It does make them hypocrites, I suppose, if they are espousing woke ideology while not actually believing in it. But hell, hypocrisy is a part of the human condition (*sad lol*)... and not just for symbolic capitalists.

- "This is what Great Awokenings are fundamentally 'about': frustrated erstwhile elites condemning the social order that failed them and jockeying to secure the position they feel they 'deserve.' ... Critically none of this entails that symbolic capitalists are cynical or insincere in their professed commitments to social justice. We tend to be true believers. However, these beliefs are rarely translated into behavioral changes or reallocations of material resources... in reality symbolic capitalists are, themselves, among the primary beneficiaries of contemporary inequalities. And we don't just passively benefit. We actively exploit, exacerbate, and reinforce the very stratification that we are pledged to abolish... This is not to say that symbolic capitalists are completely unaware of the dissonance between our rhetoric and our lifestyles, behaviors, or social position. We are often self-critical. However, we also believe that we're more worthy of being elites than just about anyone else. Power, wealth, and resources are better in our hands than most others'... That's the argument of the book in a nutshell."



I've suddenly realized that I would have appreciated this book a lot more if it had been titled We Have Never Been Class- and Economics-Based Progressives, We're Actually Just Your Basic Center-Left Democrats Who Talk Like We're Socialists, Secretly Love Neoliberalism, And Just Want To Be Comfortable In Life, I Mean, Is That So Bad? But I guess that title doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

[Sanjida · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wicked, as in cruel, book about elite hypocrisy. This is a roast. If you are the type of person who reads reviews on Goodreads, chances are, he's roasting you. I kind of loved it, even when I thought he was overgeneralizing and not playing fair. (I mean, not fair to me, because I'm not like that, even though I totally am, lol).

The idea is that symbolic capitalists, as Al-Gharbi calls them, aka the professional managerial class aka liberal elites, are a culture unto themselves, unrepresentative of their race or gender or etc. This overlaps with other recent critiques of the upper middle class offered in Dream Hoarders (Richard Reeves), Elite Capture (Taiwo), and Poverty by America (Desmond), but Al-Gharbi focuses much more on "wokeness" as a substitute for justice . His socio-anthropological ribbing takes no prisoners. There is something here to offend everyone. Need I add a trigger warning? 😄

But where's the lie? He's right. And if we want to figure out how to put the brakes on what happened in the US earlier this month, we need to be willing to look at these truths.

[Matt Berkowitz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book on wokeness. What does this one have to offer? A lot, but the book is bloated with unnecessary material that doesn’t necessarily serve its main thesis. Despite that, it’s quite an interesting, intriguing read.

In al-Gharbi’s words, “[a] core argument of this book is that wokeness has become key a source of cultural capital among contemporary elites—especially among symbolic capitalists” (p. 35). By symbolic capitalists—which is borrowed from French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—he means those who work in the knowledge economy, whose value lies in non-material resources that give them social status. Bourdieu breaks symbolic capital into three types: cultural, academic, and political. By “wokeness”, al-Gharbi admirably is able to define what he thinks people mean by it without casting a favourable or pejorative value judgment on it. In al-Gharbi’s own words,

“[f]or instance: trans-inclusive feminism. People across the spectrum would likely find it uncontroversial to assert that someone who is woke is a trans-inclusive feminist—and that someone who is not a feminist or is not trans-inclusive would generally not be considered ‘woke.’ Several other such examples could be proliferated. For instance: [i]dentification as an ‘ally’ with respect to antiracism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, and environmentalism—and an understanding of these struggles as deeply interconnected with one another; [a]n aesthetic embrace of diversity and inclusion that extends to honoring and accommodating trauma and disability alongside various demographic characteristics; [a] focus on identity, subjectivity, and lived experience—and on validating the expressed identities and lived experiences of oneself and others” (p. 40); and many other examples. I think he nails this in a way that both those who identify more closely with the “woke” and those who identify more as “anti-woke” would both be able to agree that these examples characterize the “woke”.

He then points out that those most likely to espouse woke beliefs are those most likely to become symbolic capitalists: educated, affluent white liberals. Interestingly, al-Gharbi thinks the woke and anti-woke have much in common: “In much the same way as the behaviors of ‘woke’ elites suggest an implicit belief that symbolic gestures are necessary and sufficient to fulfill their social justice obligations, the anti-woke behave as if condemning, mocking, or deriding wokeness somehow obviates the need for further action on their part in pursuit of the social justice goals they ostensibly endorse” (p. 51). This seems like an astute observation, but I dispute his subsequent point, that the woke and anti-woke “actually subscribe to the same fundamental worldview as those who are woke. They are obsessed with wokeness and view it as dangerous precisely because they share the mainstream symbolic capitalist conviction that symbols, rhetoric, and beliefs are very important.” While it’s true that they could both be classified as symbolic capitalists, they fundamentally disagree about which symbols and values ought to be valorized in the societal discourse.

Chapter 2 defends an interesting explanatory hypothesis for why wokeness became ascendant—i.e., the “Great Awokening”—starting around 2014, which I will get to in a moment. al-Gharbi starts by making the empirical case for the ascendancy of wokeness, documenting rapidly growing polarization starting in the early 2010s. But rather than simply concentrate on polarization between Democrats and Republicans, he focuses on polarization between highly educated white liberals and everyone else.

To explain the most recent Great Awokening, al-Gharbi describes three prior Awokenings that he dates as having occurred in the 1930s, 1960s, and late 1980s. To summarize, al-Gharbi attributes Awokenings to “elite overproduction”: when more people get accredited at post-secondary institutions than there are jobs to be filled by such credentialed graduates. Likewise, he contends that Awokenings tend to collapse when enough of these frustrated aspirants are integrated back into some desirous role. He summarizes the effects of the Great Awokenings thusly: “Here the reader may wonder, even if the story seems bleak in looking at laws or socioeconomic statistics, surely the Awokenings are responsible for changing public attitudes, right? There are two key things to note in response to this question. First, it is not clear that changing discourse or attitudes actually matter if they don’t manifest ‘in the world’ via beneficial changes in behaviors, relationships, policies, or allocations of resources. In any case, it is empirically unclear that the previous Awokenings did have any broad-based and long-term effect on public attitudes—let alone any positive effects” (p. 115).

Plenty of empirical support from various sources is supplied to substantiate this thesis. For example, al-Gharbi cites the oversupply of college graduates relative to high-skill, degree-required jobs, with around twice as many graduates as available positions. He provides specific examples of law and journalism graduates struggling with job placement and facing lower starting salaries post-2008, despite significant debt accrued for their education. And he claims there was a proliferation of ‘bullshit jobs’ in the 1990s and 2000s, as employers reclassified roles to require degrees, serving as a buffer for this elite surplus without necessarily increasing meaningful high-status positions.

al-Gharbi also traces the growing disillusionment with science—and institutional distrust in general—on the right, and thus the bifurcation of trust between the left and right (and Democrats and Republicans) to the post-Awokening periods. Consequently, al-Gharbi notes the establishment of the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundations after the second Awokening as alternative knowledge production institutions of the right.

Chapter 3 takes a turn for the worse, in what I consider to be a largely economically illiterate chapter. al-Gharbi discusses the supposed exploitation of employees of Amazon, meal delivery services (DoorDash, UberEats), and ride share apps (Uber, Lyft), claiming that these economies exist purely for the benefit of symbolic capitalists at the expense of these poor employees, who are largely minorities and immigrants (many of whom are undocumented, as al-Gharbi points out). While there is clearly some truth to this rather anti-capitalist critique, employees ultimately choose whether or not to opt in to these sectors, and if the conditions are net negative, they can seek employment elsewhere.

On the contrary, he accurately criticizes the NIMBYism of symbolic capitalists regarding housing, which drives up housing costs and drives out the poor and middle-class. He returns to this subject in the subsequent chapter when discussing contradictions regarding what symbolic capitalist/progressives claim they want and how they behave (e.g., Californians voting against building more homeless shelters for the main unhoused people in tent encampments).

The rest of the chapter documents very interesting socioeconomic trends that allegedly serve to perpetuate symbolic capitalists’ positions of status in knowledge economies. For example, young media interns will work for free at first in order to build up a reputation, something only those from wealthier backgrounds can manage—which serves to raise barriers for the non-elite (disproportionately minorities) to enter in such professions.

As al-Gharbi concludes, in principle, symbolic capitalists support antiracism and feminism (at least, certain definitions of those things), LGBQT rights, the environment, etc., but our actions often signify otherwise, especially if it costs us.

Chapter 5 carries on by discussing the strange appeal “for cultural elites to not merely present themselves as concerned with the plight of the less fortunate but to represent themselves as the less fortunate” (p. 219); that is, the rise in victimhood culture (as discussed in an eponymous book by Campbell & Manning). The chapter traces this shift to changes in how trauma and victimization have transformed from being something experienced temporarily to a lasting identity, with social and moral status attached to victimhood. This victimhood—which al-Gharbi calls “totemic capital” (akin to Bourdieu’s symbolic capital)—is often viewed through the lens of collective historical trauma, emphasizing sensitivity to harm, which must be remedied by third-party intervention.

The book is quite bloated and could easily have been trimmed down by half. Most of the extra content is interesting background context but doesn’t really support the main thesis (about elite overproduction explaining Awokenings), which is mostly relegated to the first two chapters. The rest is quite interesting but often somewhat meandering, tangential analysis and discussion of various socioeconomic and cultural trends.

Quite an interesting read overall.

[Morgan Schulman · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a white cishet female social worker with two masters degrees and a six figure income, I am definitely part of the problem. I’m really glad I was able to push aside my own preconceived thinking and read this book. It was not always easy, but I see the truth in it and I wouldn’t encourage anyone else in my category to do the same.

[Jules · Rating 1 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book, I really did. I agree with some of al-Gharbi's overall critiques about performative wokeness. However, I found that he assumed a great deal about his subjects, sometimes to the extent of being wrong, condescending, or straight up sexist.

For example, he claims that women are driving the phenomenon of elites marrying elites because women want a man with a higher salary than them; only later does he admit that *men* want a woman with less education and a lower salary. Why put all the blame on women? He also argues that women are becoming bisexual because their prospects for elite men are so bleak, which, as a bisexual woman, I find deeply patronizing and offensive. He gives a brief cop-out that this is unconscious, blah blah blah (so even more patronizing), but you don't have sexual dreams about someone because of their earning potential.

He also continuously argues that symbolic capitalists cling to their jobs for status, without even considering the fact that many non-symbolic-capitalist jobs are shit jobs - bad working conditions, low pay, no benefits, and mind-numbingly boring. Yeah, you do them if you have to, but they wear you down.

I also found him to be deliberately obtuse sometimes. At times he would rightly be critiquing hypocrisy, but then he would talk about a slogan and completely remove all nuance from a conversation, thereby making it easier to critique, which is just sloppy scholarship. For example, he argued that people who say, "Trans women are women" can't really mean that because they're not sexually attracted to trans women like they are to cis women. Except that "Trans women are women" is a slogan, and slogans are inherently stripped of nuance, and having a 5 min conversation with an LGBTQ activist would allow you to understand the nuance of the situation.

I honestly stopped reading about halfway through when he was critiquing the way science is done. It's not that I don't think scientific institutions should be critiqued, but instead that he was mischaracterizing the problems. He argues that science is best done when in collaboration with industry, which is a bizarre claim that he doesn't support with concrete examples (his concrete examples become thinner and thinner as the book goes on, until he just says things without elaborating on them at all midway through the book). He does not mention publish-or-perish, the current required fast pace of research, predatory journals, etc. Instead the problem, according to him, is that scientists are just too obsessed with status.

Overall, I think al-Gharbi tried to do too much, to cover too much, and he got out of his depth. He assumed his narrative was the one unifying narrative that explained everything that's happened in the last 75 years, which of course it's not because nothing has that much explanatory power. This overreaching made what could have been a tightly argued critique into something relatively useless.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Intellectuals have a much greater than average capacity to transform their spontaneous sociology, their self-interested vision of the social world, into the appearance of a scientific sociology.
(Pierre Bourdieu, quoted on p. 261)

They do. And Musa al-Gharbi is one of them.

This book was disappointing. I hoped it would be worth grappling with, and I do think it will challenge any reader regardless of political persuasion. Perhaps it’s worth reading merely to argue with. But unfortunately it has a single note, repeated over and over with slight variation, and after a while this note grates enough to start drowning out what good points al-Gharbi does have.

You’d think I’d cheer at least when al-Gharbi takes on those I have a problem with, those the book ostensibly focuses on who preach “woke” ideology with religious zealotry but little material impact on improving the world. But even here his attacks are best described as boring. He’s trying to sell his ideas as radical insights when they are not.

Al-Gharbi’s central thesis is that people are self-interested. This is true, and it’s worth analyzing the consequences of this, but it’s hardly a novel insight, and he does seem to take this cynical approach too far. Also, he’s very focused on a particular class of people, which he calls “symbolic capitalists”, but he’s focused on a particular incarnation of them that seems extremely heavily influenced by his personal experience at Columbia in New York City. Hardly representative of anything, and certainly not of symbolic capitalists broadly.

Do symbolic capitalists behave in ways that are inconsistent with their espoused views, such as saying that they support the working class and then ordering things on Amazon Prime and supporting a system that’s inhumane to underpaid workers? Sure, sometimes! Do red state non-college-educated working folks behave in ways that are inconsistent with their espoused views, such as saying how much they value American factory jobs and then going to Walmart to buy clothing made in Bangladesh? Sure, sometimes! Symbolic capitalists have lifestyles heavily dependent on poorly compensated people (p. 146), but so does everyone else in modern America.

Al-Gharbi dismisses “symbolic” protests like the March for Science and the Women’s March, ignoring the protests about immigration policy during the first Trump presidency. These protests and public pressure resulted in reversing or scaling back much of what had been attempted, generally benefitting people who weren’t even in the US at the time of the protests. They certainly didn’t benefit white, American-born, upper-middle class “symbolic capitalists”.

What is al-Gharbi’s urgency in calling out symbolic capitalists in particular, then? Is it because they are preachy and moralizing, and he wants to reveal their feet of clay? Fine, but the Woke Left hardly has a monopoly on preaching and moralizing, and it’s hardly news that preachy people often fall short of the values they claim. As John Warner recently noted, “we already knew… that the interests in diversity, equity and inclusion in elite spaces were a virtue-signaling scrim over the much less savory reality of wealth and exclusion” ( https://www.insidehighered.com/opinio... ). And no Social Justice Warriors are going to be swayed by al-Gharbi’s argument. This is a segment of the population who loves the No True Scotsman fallacy, to the point that it’s almost a rite of passage for new Warriors to find ways in which the previous Warriors were “problematic”.

The TV show The Good Place offers some insight into this modern dilemma of such complex and long chains of implications from our actions. We learn that for a long time now everyone has been sent to the Bad Place, even if we try hard to be good, simply because of how complicated and interconnected the modern world is. Even well-educated people can’t grasp more than a small fraction its operation. Say you want to protect the environment, and you’ve heard that organic products and plant-based foods are important for that. You want to help poor people in other countries, and you’ve heard that Fair Trade helps with that. You want to help the working class in your own city, and you’ve heard that buying local helps with that. Well, once you’ve bought your organic fair trade soy latte from a local coffee house, al-Gharbi will be waiting at your table to tell you why every decision you just made is horrible for the people you wanted to help. But the truth is that getting a non-organic cow milk latte from Starbucks or coffee from a gas station isn’t any better for any of these causes. An educated person might carefully research one aspect, such as the carbon output per ounce of soy milk vs. cow milk, and come to a definite conclusion, but the overall situation is too complex and has too many parameters to truly optimize over. And even an optimal solution isn’t morally perfect.

Al-Gharbi thinks “symbolic capitalists” are terrible and the root of essentially all problems in our society. A key factor in this, in his telling, is college education, which makes people less creative, less entrepreneurial, less likely to make breakthroughs, and more likely to support policies that harm our society, all while they hypocritically proclaim to support egalitarianism, environmentalism, democracy, and so on.

Does al-Gharbi actually believe this? As his rant went on and on, it became increasingly difficult for me to believe that he does. After all, why would someone who believed that college education was harmful choose a career as… a college professor?

He also lumps all symbolic capitalists together. Early childhood educator at a public school or private equity manager? No difference! Struggling extra or Hollywood megaproducer? Sounds pretty similar! Public defender or top corporate law specialist? Looks the same to me! It’s particularly weird because he repeatedly claims that symbolic capitalists, including lawyers and tech workers, “continue to be explicitly legitimized on the basis of their altruism” (p. 65) and justify our prestige with “claims that we serve the common good” (p. 219). I’ve never heard anyone talking about those selfless, salt-of-the-earth software engineers that are the real America, nor am I familiar with a trope of lawyers as such good folks who are only it in to help others.

Some symbolic capitalists do urge policies that they say will help the less fortunate. Al-Gharbi dismisses all this, which seems too hasty. For example, the “fight for 15” effort to raise the minimum wage had real successes, and these success solely benefitted low-income workers, and at the expense of the symbolic capitalists. This was a fight to raise the wages of people who were exclusively not symbolic capitalists, funded by increased prices rather than taxes on the superrich. 10 states and several major cities substantially increased minimum wages. Al-Gharbi complains about poor restaurant workers who “often earn less than the minimum wage (even after tips)” (p. 157), failing to point out that the states where this is true are Alabama, Arkansa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, Wyoming, etc., all fitting the trend of being states very much not under any influence from those darned symbolic capitalists. Meanwhile in states like California, Oregon, and Washington, all workers get the same minimum wage, and in all three states it’s more than twice the federal minimum wage.

Al-Gharbi aggressively contrasts “symbolic capitalists” with “normies”, repeatedly using this term to suggest that only those who work with things rather than symbols are “normal”. Except goods-producing jobs are a small minority of jobs in the US these days. Only 13.4% of jobs are in goods-producing fields such as manufacturing, construction, agriculture, fishing, and so on. There are more people working in financial services than in construction. https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employ...

Are symbolic capitalists “among the primary beneficiaries of the environmental devastation they conspicuously condemn” (p 305)? Sure, insofar as all Americans are. But the average resident of NYC emits half as many greenhouse gasses as the average American. Living in cities is far less environmentally impactful than living in sprawl, as are “symbolic capitalist” modes of transportation such as walking, cycling, public transportation, or driving EVs or hybrids. Not a lot of symbolic capitalists driving jacked-up diesel trucks getting 10 mpg.

Continuing his misguided attacks, al-Gharbi goes after symbolic capitalists who live in cities supported by those with low wages (p. 157). San Francisco, a city with higher poverty rates than most, had 10.4% of its population below poverty level in 2022 ( https://www.sf.gov/data--poverty-san-... ) while the US national average was 11.5% ( https://www.census.gov/library/public... ). Meanwhile, the 10 poorest counties in the US, all with poverty rates over 40%, are about as far as you can get from symbolic capitalist hubs, in places like rural South Dakota ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewde... ).

You may be surprised to find that al-Gharbi is a fan of Michel Foucault (p. 261), as well as standpoint epistemology and critical theory (p. 300). Those are the bases of wokeness, as painstakingly detailed by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Ah, but you see, according to al-Gharbi any wokeness based on French theory is as a result of those works being “poorly translated” or “misinterpreted” (p. 308). Foucault has not failed you; you have failed Foucault! You can definitely see al-Gharbi interested mostly in power structures and adopting the tools of the woke if not their conclusions. You’ll be less surprised that al-Gharbi likes Bruno Latour (p. 22), given Latour’s famous We Have Never Been Modern, but any scientist will be immediately wary of al-Gharbi as a result (with good reason).

For all the profound problems with symbolic capitalists and their social order, wouldn’t it be far worse if their opponents had more influence over American society? (p. 309)

Two months into the second Trump presidency, I can assure you that it absolutely would be. Al-Gharbi didn’t want to write a book about that, and fine, whatever. Write books about what you want to write about. But if you want to claim you’re writing a book about why America is broken and you don’t bother with Trumpers at all… well, I think you’ve failed.

Good Points (with Caveats):

There is blame to spread around:
Al-Gharbi points out that our problems are not all the fault of the billionaires or even the 1%. Those in the top 10% or even 20% have a lot of influence on how things work in our society. But to suggest that problems are really the fault of the 20% because they’re the ones who make everything roll along is like blaming the waiter when the chef screws up a dish.

Many policies of the woke left are counterproductive:
Not a new point, but an important one: diversity training generally backfires (p. 109). And while having diverse teams is good, it’s not possible to have diverse individuals. Plus, stop trying to make the one black person a representative for their entire race, or to claim that the promotion of the one Latina is a win for all Latinas.

It’s a genuine problem that racial minorities are leaving the Democratic Party, as are working-class people, to the point that the strongest constituency for the Democrats is the college educated (p. 70). It is possible that part of this is people feeling alienated from the Woke Left.

The reasons for this are many, but to take one example, the term “Latinx” is not helpful with Latinos and Latinas. In fact many of them view the term very negatively, while only 3% of them use it themselves. And indeed this group did swing substantially to the Republicans when voting in 2024.

Another possible reason is that the Woke Left has become very concerned with poverty only when it affects particular minorities, as opposed to, say, white people (p. 17). See Bernie Sanders stumbling in 2016.

We’ve been obsessed with wokeness before:
This was an interesting part of the book to me. He discusses previous similar waves of wokeness (p. 80), and I think this is history worth getting into. However, we should not over-analogize with the previous situations.

The right wing is coming for your institutions:

Right-aligned symbolic capitalists and their allies paint themselves as populists who will restore order, sanity, and dignity to the country and its institutions—or, that failing, defund, dismantle, and disempower them. (p. 121)

Yep, the dismantling is happen as I write this.

Random Weird Problems with This Book:

Scholarship and forecasting:
Al-Gharbi claims that experts are worse at forecasting than laymen “especially with respect to their areas of expertise” (p. 200). Here he cites Tetlock’s interesting work on superforecasting, but al-Gharbi completely misrepresents it. The average lay person is very bad at forecasting. There are a tiny number of “superforecasters” who are good at forecasting events, and in the realm of politics they do better than most trained analysts. The reasons why they do better are interesting and explained at length in Rationality. Needless to say it supports none of al-Gharbi’s claims, and it’s not true in areas where detailed technical knowledge is needed to understand the issues.

He claims, without any supporting evidence, that in science “revolutionary discoveries have often been stumbled on by practitioners, amateurs, or outsiders of a field” (p 208). Note that al-Gharbi is not a historian of science, and citing Paul Feyerabend (provocateur, iconoclast, and also not a historian of science) doesn’t help.

In physics and astronomy, the most significant breakthroughs there are associated with names like Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, Boltzmann, Planck, Einstein, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Chandrasekhar, Hawking, Penrose, etc. Something every single one of them has in common is that they were complete masters of the science of their day, highly educated in establishment schools prior to making their immense breakthroughs. Thinking of other fields, the same can be said of everyone from Leonhard Euler to Charles Darwin to Linus Pauling. Such education is even more important today; we now know a lot about the world, and you can’t come up with better theories if you don’t understand the ones we have today.

Does al-Gharbi have any good point here? Yes. He notes the incentives for scholars to work in ways that will be embraced by peers rather than going bold new directions (p. 208), but as usual he gives his actual good point short shrift and surrounds it with nonsense.

Contingent faculty at universities:
Al-Gharbi lumps university faculty in with centimillionaires as symbolic capitalist “elites”. He is aware that “the vast majority of people who were hired as faculty in any capacity were hired on a contingent basis—with much lower pay, benefits, job security, and future prospects” (p. 95), but ignores their circumstances. He claims contingent faculty make (barely) more than the average American (pp. 144–145; I guess we’re now indicting the top 50%?). But he conveniently excludes from his count the part-time faculty who make vastly less and who make up 70% of all contingent faculty ( https://www.aaup.org/article/data-sna... ). He also ignores that these folks—often working without benefits at near-poverty wages—start their careers 10–15 years later than the “normies” who didn’t go to college, and often have considerable debt.

Al-Gharbi’s limited familiarity with universities:

He says “many colleges and universities have nearly as many noninstructional staff as they have undergraduate students, and in some cases more” (p. 107). I agree that this is worth thinking about, but let’s actually think about it. He’s talking about a handful of the most elite and expensive private schools in the country, and even among this group, it’s only doctoral institutions for which this is true. Even places like Amherst and Williams have substantially more students than staff. So what’s going on? At doctoral institutions the undergrads are something of an afterthought. These schools often have many more graduate and professional students, not to mention armies of postdocs, technicians, clinicians, and so on. Such universities are institutions of research and/or major hospitals—they are not primarily there to educated undergrads. But al-Gharbi either doesn’t know this or knows it and is lying, because he attributes these numbers to “administrators to curate and manage diversity” (p. 80).

Your causes aren’t the right causes:
Al-Gharbi explicitly calls out Amnesty International for not working with “underserved communities” (p. 186). Right, that’s the problem with Gaza right now, it’s served too well.

In this way al-Gharbi echoes Ibram X. Kendi. It’s a comparison both would hate, but it’s true. They both criticize people for their causes not being the right causes.

Political polarization
Al-Gharbi suggests that the polarization in American politics has been driven by the rise of symbolic capitalists in the Democratic Party (p. 201). This ignores very basic political science, including the fact that the Republican Party moved substantially rightward well before the Democratic Party moved at all, as well as many other factors Why We're Polarized.

He finds it odd that groups like scientists and journalists affiliate far less with the Republican Party than they used to (p. 173), without bothering to look at how the modern Republican Party systematically attacks and delegitimizes science and the free press. This is a standard playbook for authoritarians, because they try to control or eliminate any group that could challenge their claims of truth. But apparently al-Gharbi thinks Maria Ressa should just have found the good side of the Duterte regime. Or maybe we should actually learn How to Stand Up to a Dictator.

“Erstwhile”:
Al-Gharbi, please look this word up in a dictionary.

[Anthony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've been reading Al-Gharbi online for a while and was really looking forward to this book, and it met or exceeded my expectations. I tend to agree with most of the points made but was still pushed into new ways of thinking about several issues. I also hope that even if I didn't agree with him I would still admire the rare blend of being level-headed and fair minded but also unflinching and provocative on very sensitive issues.

[Sergio Portesan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides a jarringly accurate description of symbolic capitalists — aka myself and many of my peers. Al-Gharbi puts to words my frustrations regarding the inconsistencies, paradoxes, and hypocrisy that I have noted in my experiences in higher education and the non-profit sector.

While some of the arguments were tough pills to swallow (wokeness is performative and doesn’t change anything, our lifestyles are made possible by the euphemised sacrifices of underpaid and exploited workers, we disproportionally benefit from DEI while couching it as wins toward progress despite the fact that it often harms minorities, Awokenings happen when there is elite overproduction and aspirational elites feel they are being held back from what’s rightfully theirs only to fizzle out once they’re satisfied, elites are not disrupters but rather the ultimate conformists, elites believe they’re representative of the populations when they’re actually their own idiosyncratic class, our positionality is dependent on inequality and inegalitarian outcomes, and the demonstrated disconnect between what we say we want and what we do/are willing to actually sacrifice), the analysis was on the nose and had great explanatory power.

Al-Gharbi’s argument is interdisciplinarily grounded in a wide range of sociology, philosophy, history, and political science, which he wields well to prove his points. While dense, it paints a damning picture that explains the outcome of the 2024 election and the culture wars.

His academic tone at times comes across as pretentious, with some unnecessarily erudite or antiquated word choices furthering that vibe. The book was a slow burn, with the first two chapters almost putting me off due to the above factors. Fortunately, once the framework was established, I found the analysis compelling and very astute.

I wish al-Gharbi had chosen a different term for symbolic capitalists, such as the “aspirational class” or “professional-managerial class,” especially as his conception of totemic capitalism could easily be confused with symbolic capitalism outside the context of his argument. I also found his use of quotations to be a bit inconsistent and bizarre (in particular with “normies”). I also wish that the chapters had been better broken down into more digestible sections, as 6-hour-long chapters required a degree of commitment (that was ultimately rewarded).

Despite my minor quibbles, I greatly enjoyed this book and was consistently wowed by how on the nose the analysis was, and the breadth of its explanatory power. I would give this 5 stars for the argument and accuracy, and 2.5 stars for the writing. I debated 5 stars, but decided to go with 4 since it was at times bogged down a bit too much by its academic tilt.

This book is one of the most thought-provoking of 2024, and should be required reading for everyone who fits the definition of a symbolic capitalist.

[Martin Riexinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book about and against "woke"?

Well, yes and perhaps the best one, because the author does not indulge in polemics but underpins his analysis with a lot of data. Not all aspects of his theoretical approach appear convincing, however, and I cannot agree with some of his assumptions. Therefore no *****

Al-Gharbi's main argument is that the current conglomerste of ideologies now often called woke results from the increase of the social class (I would say segment) which he calls "social capitalists", building on Bourdieu's concept of "social capital". The social capitalists who are concentrated in the media, education, the cultural sector but also the service industries dominate public discourse emphasizing "social justice" and identity.
Their lifestyle, however, belies them. They understand how to transform symbolical capital in material wealth. Consisting primarily of whites with a privileged background, and members of minorities hailing from a middle class background and often a minority within the minority, they have a lifestyle that depends on the exploitation of people from a lower background (not least migrants).* Their social codes serve as a mark of distinction that excludes others and they hold beliefs like "defund the police" that are detrimental to the interests of people with low incomes and educational prospects living in insecure areas.** The tendency to social conformism is according to him exacerbated by the dominance of women in the current "fourth awokening".*** Although privileged (in their jargon) many are tempted to present themselves as victims, in some spectacular cases (Warren, Dolezal) amounting to fraud.
In these respects the social capitalists have "never been woke".
Nonetheless al-Gharbi argues against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Concepts like intersectionality as formulated by Crenshaw can be useful intellectual tools to adress social injustice, given that they are not used as mark of distinction.

First on the last pages al-Gharbi discusses briefly in how far his observations on the US might have parallels in other Westrrn societies.

What I found less convincing:
- While I regard his recourse to Bourdieu inspiring, I am less convinced by references to figures like Chomsky and Nassim Taleb.
- The book is written in 2023/4. Al-Gharbi assumed that many business executives as well. I was always skeptical in this regard and considered respective statemts as expressions of political opportunism. Anticipating an election victory by Trump or reacting to flops (Hollywood) many companies scrapped their DEI programs in 2024.
- Everybody who has studied is a symbolic capitalist, also engineers (who according to him are strongly represented among the counter-woke).
- al-Gharbi underestimates the importance of ideas.
- and finally: Asian Americans who would outperform white social capitalists if strictly meritocratic principles were applied are hardly discussed.


* Housekeeping, hospitality.
** He does not use the term "luxury beliefs".
*** In the first chapter he draws parallels to its precursors in the 1930s, 1960s and 1980s.

[Elle VanGilder · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to start by saying that I agree with a majority of the sentiments expressed in this book: cultural elites & symbolic capitalists (of which I’ll admit I am one, PhD hopeful that I am) use “woke” language in order to bolster their sociocultural capital and status without actually engaging with actions to better the world. I think Musa’s methodology was sound and his thesis is one that challenges the reader (academic or not) to think about the own interactions with “wokeness” and more generally theory without practice. It likewise makes us examine the actions of those we hold in high regard: celebrities, politicians, etc etc. Two things lost me, though.

First of all: there were a lot of interesting but unnecessary “tangents” (per se). The inclusion of the HUGE chunk of the chapter that analyzing Amazon (et al: Uber, Door Dash, what have you) took up was interesting, sure, but so unnecessary to the chapter’s actual analysis. It could’ve been a paragraph or two max in order to bolster the argument; with how much it went on I just got lost in the sauce and forgot what the chapter was ACTUALLY about—totally took me out of the argument and into a different realm of thought.

Second of all: Musa is King of saying “So people (especially those WOMEN) who identify as queer (and especially WOMEN who identify as gender non-conforming and trans) are actually just saying it for the woke clout” and then tacking on a “but their identities are probably valid”. Like, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. Either stand on your claim that women who claim the moniker queer and AFABs who identify as trans are making it up for clout or take them out of your analysis entirely. There was just a simmering of misogyny, transphobia, and biphobia under all of the sections that brought up women and queer people (especially queer women) which made all of the insightful analysis in the section moot imo. At first I thought I was just being sensitive as a queer women (oh he’d hate that generalization, I know) reading it, but even in trying to set aside that discomfort (which I admit is never fully possible etc etc) I still found these sections way less useful and more done out of mean-spiritedness than others.

BUT OTHERWISE! Very good, very sound, very provocative for anyone in the “industry” although, as al-Gharbi admits, it doesn’t leave much in terms of “actionable solutions”.

[Umar Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll review this in my newsletter. This book is a must-read to understand our current moment. Musa says so many things I've been writing and blogging about for the last 25 years while adding in academic research, historical analysis, and theory. The contradictions and lack of authenticity of Symbolic Capitalists are very obvious and plain to see for anyone outside of that bubble. Someone like myself, who has always interacted with this demographic as an outsider, could analyze from a distance, and while Musa is now part of this class himself, his initial distance may have given him a vantage point.

He points to things that would be controversial for many to write. Human resources, DEI, and other governmental, nonprofit, and HR jobs are overwhelmingly held by women college grads (even though for most of these, a degree really isn't needed). How much of this is about an overproduction in degrees with fields that previously had limited job openings?

In the Black American community, top opportunities, jobs, and positions of societal and cultural importance are increasingly going to the wealthy, biracial, and immigrants and their kids. This divide is something people are just starting to talk about (example: is it a coincidence that neither Barack Obama nor Kamala Harris are descendants of American slaves?).

The university as the hub for Symbolic Capitalists and incubator (Woke Madrasaas l), but also doubling as a real estate developer, chief architect of gentrification, often pays staff at meager wages, and those in the orbit are reliant on low-paid employees and gig workers who are increasingly immigrant and can't afford to live in the proximity of the university.

The weaponization of identity and intersections of oppression in the pursuit of wealth and status climbing, centering identity in trauma and mental health issues, the fundamental unfairness of Tony West's gig economy, using ideas of white privilege to ignore the issues of working-class white Americans, and more. The sanctification of narcissism as self-care. So many issues covered.

In closing, a local connection. Musa mentions Mike Brown. As a St. Louisan, I immediately recognized that while money was flowing into St. Louis from nonprofits and the Big Left after the killing of Mike Brown, none of it was going to anyone like Mike Brown. A movement was being created to project the values and politics of the white urban gentry and donor class (symbolic capitalists), and in order to do that, college-educated Black activists with intersectional identities were enlisted. This would be replicated throughout America as gentrification driven by white Symbolic Capitalists created a population base to support Squadish non-white candidates whose election could then signify the love of diversity of the Symbolic Capitalists. A new Black, Muslim, Latino, leader etc. is now often the one selected by and espousing ideas popular with white Symbolic Capitalists.

[Ashwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The good parts were excellent. The bad parts were horrific.

The good:
- He articulates several ideas exceptionally well. I have my bias, because I have agreed with his ideas for a long time.
- It’s a critical book for many to read in the “symbolic professions”. It also articulates why people “ethnicize” themselves or hold obsessively to their unique minority identities. Thank goodness for that.
- It challenges me to be more self-critical, with more specificity. Two ideas that will stay:

1. How do my beliefs about social justice benefit my own life?
2. What aspects of my life are influenced by my own elite status?

The bad:
- He engages in what I can only call “citation porn”. There are many passages with a nauseating amount of sweeping statements, each having a single citation. None of those studies are adequately explained. He also acknowledges that typically, nobody bothers reading sociology studies and implies that they have little rigor as a result. Yet, he cites hundreds of them, distilling their results to a single vague sentence
- By golly the repetition. The book could have been cut in half. Also, you can tell the editor didn’t do their job. How many times are you going to end a list with “and so on” or refer to something as “parochial”?
- He’s self-aware that the book doesn’t provide solutions/suggestions on how to change behavior. It’s good that he’s self-aware, but that doesn’t mean it’s not still a problem. He lambasts his reader for 300+ pages and then says “now, dear reader, go forth and change everything!”. I found this to be ridiculous.


All that being said, I still think it’s well worth it to read, despite the flaws

[David Liu · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think if you're someone who cares about social justice issues, you must read this. You won't agree with all of it or think every point of argument is valid. It will make you uncomfortable. It'll make you angry. But you must read it.

I see negative reviews criticising Al-Gharbi for not writing a fair discussion that balances different point of views. I agree. He's criticised for being biased and overly rhetorical. I agree. I just don't think it's done in bad faith, as some people claimed. This book is meant to be provocative. It challenges what we believe about social justice movements. It critiques the readers of this book and the people that form our social networks.

Just as a critique of Christianity and its systems of exploitation is not necessarily a critique of Christian values of love and compassion, Al-Gharbi's critique of 'wokeness' is not a critique of anti-racism, feminism or inclusivity. In fact, the book champions intersectionality and challenges readers to question the overly simplistic classifications we typically assign to identity and victimhood.

Al-Gharbi describes modern society with the same framing that a historian/anthropologist would adopt when describing primitive tribes, and it reveals uncomfortable truths. The key message of We Have Never Been Woke isn't that "we shouldn't be woke", it's that "being woke is not enough"

[Darnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

My concern going in was that this would be another book cashing in on the culture war, pretending to have an innovative perspective while just regurgitating what one side wants to hear. Thankfully, it wasn't. The reason I follow Musa al-Ghari, even though he promotes his own material endlessly, is that he does provide takes I'm not reading elsewhere.

Having finished the book, my main concern is now that my positive reaction may be in part because it's telling me what I want to hear. I thought it was compelling and more rigorous than the usual for this field, but I've seen people say the same about some books I thought were terrible. How much am I influenced by my own biases here?

Five stars for having a real thesis, currently limited by uncertainty. I'll have to think about this more.

[Tim Preston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very perceptive book, about how the liberalism of the elite often fails to benefit, or even harms, the people it is supposed to help, although it allows the elite to 'look' caring and enlightened.

E.g. The risk of being 'cancelled' and losing one's job for a single politically incorrect comment is more likely to trip up someone who has worked their way up from poverty or unconventional home background. Someone born into the elite has probably learned from childhood what is and is not acceptable to say in academia, newsrooms and boardrooms, and is less likely to be caught out saying the wrong thing.

The section on the working conditions of distribution centre and delivery staff working for Amazon and other home delivery Apps, and the ruthless way they suck the blood out of smaller businesses who partner with them, is uncomfortable reading for those (most of us) unwilling to give up the convenience of using them. E.g. delivery drivers are most likely to be sent out into the darkest, coldest, wettest, most tempestuous, and therefore most dangerous, driving conditions, because that is when the rest of us are most likely to choose to stay at home, and order food and goods delivered. And if the delivery drivers have an accident, such lowly employees are unlikely, in the USA, to have health insurance or paid sick leave.

The reason I give this book 4 stars, not 5, is because it is so long, and has unmanageably long chapters. That was a particular problem for me listening to this as an Audiobook, as I do, in moments of insomnia. If I fall asleep, say, an hour into Chapter 3, it is hard to remember the next day where I was. It is much easier in Books divided into more chapters to remember that I had been a few minutes into Chapter 19; or whatever.

[Drew Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

In “We Have Never Been Woke,” Al-Gharbi presents a comprehensive view of a new class of elites, he dubs the “symbolic capitalists” - the people in society that work primarily in non-material professions with potential access to high financial or cultural capital. Al-Gharbi explores the apparent contradictions in this modern class, such as their professed commitment to equity and inclusion despite benefitting from exclusive and inherently unequal economic and social conditions.

This book is fundamentally a cultural critique, but Al-Gharbi takes care in treating the subjects of the analysis with respect. This is not an “own the libs” book, but serious scholarly work.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the current cultural moment, or really anyone working in the symbolic professions.

[joan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a growing feeling of bad faith about this one. It absolutely castigates our cultural gatekeepers, but somehow the author, a cultural gatekeeper, isn’t quitting the castle.

At one point he seems to think like a communist - economic niche generates identity, overriding existing identities, ie class trumps race. Then in the bulk of the book, enumerating all the hypocrisy, race trumps class.

It makes me suspect that what he wants, actually, is for his insurgent non-WASP part of this class, whose presence he minimises, to take it over, as the true voices of the downtrodden. The book’s title is his faction’s voice. We are not woke, we just mean use DEI to rule.

If race will out (and if it outs in even in the class predicated on anti racism and the most keen on arguments and persuasion, then it certainly will out) then power is all that’s left. That’s his opinion, so that’s his justification, the esoteric message of the book.

There are lots of tells: IQ occurs once, though it’s an obvious cause of stickiness in the composition of this class. It’s now mostly female, so it’s obviously porous. And so on. Boo.

[Darcy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke is a trenchant analysis of how social justice concerns play out in the lives of those who tend to champion them the most: symbolic capitalists. As he explains, “this book could be considered an exercise in negative epistemology: whatever “social justice” looks like, it does not seem to be well reflected in symbolic capitalist institutions. … Not only are we no “there” yet with respect to social justice, but it isn’t clear we’re anywhere close to being on the right track” (310).
I appreciate that he writes as a fellow symbolic capitalist wrestling with the fact that our “priorities are manifested through action.”
Be prepared to be deeply challenged by what you encounter. And I recommend finding others who can read along and/or wrestle through the issues with you. We must do better.

[Dan Bouchelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptionally insightful book that calls out much of the hypocrisy coming from the progressive left that not only does not solve the problem of inequalities, but often exploits it and deepens it. This is an essential and convicting read for anyone who considers themselves an ally of the disadvantaged.

[Paul Sand · Rating 5 out of 5]

I picked this book up at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, expecting that I'd dislike it. I was pleasantly surprised. The author, Musa al-Gharbi, is an honest, sharp-eyed observer of the self-proclaimed "woke" fractious faction. And he makes a convincing case that their nostrums are ineffective at solving the problems they describe.

Briefly: the "woke" are largely "symbolic capitalists", dealing in services, ideas, and concepts, not concrete products. They are largely white, male, cishet, and extremely well-off. In any honest telling, they are an elite, holding down the commanding heights in academia, media, and (increasingly) at tech businesses. They tend to be located in geographically compact regions: Silicon Valley, New York City, Seattle, …

And, even though they "talk the talk", their walking of the walk leaves much to be desired. Their remedies do not raise up the American downtrodden, even in places, like California and New York, where they seem to have a firm grasp on political power. And (to a certain extent) this is intentional.

(I say: "they". Which is a little misleading. al-Gharbi fully admits that he's in that elite "symbolic capitalist" group. So am I, for that matter. But I've never, ever, claimed to be "woke".)

In certain spots, al-Gharbi seems to echo critiques made by us "right-wingers". He's brutal on folks like Elizabeth Warren, Jussie Smollett, Rachel Dolezal. And he quotes folks like Thomas Sowell and Bryan Caplan approvingly. (There's also a positive blurb from Tyler Cowen on the back.)

Once you get the gist of al-Gharbi's thesis, it's hard to avoid seeing confirming evidence. Do DEI efforts actually work, or are they just noisy virtue-signalling? From the February 7 WSJ: DEI Didn’t Change the Workforce All That Much. A Look at 13 Million Jobs. Subtitle: "For all the controversy that diversity programs stir up, most senior managers are still white men."

How about the notion that the Democrats have become the favored party among the well-off "symbolic capitalists", concentrated in their small-area conclaves? That can't be true, can it? We're always being told that Republicans are the party of the fat cats!

Exercise for the reader: click over to smartasset's 2024 list of America’s Richest Congressional Districts. Go down the list of districts, ranked by affluence, and look for the first one represented by a Republican.

I had to go down to #15: New Jersey's 7th Congressional District sends Thomas Kean Jr. to D.C. He squeaked by Democrat Susan Altman in last year's election 51.8%-46.4%. (Trump also edged Kamala in NJ-7, 49.8%-47.8%.)

On Kean's House page, as I type: "Kean Fighting to Restore SALT Deduction". Is that fighting for the poor and downtrodden? Not exactly. From the Tax Policy Center: Repealing The SALT Cap Would Overwhelmingly Benefit Those With High Incomes. (And, for the record, Sue Altman, Kean's opponent, came out in favor of that too, although that involved a hypocritical flip-flop.)

But if I have to gripe about something: al-Gharbi's analysis of "inequality" unfortunately involves some usual lefty stat-hacking. Without getting into the weeds on that, the book could have used some insights from a recent book by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early: The Myth of American Inequality.

al-Gharbi is also short on recommending policy prescriptions; he admits this upfront. Which is fine, his goal is to describe, however imperfectly, the state of play.

[Andrea McDowell · Rating 2 out of 5]

When my child was in grade 2 and the chronic pain and joint problems kicked in that would define so much of their life for so long, one of their doctors wrote the first of many letters to the school saying that they needed a desk and chair that were adjustable and the right size in order to avoid further joint damage.

It took ten years for the school board to buy this desk and chair. They had it only for their last year of public education before graduating. Every day prior to that was spent in pain, accelerating joint damage. Moreover, since the policy was to buy one desk and chair for each student only, and in high school you have four classrooms that you rotate between, even at that point, they had ONE class each day that they could be in without pain. One.

This was a self-proclaimed human rights school.

So you think I would be the author's target audience here. I have seen, first hand, over and over, people who pride themselves on social justice and human rights, repeatedly fail on accessibility and accommodation in the most basic and obvious of ways. They lecture me and my kid on the "right" language for disability (person-first! Never mind that I have never met a disabled person who wants this language and it is absurd if you think about it for more than five seconds). The school sent home a letter every fall saying that every student had to participate in the Terry Fox run -- never mind that my kid couldn't run. Every fall! They create a conference or event on social justice issues and loudly proclaim their values from stages in venues that disabled people can't enter.

During the pandemic, when my kid and I went to the school to pick up the things they'd had in their locker all those months, some brilliant academic had put pylons down the middle of the accessibility ramp. Why? Well, you had to enforce social distancing, so they created lanes on the ramp. Problem being that now the ramp was completely inaccessible because neither of the lanes were wide enough for a single walker or wheelchair, and there were only two kids using these devices at the school so social distancing on the ramp was not necessary anyway. If I hadn't been there, how would my kid have gotten into the school to get their things back?

Not to mention working in climate change for decades where people wring their hands about how awful it is and Someone Should Do Something, but never them, never anything that might cost them money or change their habits.

Again, I should be al-Gharbi's biggest fan. And what's excruciating for me here is that I am completely on board with his thesis while finding most of his arguments and 'evidence' groundless, thoughtless, based on cruel assumptions, often flagrantly and obviously wrong, often reading more like an Atlantic op-ed than a scholarly dissertation, and ironically a great example of the very thing he purports to decry.

For example: apparently high-income women buy expensive make up to better their chances of catching a man. Evidence? Who needs it? Let's ignore that no woman I know expects a man to be able to tell the difference between Sephora and Maybelline eyeliner, and many women buy and use makeup that they expect men will actively dislike. Let's not even consider that women with more money spend some of it on more expensive makeup because they can, just like people with higher incomes tend in general to buy more expensive things. Oh no. It's all about mate catching. How does this even relate to the thesis? I've got no fucking idea.

Or his claim that wealthier people cynically and exploitatively stayed home and ordered things from apps during covid-19 lockdowns because they explicitly did not value the lives of people working in warehouses or making deliveries. Yes, al-Gharbi decries this as intentional. Let's ignore the organizing and public pressure on these employers to provide hero pay, or how governments, politicians, and public health officials ordered people to stay home and order things online to save lives, or even the fact that all of the places people could have gone to get their own food WERE CLOSED BECAUSE IT WAS A LOCKDOWN. Nope. Rich people wanted to kill warehouse workers and delivery app drivers. QED.

An entire section on rideshare apps is particularly maddening. Are Uber and Lyft exploitative of workers? 100%. He could have made a solid argument without the hyperbole, but instead, decided to make the claim that using taxis is virtuous but using rideshare apps is "expecting a chauffeur without the expense." Excuse me, but what? Taxis and rideshare apps are functionally the same thing, just the interface is different and the cost lower. And frankly, after trying for a decade to use taxis for exactly the reasons he outlines, and being stranded for school and important appointments and medical procedures because even reserving a taxi days in advance did not guarantee that someone would come within even two hours of the needed time, we had no choice but to switch.

But it is the section on disability in schools that grinds my gears the most, and it will take some space to describe why:

al-Gharbi describes what he calls "honour and disability cultures" in low-income communities vs. "victimhood" cultures in high-income communities. To support this in schools, he claims that wealthy parents are purchasing disability diagnoses and accommodations in schools for their children to give them a leg up for better grades and material to use in college application essays. His evidence is that wealthier children tend to write more of these essays, and the variance in diagnosis/accommodation rates between low-income and high-income American schools: 2.7% vs. around 20%.

To be sure, that's a startling variation, but if you think about it for twenty seconds or so, I'm sure you will come up with an alternative explanation based on what is common knowledge of how uniquely terrible both the public school and health care systems are for low-income people in America. Is it that rich parents are purchasing diagnoses?

Well, let's spend a few minutes on google and see what the rates look like in countries without such terrible health care and education systems. Let's try my own, Ontario. Shall we?

Country/Income Low High
America 2.7% 20%
Canada 20% 14%

Which group is the actual outlier here?

Right. Low-income American parents. Who aren't virtuously pursuing an "honour and dignity culture," but rather are not able to get a diagnosis because they can't afford it, possibly also don't have time because they're working too much and stressing over bills, and their kids are in schools that can't support them with accommodations anyway. The story here isn't that high-income American parents are purchasing diagnoses and accommodations for kids who are being schooled in adopting a victimhood mindset. It's that around 15% or more of low-income American students need and deserve those accommodations and can't get them. That's a fucking tragedy. Very likely those kids aren't applying to college because they're not graduating from high school, thus the difference in entrance essays. Given how often kids with physical disabilities are segregated into special ed classrooms because of the assumptions that they must be stupid -- all of which data, by the way, is easy to find -- how many millions of American children are having their entire lives wasted?

At the risk of doing something al-Gharbi critiques, I am going to establish some more bonafides before concluding: I am a type 1 diabetic single mom. (Which reminds me that he says many of these disabled upper-income students "only" have conditions like diabetes which are "easy to manage." Clearly he has not spoken to a single t1d child or parent, or reviewed any literature on it at all.) My parents were married, but shouldn't have been; as followers know, my mother is extremely abusive and mentally ill, and their marriage and income did not make my childhood easy. I have been parenting a disabled kid with a chronic illness myself for nearly two decades. Managing my child's disability, all of the appointments and records and referrals and prescriptions and procedures and studies and surgeries, was a second full-time job on top of the one I already had. They were in their teens before we had a diagnosis. They are visibly disabled and use a mobility aid (I hope this qualifies as "truly disabled" in al-Gharbi's terminology). And yet, even with reams of paperwork and letters from doctors and an IEP going back years, every term, every term, there is one prof who says "you don't need all that" and won't accommodate them without a fight.

Even in a publicly funded health care system with rationally funded public schools and a good job with decent insurance doing this almost killed me. Working from home multiple days in a week because they were in too much pain to go to school, or had been throwing up all night again; fighting with the insurance company to cover the walker and wheelchair; calling one doctor's office to make sure they sent the x-rays or blood tests to the other office we were going to see, being assured they were, and then showing up for the appointment to find out that wasn't true; leading an online meeting from the dining table and listening to my kid scream because they tried to move the wrong way, from the bed in the living room because they could no longer use the stairs. And even so. Even with all of this. Getting a diagnosis, getting an IEP, getting the accommodations, was a fight and still is a fight every step of the way. Doctors don't hand this stuff out like candy. So often I asked myself what on earth I would do and what would become of my kid if I didn't have my reasonably well-paying job that I can do from home when needed, the 'right' skin tone and accent, decent insurance, and the confidence to challenge doctors and push that comes from the 'right' social class.

It is all too apparent al-Gharbi didn't even bother to question his basic assumptions or do the most basic of evidence reviews, and even though this is his PhD dissertation, apparently no one at Princeton thought that was necessary either.

This book should end al-Gharbi's career. But alas, his thesis is correct; he will cement his new position and social status by throwing poor disabled kids under the bus.

[Niklas Braun · Rating 4 out of 5]

really informative book that actually makes me less lost after the election. It's a data dump for sure that requires pausing and thinking. Excellent discussion on corporate woke-washing among a lot of issues. I think it fell flat on the topic of LGBTQ demographic changes in terms of having a narrow minded approach.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential. Read it and reconsider who we are and what we do.

[Heike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Challenging, eye-opening, razor-sharp analysis, one of the best books I've ever read, will definitely have me thinking for a while.

[Naori · Rating 2 out of 5]

From the beginning, I’ve had an overwhelming sense that while this book is “interesting”, this is not the author to be writing it. At first, I thought it was merely instructional; for instance, if I was back in grad school & one of my professors was teaching it I wouldn’t be as concerned about the author - the context would be educational. However, I consistently have a hard time with people who don’t inhabit certain spaces explaining why those spaces are problematic. This read very much like a white man, attempting to do the work of becoming anti-racist, without actually engaging with people or communities of color. When I was much, much younger (in my teens and early 20s), I would read books on gender and queer theory written by people who weren’t a part of that (my) community. After my initial confusion, I realized that as universities were moving away from women’s studies and towards gender studies, in order to remain relevant in their field, some academics were stretching to cover a topic they had little or no experience with.

However, when I was getting my PhD, the rapid rise of Disability studies, concepts of “freakery“ in relation to the body, and how disability/gender/sexuality have historically intersected, exploded as an almost fetishized new topic. As a queer disabled person, I would sit and listen to the very small group of people in my department excitedly riff ideas off each other like a jazz band, none of whom were disabled, most of whom weren’t queer, many whose concept of gender was very binary, and who all lived at socioeconomic levels I couldn’t dream of. Although, as a socialist in our current capitalistic society, I would never engage in that lifestyle. I believe we are now at a point where, for the most point, people who are theorizing certain spaces in the publishing world are also occupying them. However that sense of isolation, anger, smallness & shock I felt as a young student was the same thing I felt from the beginning of this book.

There was a much, much bigger conversation that needed to be happening about the actions the elite, who romanticize identities such as “woke”, needed to be taking (not just an awareness of it as a problematic stance). Additionally, while class was touched upon in an urban vs rural discussion, that was waaaayyy too wide of a brush stroke. I live in upstate New York in a city where factories have shut down making people unhoused, merely streets away from million dollar residences. All of the dissonances the author talks about exist here too. I have also taught part time for 15 years at an expensive liberal arts college catering to upper class mostly white students, ten minutes away from the (still expensive) technical college of almost exclusively lower income students of color. I read another review suggesting the author needed to come to the agency the reviewer works at to get a better perspective. I echo this sentiment.

Finally, while this might not have been something the author felt relevant, I thought a discussion on wealth & health care would have greatly enhanced his book. For instance, people who have access to better healthcare are absolutely employing lower class, disposable workers as private aids, nurses, and caretakers with job duties that go far beyond these roles. This is especially evident with wealthy families who have the financial means to pay what he calls “disposable” workers to take care of their loved ones (often seniors) so they may stay in the home. However, I am disabled and have a part-time in-home health aide who earns slightly more than minimum wage. This is all that my insurance company will allow. And this is very, very common. The system of care that goes on for in-home health workers for adult disabled people dependent on state & federal funding, versus private in-home healthcare is another enormous area where these divisions are seen. It is not simply caretakers of the young, but also the elderly and disabled where we see these fissures & exploitations.

[Meg Huber · Rating 4 out of 5]

Required uncomfortable reading about rich hypocrisy


What does it mean to be the person he is calling out and agreeing full heatedly with what he is saying?

[Augustin Grigorov · Rating 5 out of 5]

This may be the best nonfiction book I’ve read so far. It is a surgical dissection of contemporary society through a political lens, and it’s brilliant. It is no exaggeration to say that it has made me question and reevaluate core parts of my worldview. Remarkably, it achieves this without taking any political stance. It merely offers apolitical observations, backed by facts, that may be unpleasant and uncomfortable to confront. Yet, when you do, you feel better for it, because belief systems built on delusions do not serve us well.

Even though it made me realize that I am not as righteous or morally superior as I thought I was, I feel better for having an honest foundation to build upon.

[Jude Mercer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Need to collect my thoughts on this one. Debating between 3 and 4 stars. I really wrestled with this book. Some outstanding parts. Some very uneven. Some assumptions and opinions forced. Some points were uncomfortable but clearly true. Overall I find the author to be a blow hard but not unwilling to include himself in the symbolic capitalists he calls out. I do think this would have read way different pre-Trump 2.0. In many ways symbolic capitalism has shifted in the past year and is continuing to shift leaving a lot of us wondering how and why. Those assumptions I talked about earlier ring hollower in 2025 with Trump and his folks stomping on every perceived woke institution or organization, but it doesn’t take much to extrapolate why many of the elite are falling into line either. If Al-Gharbi is right in his premises around elites and symbolic capital, then they are just chasing the new sources of symbolic capital. And it shouldnt really be a surprise at all. It’s good when you wrestle with a text. You can really pull out the ideas and challenge your own assumptions. That’s what this book did for me and ultimately why I give it the four stars.

[Aaron Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everyone should read this book and talk about it.

It will offend nearly everyone, and its lack of a conclusion that offers solution will likely annoy everyone who isn’t already offended.

As a book about contradictions, it is great. As a tight, singular argument it is a mess. This books floats from topic to topic and tosses out generalizations like free candy at a parade. No one is spared.

I left really struggling to understand what to DO with any of this.

But beyond that, I struggle with the idea of intention. The author believes that actions define our true beliefs, and that if really interrogated, most social capitalists would find they are just as bigoted as the next person. Even if they believe in their spirit they are not.

I find that difficult to sit with. And yet this book feels essential.

[Adam Omelianchuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very fine book about how "wokeness" functions in modern society. The premises of "social justice" -- that are supposed to uplift the marginalized (and, importantly, are not rejected in this book) -- are actually used to leverage the clout of middle- and upper-middle class professionals who work in "symbolic" professions (entertainers, artists, academics, lawyers, regulators administrators, human resource departments) often to the detriment of the marginalized. Author traces this sort of behavior over the centuries, but isolates the latest "great awokening" as beginning with the Occupy movement that allowed people in the top 15% to feel aggrieved at the top 1%. Only criticism: his category of who counts as an "elite" seems rather capacious. Still, a very penetrating analysis of what makes the phenomenon of "wokeness" so aggravating in modern society.