Woke Ideology Has Always Benefited Elites, Not Victims
We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi Princeton University Press 432 pp., $20.79
If the referent of “we” in this book’s title is “average Americans,” then the claim is undoubtedly correct. Few Americans who are working 9-to-5 jobs, raising families, and living in modest homes in the middle of the country, far from the coasts, have adopted the far-left ideology now popularly known as “woke,” or wokeism. A good sociological treatment of why the ideology has had such paltry success penetrating into that stratum of American society would be of use.
However, We Have Never Been Woke is not focused on that task. It is an attempt to explain how woke ideology has seized a significant portion of the American elite classes and to examine the consequences. The book argues that wokeism is a phenomenon of elites on the political left who cynically use it to advance their status and material prosperity. In reality, they disdain the policy consequences suggested by their own ideas, which would advantage those below them.
The book is not without insights, even if most of them can be examined elsewhere. There is trenchant discussion of the exaggerated way in which the wealthiest Americans skew woke. In 1993, voters in the richest 20 percent of congressional districts favored Republican candidates by a ratio of two to one. Today, the tilt is five to one, but in the direction of the Democrats. And it is Democrats who now receive most anonymous “dark money” through organizations that don’t disclose their wealthy donors’ names. Biden took in six times more from that source than Trump in 2020. The billionaires are solidly on the left. This should be constantly repeated in the faces of woke ideologues, who screech about Trump and the wealthiest 1 percent.
Wokeism is a phenomenon of elites on the political left who cynically use it to advance their status and material prosperity.
The book’s most effective chapter is “Postmaterialist Politics,” which rakes woke elites through the hot coals of their own political hypocrisy. These radicals talk revolution, but live as an aristocracy. Al-Gharbi rightly points out that their “revolutionary” scholarly writing is read by close to no one who is not already in their elite class. They self-segregate through their housing preferences, escaping the plebian classes for gated communities. They claim to be the allies of the oppressed but invariably view them as helpless pawns manipulated by evil forces. Those forces include the Orange Man, who is seen as a hero by an uncomfortably high number of the denizens of the working classes. The scholarship of woke elites is dedicated to pathologizing all views of politics that deviate from their own. They empower media industries that nudge the population into conformity with them ideologically. Much of this account sounds just like Charles Murray’s insightful take on elites in Coming Apart.
Al-Gharbi invents the term “totemic capital” to describe the embrace of victimhood culture by elites. (I hope the reader will forgive me for noting that I wrote about using the Durkheimian notion of totemism to understand woke victimology in the August 2019 issue of First Things in an article titled “Woke Totemism,” though I am not cited by Al-Gharbi.) If the category of “victim” can be defined broadly enough, elites, too, can be included and thus share in the status that accrues to this population, even while objectively sitting at the top of the social order. The LGBTQ categories have thus exploded in number and size (more than a third of students at elite schools now identify somewhere on the spectrum of sexual deviancy), and mixed-race elites vigorously embrace their nonwhiteness. Incidentally, al-Gharbi himself has embraced the elite trajectory here. He is bi-racial but identifies as black—and now Muslim as well, since he converted some years back.
Al-Gharbi is a university professor, so he has thoughts on wokeism in that set of institutions. In his perspective, DEI under the woke elites is merely a façade, a cover for business as usual. He believes measures to undo the forms of domination DEI decries are needed. But universities have not been actively pursuing them so much as just pretending to do so, to the symbolic profit of the woke. He is straightforwardly wrong on this claim. Woke efforts in higher education have demonstrably weakened faculties and curricula. Underqualified “victim” populations have increased in the ranks of the professoriate, and there has been an explosion in the teaching of vapid politicized topics masquerading as academic subjects.
Al-Gharbi’s criticism is that woke ideology cynically solidifies existing elite power, and some of that is certainly happening. But he fails to see that their efforts have resulted in significant harm to all the country’s elite institutions, precisely because of their success at moving away from merit and embracing the empty value of diversity in its stead. He argues that we are now in the most recent of a string of “episodic surges” in elite mobilization. He describes—in barely 13 pages—the intellectual history of “awokenings” in American history. The first emerges with the left of FDR’s New Deal, the second with the ’60s counterculture, and the third in the 1980s and 1990s wave of political correctness. This, the fourth “awakening,” shall also pass.
Al-Gharbi does not trouble himself to examine precisely how much has changed since the moment when political correctness crested in the 1990s. He is too young to have experienced that surge. Those of us who have been around longer know well how different the situation in higher education was then. When handfuls of radical young faculty and graduate students ginned up the insurgent noise, there was then a solid core of older, centrist faculty to keep them under control, and the administrations had not yet uniformly descended into woke political activism.
In today’s surge, every school in the country has a DEI apparatus, a faculty overloaded with leftist activists produced by the intervening decades of continuing radicalization of the graduate programs, and an administrative staff that has grown by leaps and bounds, and which has ideologically moved in the same direction as the faculty. There are no sane, older heads left to keep the radicals from doing whatever they like.
The book contains no careful analysis of the key elements of the ascendancy of wokeism. There is nothing, for example, on the growth of the administrative state and its clear and ever-increasing tilt to the left. Nor does the book explore the demographic revolution that followed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and has led, among other serious consequences, to the importation of migrant populations, which reliably push American politics in the same leftward direction. There is no close consideration of the transformation of university faculties and curricula over the past five decades by the emergence and expansion of political ideologies masquerading as new intellectual disciplines.
Al-Gharbi’s central theoretical inspiration is the work of the late French social thinker Pierre Bourdieu, who was a left radical, a socialist, and a sympathizer with woke identity politics. Al-Gharbi endeavors to detach Marxism from the ideas of the “fourth awokening” in order to position Marx as a figure critical of wokeism. While he is correct to make such distinctions, al-Gharbi is clearly not making them out of concern for historical accuracy. He, like his mentor Bourdieu, is an advocate for the feasibility of some of Marx’s major ideas.
It is unquestionably true that wokeism totally disregards the main theoretical idea of Marxism: the radicalization of the proletarian class against capitalism. Woke ideology instead focuses on race, gender, and sexual identity. But al-Gharbi also wants to see in Marx the promise of what he considers meaningful and desirable social change. In undertaking that interpretive task, he argues, incredibly, that Marx was opposed to equity or social leveling.
Thus, al-Gharbi struggles mightily to turn the Marxian aphorism of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” into a meritocratic nonegalitarian statement. This is a fool’s errand. He invokes Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme (1891) as his evidence, but Marx says explicitly in this text that the inequality of outcomes inevitable in early communism has to do with the latter’s origins in capitalism, which is shot through with such stratification. This long-enduring inequity cannot be eliminated at a mere wave of the revolutionary wand. It takes time. Yet Marx is clear that the more developed stages of communism will eventually arrive at the full realization of the principle of equality, by appropriating from those who produce more and giving to those who produce less.
Al-Gharbi’s perspective is thus very far from the conservative view of wokeism. Beyond the references to Bourdieu and Marx, he is forthcoming about the intellectual tradition in which he situates himself. It is the same tradition occupied by W.E.B. DuBois, a black American radical of the 20th century who eventually became so disenchanted with his own country that he embraced Stalinism. The book’s perspective is well summarized in a quote the author gives from G. A. Cohen: “If you’re an egalitarian, how come you’re so rich?”
To the conservative, material egalitarianism is a dead end. The most extreme levels of inequality in wealth and power are socially disruptive and should be combated, but attacking the wealthy and powerful in principle does much more harm than good.
But Al-Gharbi, like Bourdieu, offers no careful consideration of such nuances. He claims he is not an idealistic radical, but inequality as a principle is his target, and that fact is seen everywhere in his work. So, while some insights into the motivation of woke elites can be had in We Have Never Been Woke, a well-grounded demolition of their ideology must be sought elsewhere.
https://chroniclesmagazine.org/reviews/woke-ideology-has-always-benefited-elites-not-victims