Although they understand themselves as missionaries to the marginalized, woke elites use their ideology of oppression to protect their own privilege and social status. Contributing Editor G. Patrick Lynch discusses these dynamics with Musa al-Gharbi, author of We Have Never Been Woke, and a shrewd diagnostician of elite hypocrisy.

Related Links

We Have Never Been Woke by Musa al-Gharbi
“Questioning the Oppression Olympics,” by Jesse Smith (Review of We Have Never Been Woke)

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06 ):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty in this podcast are published by Liberty Fund.

Patrick Lynch (00:39 ):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m G. Patrick Lynch, a senior fellow at the Liberty Fund, and a contributing editor at Law & Liberty. And for this episode, I’m filling in for James Patterson. Today we’re joined by Musa al-Gharbi to discuss his critically acclaimed 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite published by Princeton University Press. To give our listeners some sense of the impact of the work, the book was listed by both the Wall Street Journal and Mother Jones of all places in their top books of year. Musa has discussed the book on numerous prominent podcasts and periodicals across the ideological spectrum. Musa is a sociologist in the school of Journalism and Communications at Stony Brook University. Musa, it is so great to have you on the Law & Liberty Podcast. Welcome.

Musa al-Gharbi (01:23 ):

It’s great to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Patrick Lynch (01:25 ):

Thanks for coming. The book has just gotten a ton of a positive attention and I think very deservedly so. It’s well worth a read for our listeners and I strongly encourage you to pick a copy of it. Let’s jump right at the beginning and give the listeners some background. The key claim that you make is that there is a group of people, these woke folks who are very interested in categories, but they themselves are a category, and you use that term “symbolic capitalists” to describe who those folks are. Can you explain a little bit about what symbolic capitalism is, who symbolic capitalists are, and how they differ from other folks in the market system?

Musa al-Gharbi (02:00 ):

Sure, sure. The “we” in We Have Never Been Woke, is this group of folks that I call symbolic capitalists, as you said. So the term “symbolic capital” is from a Pierre Bourdieu, a different sociologist. And what Bourdieu argued is that symbolic capital were the resources that elites draw on to get other people to do what they want to conform with their preferences, but without stark coercion. So as people like Weber and so on have pointed out from beginning of the field of sociology, almost all social orders do in a deep sense, rely on some kind of consent. It’s actually very difficult to just coerce, to constantly surveil everyone in society, and to constantly be coercing them into doing what you want them to do is basically impossible. The only way that any social order persists is because huge shares of the population comply when they could choose not to.

(02:54 ):

And so symbolic capital are the resources that people at the upper ends of social distributions often rely on to get other people to do what they want, to follow their will to accord with their preferences. Bourdieu came up with three different forms of symbolic capital. So there’s political capital. That’s when you get people to do what you want based on your position in an organization and based on your reputation for getting things done and so on. So an example of people leveraging political capital would be, you should do this because I’m the manager, I told you to do this and I’m the manager, so you should do it because I’m the manager, right? So the place that you’re occupying in the social order creates this expectation of deference. And the same thing is true of parents talking to children, for instance and so on.

(03:40 ):

Then there’s cultural capital, which is when people try to do what you want, conform with your preferences because they think you’re cool or interested or sophisticated or cultured or they like you and they want you to like them, they want to ingratiate themselves with you. And then finally, there’s academic capital, which is when you try to get other people to defer to your preferences, to do what you want because you have some kind of knowledge that they don’t have because you’re tied to institutions of knowledge production. So people leverage their academic capital by emphasizing, for instance, that “I have a PhD in sociology,” or “I came from Columbia University,” or “I write for the New York Times.” So these are all examples of people trying to leverage academic capital. And I call these people symbolic capitalists because the main way that we make a living is by cultivating these different forms of symbolic capital and by leveraging that symbolic capital on behalf of ourselves and other people.

(04:40 ):

So who are symbolic capitalists? Symbolic capitalists are people who primarily make a living based on what they know, who they know, and how they’re known. They’re people who make a living by manipulating symbols and data, ideas and stuff like that, instead of producing physical goods and services to people. So if you think about people who work in fields like journalism, consulting, education, finance, things like this, these are all examples of symbolic capitalists. They’re people who make a living by manipulating symbols and data and ideas and stuff like that, instead of providing physical goods and services to people.

Patrick Lynch (05:13 ):

Historically, this group, well, first of all you claim this is not the first wave what we call wokeness, or that this group has some aspirations and uses, and tries to leverage its position throughout history, or at least in the last 150 years or a hundred, say 120 years. But historically, it seems like this group has become more homogeneous over the past 20 years, that it’s moved in a particular direction and it’s started to adopt a set of views. Why do you think that it’s moved towards adopting these views? And what do you think are the forces that are moving it towards what we now call “wokeism” in which you identify these sets of cultural expertise and the kind of call to power that gives them this leverage over other people?

Musa al-Gharbi (05:59 ):

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that’s really interesting about symbolic capitalists as a group is that we have this kind of longstanding relationship between the symbolic professions like law, higher ed journalism and so on, and social justice, narratives about social justice. So from the beginning of a lot of our profe