Fine Woke Cannibals

"We Have Never Been Woke" by Musa al-Gharbi may be academia's first serious effort at self-analysis, and its surprising, enraging diagnosis rings all too true.

If a book gets you thinking about tri-state killing sprees by the middle pages, it’s probably worth reading. Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke achieves the feat in the introduction, when the author unveils a character called a symbolic capitalist. I’d have gone with a term needing no explanation, like “laptop-class douchebag,” but al-Gharbi works in academia, so:

Symbolic capitalists are professionals who traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstraction (as opposed to workers engaged in manual forms of labor tied to physical goods and services)… People who work in fields like education, science, tech, finance, media, law, consulting, administration, and public policy... If you’re reading this book, there’s a strong chance you’re a symbolic capitalist. I am, myself, a symbolic capitalist.

Musa al-Gharbi grew up in a “smallish southern Arizona military town,” is black, and before embarking on a PhD program at Columbia supported a family of four “selling shoes at Dillard’s.” Apart from those details, and a few suspiciously merciless descriptions, you’d never think the book was written by an outsider. With its Ivy-credentialed author and Princeton imprint, We Have Never Been Woke is academia’s first real attempt to self-diagnose its recent bout with madness. Its many surprises helped reframe my understanding of the last decade-plus of American history, when I wasted huge amounts of time puzzling, puzzling, puzzling.

I understood why some Democrats considered Bernie Sanders a nuisance needing squashing, but smearing him as a racist misogynist Putin acolyte meant losing many of his voters, in election years no less. What possible end could that serve? Why during the “summer of Floyd” were there so few concrete structural demands on police procedure, but so many purges of alleged racists? Why did a historically speech-protecting party suddenly endorse huge digital censorship programs, even after they became political liabilities? Why cancel Barbara Ehrenreich, for God’s sake?

These turn out to be the wrong questions. Republicans often made a similar mistake in thinking woke intellectuals were extreme ideologues driven by hatred for the ordinary, family-oriented conservative. In fact few “symbolic capitalists” know any conservatives, and the only thing most know about conservatives is they can be utterly denounced with zero social cost. As for ideology, unless “believing everything all my friends think” counts, “symbolic capitalists” really don’t have one.

Hence the title of We Have Never Been Woke, which shows that a generation of McCarthyist lunacies was neither a neo-Marxist movement, nor an anti-populist partisan gambit, but a vulgar scrum for resources disguised as political struggle, conducted wholly within the top of the wealth distribution. Rural conservatives, independents, and institutions like schools and the press were collateral damage to history’s dumbest upper-class food fight. And I was complicit! This book forced me to realize that through one of the biggest errors of my career, I helped launch the woke Hindenburg: