Musa al-Gharbi: How Woke Elites Became Out of Touch

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist at Stony Brook University and the author of the new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Al-Gharbi argues that academics, journalists, and other elite professionals that he calls “symbolic capitalists” are disconnected from the marginalized and disadvantaged communities they claim to speak for—and that, by using the rhetoric of class solidarity drawn from the Occupy movement (which pitted the “99 percent versus the 1 percent”), progressive symbolic capitalists actually exploit those communities to maintain a relatively lush lifestyle.

Born and raised in a mixed-race military family in Arizona, al-Gharbi spoke with Reason’s Nick Gillespie about wokeness transforming the college experience, his conversion from Catholicism to atheism to Islam, why black and Latino voters appear to be embracing former President Donald Trump in record numbers, and his highly public cancellation in 2014 after he was attacked by Fox News for criticizing U.S. foreign policy.

0:00— Introduction
1:09— New book: We Have Never Been Woke
4:04— Can ‘wokeness’ be defined?
8:35— The history of ‘Great Awokenings’
9:30— Occupy Wall Street was an elite movement
11:02— ‘Symbolic Capitalists’ pretend not to be elites
15:57— Political splits among ‘Symbolic Capitalists’
19:50— The primary function of elite schooling is to grant elite status
23:42— Cultural contradictions of ‘symbolic professions’
25:20— Elite overproduction drives status anxiety
27:30— Elite overproduction and popular immiseration equal ‘Great Awokening’
31:04— How Occupy Wall Street shifted to identity politics
34:46— Victims like George Floyd only become important to elites after symbolic martyrdom
39:22— Musa al-Gharbi’s background
45:00— Being canceled by Fox News
49:00— Engaging with conservatives
53:18— Attending Columbia University
55:11— Working with Heterodox Academy
57:40— The latest ‘awokening’ is tapering off
1:00:29— Realignments among Black & Latino voters
1:06:42— Better living standards shift politics into ‘post-materialist’ frames
1:09:08— On not voting in the 2024 elections

Today’s sponsor:
The Reason Speakeasy. The Reason Speakeasy is a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy that doubles as a taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie. The next one takes place on November 18 and features Mercatus Center visiting fellow and former CIA analyst Martin Gurri, whose decade-old The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium remains one of the most important guides to the 21st century. Go to reason.com/events for information and tickets.

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

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