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 professions in their recognizably modern form, when they started organizing as professions, if you look at symbolic capitalists today, and through most of our history, we get more pay than most other workers. We have a lot more prestige than most other workers. We have better benefits and working conditions, a lot of autonomy and freedom. As an academic, the freedom I have and how I structure my time and what I work on day to day, it’s truly wild. As someone who’s had normal jobs in the past, it’s truly insane. And from the beginning of our professions, this autonomy, this pay, this prestige, we’ve said, the reason you should give us these things is not for our own sake, but because if you give us these things, it’ll better empower us to help everyone in society, including, and especially the least among us.

(07:06):

A lot of our professions are explicitly defined in terms of altruism and serving the common good. So take my own profession, for instance. Journalists are supposed to speak truth to power and to be a voice for the voiceless. Academics are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads and to tell the truth without worrying about anyone else’s political interests, their economic interests and so on. And so our professions are defined in terms of altruism and the common good. And when you look at the landscape of public opinion at who in America is most likely to self-identify as anti-racists, as feminists, as allies to L-G-B-T-Q, people as environmentalists and so on, environmental, it’s symbolic capitalists. And as a group, we overwhelmingly self-identify as some kind of left of center, either liberal or progressive or left or socialist, something that says “not right wing,” and politically we’re overwhelmingly and increasingly sorted into the Democratic party.

(08:09):

This wasn’t always the case. This is actually relatively recent, our longstanding cultural liberalism and so on has been a pretty persistent feature of the symbolic professions. But for a while, kind of where we sat on the Democrat-Republican spectrum was actually kind of volatile, but there was this kind of sorting that happened over time. So today within the parties and their ideology, symbolic capitalists are overwhelmingly something like five to one sorted into the Democratic party. And yeah, one of the things that’s interesting is that, as you said in some dimensions, symbolic capitalists have been getting more diverse than we used to be in the past. So, a lot of the professions when they were created, they were created as basically sinecures for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. People who were not white Anglo-Saxon Protestants were forbidden from joining them. So black people, for instance, couldn’t be lawyers.

(09:09):

The American Bar Association excluded black people from taking part in the American Bar Association. And when black people tried to create their own legal associations because they couldn’t get into the ABA, the ABA worked aggressively to shut those down and so on and so forth. But there were these changes starting in the 1950s and 60s where women became, there was a passage of Title IX, BEOC, policies on sexual harassment and discrimination, things like this, so that a lot of the barriers that were set up to prevent women from joining the professions were eventually taken down. And the same thing is true for non-whites and so on. And so the professions today are more diverse than they were in the past. But critically, even today, these professions and these institutions tend to be significantly less diverse than most other workspaces. They’re actually, compared to most other workspaces, they’re actually much more hierarchical, much more exclusionary, and in many respects have been growing more so. Especially the reliance on degrees and elite degrees is this kind of important sorting mechanism.

Patrick Lynch (10:12):

And I think this is an important point for the listeners. So the way you think about diversity: it is not necessarily the case that it’s based exclusively on things like race and gender. It’s based on economic opportunities and backgrounds to some degree, unless I’m reading the book incorrectly.

Musa al-Gharbi (10:29):

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and they actually intersect in ways that are important and underexplored. For instance, a lot of programs like Affirmative Action were created as basically a kind of soft reparations program for American descendants of slaves. But look at who benefits the most from race targeted affirmative action policies. So, these are programs that were designed to provide social mobility for people who had been historically disadvantaged. They were designed to give a leg up to people who were American descendants of slaves. That’s not the way these policies actually function in practice. The primary beneficiaries of race targeted assistance, affirmative action programs, as I show in the book, tend to be black people who are already relatively affluent, whose parents were also highly educated and successful. So in practice, they primarily serve as ways to help elites who are not white reproduce and enhance their own elite positions. They actually don’t do a lot to help the genuinely disadvantaged.

(11:32):

And even when you look at which black people tend to benefit from these programs, even though they were programs that were created for American descendants of slaves, that’s actually the subset of black people who are least likely to benefit from the programs. And at elite universities and in knowledge economy professions, the people who benefit the most from admissions and hiring preferences for black people, for instance, tend to be Afro-Caribbean and recent African origin people, people who are of recent immigrant background, from the Caribbean, or from Kenya or Nigeria or places like that. So people who are not American descendants of slaves, and the people who are American descendants of slaves who benefit from the programs tend to be half white like myself. And this matters because biracial people have importantly different risk exposures, importantly different vulnerabilities, importantly different social networks and opportunity structures compared to monoracial non-immigrant black people.

(12:30):

And so, in practice, this is what you see with the beneficiaries of a lot of these programs. On its face, it’s already the case that a lot of these professions are actually less diverse than most other workplaces. But even the diversity that’s there is often misleading. So if you look at schools like Harvard, they’ll say, we have X percentage of students who are black. Well, the share of your students that are American descendants of slaves, which is the overwhelming majority of black population, is what most people think of when they hear “We have X number of students who are black.” That is not the population of students that you see at Harvard who are black.

(13:17):

And so these intersect in interesting ways, these kind of class things. The last thing I’ll say on this is that actually, this is one of the cases where in a lot of knowledge economy spaces, a lot of these symbolic economy hubs and institutions, there really are aggressive policies in place that tend to punish people who diverge from the kind of dominant left-aligned viewpoints on cultural issues especially, but even on other issues. Now, one of the things that’s striking about that is that the people who tend to suffer the most from these policies don’t tend to be people who are already privileged and overrepresented in these institutions. The people who belong to the dominant group at these institutions also tend to subscribe to the dominant viewpoint. That’s part of the reason it’s a dominant viewpoint, because it’s the viewpoint of the dominant group.

(14:14):

Again, if you look at the highly educated, relatively affluent urban and suburban white people who dominate a lot of these institutions, they are also the people who are the most likely to subscribe to these left-aligned cultural views. And so if you create an institution that’s hostile towards socially conservative views, towards religious views and so on, the people who tend to suffer the most from that, who are most likely to be punished, excluded, and so on, to face a hostile atmosphere, are people who are already underrepresented. So people who are of immigrant background, people who are of non-traditional academic backgrounds, people who are from lower income backgrounds, people who are ethnic minorities and so on. These tend to be the people who face the most hostile atmosphere. And we can see this when a lot of institutions create policies that are supposed to help that, often in the name of empowering minorities of various kinds. Minorities are often the people who suffer the most.

(15:14):

So for instance, a lot of knowledge economy institutions have created anonymous reporting systems. If someone says something that’s not in accordance with predominant norms of highly educated, relatively affluent to urban and suburban white people, you can report them. The idea behind a lot of these anonymous reporting systems is that people who are from less advantaged backgrounds often don’t know how to work the system as well as more traditional applicants, and they’ll feel less comfortable seeking authorities. This is actually true; there’s a lot of research on this and it’s actually true. But consider how these systems work in practice. So there’s a great study in Harvard Business Review that was published by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev. They found that when companies institute these anonymous reporting systems, the net effect is that there doesn’t seem to be any kind of negative effect on managers who are white or male.

(16:20):

They are not more likely to get punished, they’re not more likely to get fired and so on. For white female managers, there’s a slight uptick in disciplinary actions that they face. For non-white female managers, there’s an even bigger uptick, and then for non-white male managers it’s huge. They are much more likely to get fired and terminated and so on. This is counterintuitive because what the reporting systems are supposed to do is help punish people who speak out of turn on cultural issues. So the intuition is that people who are minorities and so on would be benefiting the most. The reason they don’t is because the people who are actually most likely to know the right thing to say in different circumstances, who have mastered the cultural scripts of what’s appropriate and not, tend to be people who are from relatively affluent backgrounds, people who are white, people whose parents were highly educated and so on. The people who are actually already underrepresented, they’re the least likely to have mastered these discourses.

(17:18):

They’re likely to say the wrong thing at the wrong time, or to say things in the wrong way. And so when you make it easier to punish people who color out of the lines, again, even if the intent is to help people who are disadvantaged, it often has the opposite effect. And so a lot of these issues are actually deeply intertwined in a way that I think a lot of people don’t appreciate. So a lot of times people focus on things like race and gender and sexuality while ignoring class, or they focus on things like viewpoint diversity while ignoring things like demographic diversity, or they view these as antagonistic pursuits so that the people who support viewpoint diversity often think that demographic diversity is nonsense. But if you keep pulling from the same subset of society, but expecting that somehow you’ll get a radically different share of views, that’s kind of weird. But on the flip side, a lot of the people who support demographic diversity also have really negative views towards the viewpoint diversity stuff. When in reality these are actually really deeply interrelated social problems that are best addressed in tandem.

Patrick Lynch (18:31):

Let’s jump in here and talk about why. So just to clarify the language, the diversity piece. These symbolic capitalists are a group. Why do symbolic capitalists take on this woke identity? What advantages does it give them in their day-to-day lives, their professions, their careers?

Musa al-Gharbi (18:48):

Yeah. So one of the things that’s interesting is that as I noted from the beginning of the symbolic professions, our autonomy, our payer prestige were rooted in these claims about altruism and the common good. And so this created this unique form of status competition within the symbolic professions where for a hundred years now, for more than that, people who did an especially good job of depicting themselves as allies for the marginalized and the disadvantage, as having the right motives and so on, were seen as being especially worthy of deference and prestige and power and respect, and holding strong social positions. And on the flip side, people who were successfully painted as having the wrong motives or feeling the wrong things about the wrong groups or being in bed with the wrong people, they’ve been seen as worthy of having their position and their social respect stripped away.

(19:40):

And again, this isn’t something that started with Twitter. This has been a recurrent aspect of the symbolic professions from their outset. One thing that changed a little bit in an interesting way is that since the beginning of these professions, there’s been this competition about who’s the most oriented towards social justice, who was the best advocate for social justice. But after the things like the Civil Rights Act in Title IX, there was this interesting shift. As you started getting more women and minorities, and it became more acceptable to openly acknowledge yourself as queer or something or things like this, this kind of changed the status competition a little bit in an important way, because increasingly you had this group of people who couldn’t just claim to be good allies and advocates for the marginalized and the disadvantaged in society, but they could actually claim to directly represent minoritized populations.

(20:39):

They could claim to directly embody the kind of disadvantage and oppression we’re trying to fight. And so, you started seeing this new form of symbolic capital that developed within the symbolic professions, I call it totemic capitalism, which is when people kind of lean on their association with historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups in order to be taken more seriously. So, within the symbolic professions, people who self-identify as say racial and ethnic minorities are viewed as being more morally pure. They have a stronger moral authority. They’re seen as better people than whites. They’re also perceived as having deeper, truer, more authentic insight into racial issues than whites. People who are women who are gender or sexual minorities are perceived as having truer, purer insights into gender issues than men, cisgender heterosexual men, and are also seen as being better people, as being morally pure, as having better mix of motives and so on. This is actually, again, a form of deference that’s unique to the symbolic professions. It’s created this kind of unusual situation where the people who are most likely to self-identify as some kind of marginalized population, who are most likely to self-identify as victims, happen to be the people who are most likely to be social elites. So you have these social elites who are painting themselves as marginalized and disadvantaged, often kind of stretching the truth, sometimes telling not fully accurate stories about their ethnicity, and that sort of thing.

Patrick Lynch (22:31):

I very much enjoyed that part of the book. Not only do you list a lot of examples where incentives are so strong for these elites that some of them, a number of them, engage in fraud and make up these identities. Or in the case of sexuality, you document that for people who identify, for example, as bisexual, they’re more likely to be engaged in heterosexual relationships than the heterosexual people, at least for women, I believe it is. It’s a really, really interesting take on the data. And can you talk a little bit about these examples and what’s going on here? What are the underlying mechanics?

Musa al-Gharbi (23:04):

Yeah. So, let me turn the lens on myself, as I do briefly in the chapter as well. I mentioned before that there are important distinctions in practice between people who are Afro-Caribbean or of recent African origin, or people who are biracial versus non-immigrant American descendants of slaves. There are these vast differences in terms of their life outcomes or opportunity structures and all of this. But most of the black people that you see in knowledge economy spaces tend to be either immigrant, black people, or biracial. So I was on a panel, for instance, on polarization at this big conference, and there were four black people who were speaking at this conference. Two of them were of Jamaican backgrounds. One was a Kenyan Nigerian person, and then there was me who’s half white. So four black people, not one single person, not one single person was a non-immigrant, monoracial, American descendant of slaves. But here we are offering the black perspective on this issue, and that’s how it is with the overwhelming majority of black people that you see. And the thing is, even when I describe myself, I often just describe myself as black. I don’t describe myself as biracial. I don’t describe myself as mixed race. I could come up with flattering reasons why I do that. For instance, I could tell some story about how when people look at me, they basically never go, oh, there’s a white guy, and so I’m generally perceived and coded.

(24:36):

I could tell this kind of a story, and those stories would be true, but they’re not the whole truth. Another thing that’s also true is that in a lot of the spaces in which I operate, I gain more credibility. I’m seen as being more moral. There are more opportunities provided to me to collapse this kind of more complicated story about my ethnic background into just describing myself as black. In fact, one of the things that’s really interesting about the book, We Have Never Been Woke, is that the book is itself a kind of a physical embodiment of many of the social dynamics and critiques. So for instance, the book critiques the use of credentials, especially credentials from elite schools like Columbia to decide whose voices are worth listening to, whose perspectives are worth taken seriously.

(25:36):

But I published the book with Princeton University Press, and I published the book with Princeton University Press very deliberately. I targeted a prestige press, and they were interested in me in part because I was coming from Columbia. If I had sent them the same manuscript, but I was a PhD student at the University of North Dakota, that’s a fine school. But if I sent them the same manuscript as a PhD student from the University of North Dakota, it probably would’ve ended up in the slush pile. There wouldn’t have been a competitive auction for the rights to it. Similarly, the book critiques how people leverage their association, and these kind of collective identities like black or Muslim in the service of their own individual benefit. But it’s also the case that part of the reason Princeton was interested in this book is because I’m black. Now, it’s not the case that all black people just get Princeton books.

(26:29):

“You get a book! You get a book!” They didn’t publish it just because I’m black. But it is the case that if I had sent them the exact same manuscript as a cisgender, heterosexual white person, especially God forbid, if I had any whiff of conservatism or Christianity about me, the exact same manuscript would’ve been evaluated in a very different way. It probably would’ve been passed over, perceived as being too risky or something like that. To the extent that they published it at all, they probably would’ve subjected it to sensitivity readers and a whole bunch of other oversight. The reason why I was able to go “pow, pow, pow” and just say what I think is in part because of my racial and ethnic identification, now the book criticizes the use of ethnicity to decide who gets to speak honestly about which topics and whatever, but the reason I’m able to leverage those critiques in the way I am is because I’m a black Muslim dude who writes for The Guardian. So there is this kind of interesting sense in which the book is itself a physical manifestation of a lot of the things that it’s criticizing.

Patrick Lynch (27:44):

So three quick things. Number one, thank you for clarifying the pronunciation of Colombia. I have been mispronouncing it for all these years, so I appreciate it. Second of all, if we can kind of summarize this, in your view, wokeism is a self-interested act by these elites, by symbolic capitalists are using woke in very, very self-interested ways, even though they may believe these ideas. I’ll help bring a little bit of the book in here. You don’t claim that these folks are just being disingenuous. They have adopted these views, but that it is in fact in their best interests to be able to boot up use.

Musa al-Gharbi (28:14):

Yeah, I’ll say just real quick on ethnic identification, just to bring that point full circle. So to me, it’s the case that for instance, self-identifying just simply as black feels like the best, the most appropriate, the truest way for a lot of folks like me to define themselves. So it’s not cynical or insincere, this conflating of the more complicated ethnic background that most of us have into just calling ourselves “black” instead of Afro-Caribbean or biracial. Now, that said, I suspect that if the opportunity structure were different, such that it was more advantageous to self-identify as biracial or mixed race, or that it was more advantageous to create a distinction between Afro-Caribbean people and black people, if Afro-Caribbean people or recent African immigrants were seen as more prestigious, as being better truer, more authentic, more moral or whatever, then I suspect that a lot of these same folks, myself included, would probably have some different sense of this. What would strike us as the most authentic way of understanding and describing our racial identity might be different.

(29:26):

Now, that’s not to say again that we would be cynical or insincere, it’s that the set of stories that we’re drawn to about ourselves and other people are importantly structured by what’s in our interests. So one of the contributions that I hope the book makes is that often there’s, especially on the left, there’s this tendency to create this kind of false binary. You’re either using something in a self-interested instrumental way or you’re sincere. And so there’s this whole genre of work where if you can expose that someone has an interest in believing something, or they have an interest in promoting some idea, then you go, ha, you’ve been exposed. You must be cynical, you must be insincere. There’s this whole genre of stuff on the left that attempts to do this, and it also plays out with funding and other things like that.

(30:26):

If you can show that someone has received funding from the wrong people, then ha, they must not really believe it. They must be cynical or insincere. This is a really terrible way to think about thinking. So there’s a lot of research in the cognitive and behavioral sciences that shows things at a very fundamental level about the ways that we perceive the world. We’re faced with these really intense challenges. At any given moment, I’m just being bombarded by just tons and tons of information, and I have to make decisions about what to focus on, about what to remember, about how to sort the things that I focus on into a coherent picture of the world in terms of the kinds of stories I tell about why things are the way they are and so on. We don’t make these cognitive decisions in a random way.

(31:22):

We don’t make them in a disinterested way. We make the choices we make about what to focus on, how to remember how to fit things together. These are deeply informed by what we want, by what we expect, by what’s in our interests. This is the way that our brains are structured at a very fundamental level, and it’s usually life affirming. It’s fitness enhancing, it’s life affirming to kind of analyze the world in this way. It’s a healthy thing to interpret the world in this way, but it does cause problems in a lot of circumstances. Now, if we take this literature seriously, that the ways we perceive and think about the world at a very fundamental level, at the foundational level are shaped by things like our interests and our goals and priorities, then we can see there’s not actually any kind of a tension between believing something sincerely and using it instrumentally. If we had an interest in believing something, we would actually be more likely to believe it sincerely, to believe it passionately, and to try to get other people to believe it too. And so the argument that I make in the book is that, yeah, some capitalists are sincere when we say things like “we want the people at the margins of society to live lives of dignity and inclusion.” We’re not lying when we say that we want the people who are suffering and poor to be better off and flourish.

(32:45):

We’re not being deceptive. When people were crying after George Floyd was killed, that was a performance, but it wasn’t just a performance. People were actually sad. The thing I stress in the book, the core problem, this kind of tension that’s defined the symbolic professions from the outset is that on the one hand we have this set of sincere commitments towards egalitarianism, but that’s not our only set of sincere commitments. Most people who work in the symbolic professions are also sincerely committed to being elites, which is to say we think that our perspectives should count for a lot more than the people checking us out at the grocery stores. That our priorities, that our values, that our needs and demands should weigh more heavily. We think that we should have a much higher standard of living than the people delivering our packages or driving us around when we Uber. When we want our children to reproduce our own social position or to do even better than us, this set of commitments is also very sincere, and they’re in fundamental tension. So we have this set of desires to be an egalitarian, the set of desires to be an elite. They’re in fundamental tension. You can’t actually be an egalitarian social climber. It’s a contradiction in terms.

Patrick Lynch (33:59):

Lemme jump in here because time is running a little short, and I want to touch on two things that I think you underlined very, very well. The first one is this idea: so you said you speak for black people even though you are biracial, and that you were on this panel with two Caribbeans and Kenyan. Talk briefly about how there are differences among, say, the main working class blacks, working class Latinos, and how elites express themselves. You talk about use of the term Latinx in the book, which I absolutely 100% resonated with me because when I go to Latin America, and I do frequently for my work, I tell people that this is a term among elites in the United States now, and they look at me as if I’m speaking Martian. They’ve never heard this term before. They have no idea what it means. And you talk a little bit about this, you talk a little bit about how white people have adopted the defund the police position, even though African-Americans by and large don’t support it. Can we talk a little bit about these tensions and how there is a non-representative nature to this. I think you just touched on that tension, so let’s discuss this.

Musa al-Gharbi (34:59):

So this issue of non-representative representatives, that’s something that I’ve been interested in for a long time. I don’t think I’ve talked about this before, but I started becoming interested in this question from my work on national security-informed policy. So there’s this phenomenon where if we want to understand, for instance, what would happen if we depose Hussein, or what would happen if we overthrew the Ayatollah in Iran, it’s actually kind tough for us to just go to Iraq or go to Iran or go to Syria and other places like this and do nationally representative polling. And so what people often did is they looked around in the United States, they found people from Iran who were in the United States, or people from Iraq who were expatriates and asked them, “Hey, if we get rid of Saddam Hussein, how will people respond?”

(35:59):

Now a problem with this is that the kind of people who are expatriates tend to vary in systematic ways from the baseline population that’s in that country. It’s part of the reason why they’re expatriates in the first place. Because there are people who don’t fit in as easily with the mainstream culture and politics of the country they came from. And the longer they’re in the United States or some other country, the less representative they become, because they’re just less connected, but often the people who are expatriates don’t understand themselves to be non-representative. They think that they have their finger on the pulse, that they’re broadly like most other Iranians, that they have their finger on the pulse of what most other people from Iraq feel, and so on. And there’s this kind of systematic pattern of blindness that often happens where not only are they not representative, but most of the other people who are in their social networks who are from Iraq or Iran or whatever, are also non-representative.

(37:03):

So they know a bunch of other expatriates in the United States or their family back home who also hates the ruling government or whatever. And so almost all the Iranian expatriates, almost all the Iranians that they talk to, also hate the Ayatollah. And so it’s really easy for them to fall into the illusion that these perspectives are representative. They know all sorts of Iranians, every Iranian they know agrees with them, perhaps overwhelmingly agrees with them on this. And so it’s really easy for them to think that they are in fact representative when they’re systematically not. And this is the kind of a thing which I became sensitized to when I was studying foreign policy national security questions, because this problem actually contributed to some of the big intelligence failures and strategic blunders in the national security foreign policy arena.

(37:51):

It also really messes up our understanding of a lot of domestic issues. So you have the same kind of situation where a lot of people who are the kind of black writers again, who are themselves typically from relatively affluent backgrounds or they’re biracial or they’re Afro-Caribbean or whatever, but they self-identify as just black. And they think of themselves as being broadly representative of black people as a whole. They think that their views and priorities and preferences broadly align with those of black people as a whole. And most of the other black people that they know in these elite spaces and that they talk to, they’re not very often engaging with normie black people. And so all the black people that they know tend to share similar sensibilities and views. And so it’s really easy for them to fall under the illusion that this is just how most black people think because all the black people that they know think and talk this way.

(38:42):

And it’s really easy for white people who work in these knowledge economy spaces to also come under the illusion that these black people are representative of how most black people think, because that’s all of the black people that they know in their knowledge economy, and because these white people are also not just going out engaging with normie black people. And so it’s all the black people that they know seem to support defunding the police and things like this. And so it’s really easy for them to fall into the illusion that this is just a popular idea with black people. And so what often happens for convenience and for other reasons is that if you’re a knowledge economy professional and you want to go, oh, well, what do black people think about the police reform? Rather than conducting or consulting nationally representative survey data, to understand the modal black opinion, which takes a lot of work and efforts and so on, or rather than going out into the affected communities and just directly asking the impacted stakeholders what they want, which also requires a lot of legwork and a lot of effort, what they do is they go, well, let me see what the black writers in the New York Times think and say about this. With the implicit assumption that these people either themselves are directly representative, or must have done the work, because they’re making strong claims in their essays about what black people want, what black people feel.

(40:05):

So they assume that either these people are representative themselves or they’ve done some kind of research to find out, and that’s often not the case. And so we have this problem where you have all of these people who are held up as representatives of various groups, whose preferences and values and priorities are demonstrably not representative of how most people from those groups think or feel. But this is something that most people themselves are unaware of. They’re often not aware of how unrepresentative they are. And this is something that a lot of the people who listen to those folks are also unaware of.

Patrick Lynch (40:43):

So one final question, and we have to wrap it up unfortunately, although I’d like to talk to you for several more hours about the book because again, I would encourage all of our listeners to pick up a copy. It’s really, really insightful. Very, very powerful. You don’t talk a lot in the book about what would be some of the mechanisms, some of the institutional changes, some of the concrete steps that either symbolic capitalists or societies a whole could take to help out people who are in the lower end of the economic spectrum. And really, this is a book that’s implicitly about economics. Do you think the problem is that symbolic capitalists are blocking the use of the public sector or preventing the private sector from effectively helping people at the lower income ends, particularly minorities, racial and ethnic minorities or people of oppressed groups, to make serious economic strides? Is it that they are preventing one or the other or both? Can you elaborate a little bit on that? Have you thought much about that because it’s not really in the book.

Musa al-Gharbi (41:38):

Well, so one of the things I do in the book is I do challenge this fantasy that most symbolic capitalists seem to hold, which is that the real problem in society is just the top 1%, and that if we just tax Elon Musk hard enough, we can fix all the world’s problems. One of the things I show in the book is that one of the limitations of the “taxing Elon Musk hard enough” approach is that it’s actually kind of tough to just take money from the rich and just transfer it directly to the poor. That’s a little more possible now with platforms like GiveDirectly and things like that. But most typically what happens is that when you tax people like Elon Musk, it gets put into institutions that symbolic capitalists control, and we gobble up most of that, and then after we’ve had our fill, we sprinkle the bits that are left on the genuinely marginalized and the disadvantaged such that the people who actually need the help the most often don’t benefit as much.

(42:48):

So, I’ll give quick example of this. One thing I do talk about in the book, at the beginning of the symbolic professions, at the time when the professions were being born in the recognizably modern form…

Patrick Lynch (42:59):

The progressive era.

Musa al-Gharbi (43:00):

The progressive era, yeah. There were these two big changes that happened at once. There was the creation of big philanthropy in its recognizably modern form, major foundations and blah, blah, blah, administrative, all these programs. And then there was also the passage of the income tax, which was successfully defended in the Supreme Court. As a result of these two changes that happened roughly at the same time, there was this massive transfer of wealth from the Gilded Age elites downwards. So far it sounds good. Okay, but where did the money go? So as Randall Collins shows in his book The Credential Society, the primary wealth transfer that actually occurred during this period was from the rich to the upper middle class, symbolic capitalists took from the rich and we gave to ourselves, and there were some programs that were created. There were some ways in which the genuinely marginalized and the disadvantaged were made better off, but not nearly as much as could have been the case, and not nearly as much as would’ve been expected given the sheer amount of resources that were transferred downwards.

(44:00):

This has been a consistent problem also in Marxist and socialist regimes throughout. It’s something that Mikhail Bakunin, a contemporary of Marx, flagged from the outset. He said, you could take the most ardent dedicated revolutionary and imbue in him absolute power, and within a week he would be worse than the Czar. It’s actually not the idea that you would have this group of people that take all of the wealth and resources in society, they get control of them, and then they’re just going to give them all out equally, not taking not one extra dime for themselves, for their own communities, for their own families, for their own institutions, and then they’re just going to step away and live among the regular people as equals. This is the kind of thing that was kind of envisioned by Marx, but Bakunin said, there’s no chance in heck that would ever happen.

(44:50):

And this has actually been the case every time that people have tried to do this kind of a thing, Bakunin has seemed much righter, much more correct than Marx on this. So this is a perennial problem. When we try to take these resources, symbolic capitalists themselves tend to be the kind of big clutch, not the super elites actually. We can take the money from the super elites, but then it ends up in our hands. And then most of it, this has been the consistent problem with a lot of these redistribution schemes. We support redistribution, because of course we would, it means that there’s going to be a lot more resources in our hands. In fact, this is one way (last thing I’ll say on this) in which symbolic capitalists actually differ policy wise from most other Americans.

(45:39):

So most Americans prefer what you might call pre distribution. So they prefer things like high wages and benefits and stuff like that that make redistribution less necessary because they have a job, they have good pay, they don’t need help from the state. This is what most people actually want. Symbolic capitalists, on the other hand, tend to strongly prefer redistribution. This is because redistribution gives us the best of all worlds. On the one hand, we get access to all of this cheap labor. We can exploit these people, pay them really poorly, which allows us to live at a lifestyle above our typical means, because we can exploit all of this service labor, and we’re the ones who exploit it the most as I show in the book. So we can benefit from all of this disposable labor provided by these desperate and vulnerable people, but we don’t have to feel too bad about it because we take money from Elon Musk and make sure they don’t starve.

(46:31):

And so we kind of get the best of all worlds here. We get to exploit the laborers, and we don’t have to feel too bad about it because we take from people who are richer than us to make sure that those people at least survive at subsistence level. So redistribution is really good for us, but that kind of approach is actually not what most workers prefer. There’s actually a lot of research as well that shows that if you just provide people money, so if you do direct transfers of wealth, that tends to work better than a lot of more structured programs. But people like us often have this sense that we know better what other people should want and should need, and that if you just give other people money, they’ll misspend it and so on. And so we like programs that highly structure how people can use the money that create all of these oversights and constraints that try to push people down the channels that we think are in their best interest. And so this is another example of how there are actually these systematic differences even on issues like resource allocation between symbolic capitalists and most other people in the country.

Patrick Lynch (47:41):

And on that Friedman-esque note, we unfortunately must bring this conversation to a close. Musa, thank you so much for taking the time to be here. I would again encourage our listeners to pick up a copy of this outstanding book. Thank you very much for being on the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Musa al-Gharbi (47:55):

It was a lot of fun. Thank you so much for having me.

James Patterson (47:57):

Thanks for listening to this episode of Law & Liberty Podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And visit us online at www.lawliberty.org.