The cultural contradictions of wokeness — and anti-wokeness

American elites need to do a better job of making themselves useful. That’s the lesson of Musa al-Gharbi’s new book, “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.” It is primarily a critique of the American left, but it has implications for the right as well.

The book is a shrewd history and analysis of today’s performative politics. Its primary focus is the leftism that now dominates the Democratic Party, but it also highlights a group identity that appears across both left and right: educated professionals with distinctive competences.

The cluster of political positions and communicative moves called “wokeness” is often alien to the people it claims to represent — most black Americans don’t want to defund the police, and virtually no Hispanics identify themselves as “Latinx.” Al-Gharbi writes that “those who are genuinely vulnerable, marginalized, disadvantaged, or impoverished don’t think or talk in these ways.”

Wokeness clearly helped Trump win reelection. Al-Gharbi shows that norms of that sort are predominant among “symbolic capitalists,” educated knowledge workers, who produce and interpret data and tend to be highly compensated professionals — doctors, lawyers, educators, journalists and financiers. They tend to deploy such discourse as a form of “virtue-signaling” and status competition among themselves, with little benefit to the disadvantaged communities they purport to represent.

The professions’ high pay and prestige “have been justified by claims that we serve the common good and, especially, the most vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged in society.” It is because of that shared concern that there are rewards, within the class, for identifying oneself as an ally of those groups. It is a way of showing that one deserves one’s privileged position.

Al-Gharbi is a sociologist, not a political philosopher. Because his task is descriptive, not normative, he never names the deepest cultural contradiction in the phenomena he describes: the knowledge class justifies its privileges by the results it delivers, yet this class increasingly concerns itself with symbolism rather than results.

Al-Gharbi worries about inequality, but inequality is inevitable in a capitalist economy. The interesting question is under what circumstances it can be justified. Here the philosopher John Rawls offers a crucial insight: inequalities are justified to everyone in society if they operate to the benefit of the least advantaged. This is one important justification for capitalism, which has nearly eradicated world poverty.

The emergence of the professional classes, and their claims to power and privilege, benefited everyone. The standard of living of even the poorest rose because of their expertise. The medical profession is the most obvious example: it is a path to wealth, but it has also prolonged everyone’s life, including the poorest people in the poorest countries. Al-Gharbi’s book never poses the Rawlsian question. (Elsewhere he does note that people in societies with weak professional cultures often flee to America.) He persistently emphasizes the “starkly elitist and parochial,” self-serving character of the symbolic capitalists’ claims.

But the benefits of having such a class are hard to separate from the privilege. If people are to be asked to defer earnings for the sake of higher education, they had better be compensated for it. If it’s okay for businesspeople to like money, then it must be okay for the symbolic capitalists as well, though the latter don’t like to talk about it. The real question is whether they are worth what they are paid.

They are worth it — but only if they do their jobs. Here is the real problem with wokeness: It is impairing the capacity of professional class institutions to do what they are paid to do.

The hallmark of all of the professions is instrumental rationality: They deliver results. Medicine reduces morbidity and mortality. Science and technology produce the capacity to control natural processes. Competent finance and business management made America a rich country.

But wokeness is not about results — it is a collection of performative gestures, and the gestures are blunting the useful skills. Universities have become left-wing monocultures. Mainstream journalists are more inclined to spin the news in a way that conforms to progressive priors. Even science and medicine are now self-censoring to prevent the dissemination of facts inconsistent with dominant left-wing narratives. One leading publisher of scientific journals has announced that its publication decisions would be based on whether the editors think the research would cause harm to disadvantaged populations.

The performative virtue-signaling al-Gharbi identifies is not exclusively a phenomenon of the left — the right has its own varieties of destructive symbolism. He observes that there are entrepreneurs of anti-wokeness, who “behave as if condemning, mocking, or deriding wokeness somehow obviates the need for further action on their part in pursuit of the social justice goals they ostensibly endorse.”

More damaging, today’s right has propositions that the tribe demands that you publicly endorse, and even persuade yourself of, even though any competent analysis shows them to be nonsense, such as denying that there are medically necessary abortions. Vaccine skepticism seems to be the next frontier of counter-wokeness. Climate change denial is the most destructive example: Can you imagine what the world might be like if we had enacted a carbon tax in the 1990s?

And then there’s the humming factory of right-wing lies emitted by Donald Trump and Fox News. A 2023 CNN poll found that 69 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters thought that President Biden did not legitimately win the presidency in 2020. Wokeness is smug and irritating, but hasn’t inflicted anything like the level of destruction and misery that these delusions have produced and will produce.

The ideal of professional integrity and effectiveness should unite symbolic capitalists on left and right, because zealots on both sides imperil our missions.

The promise of the symbolic capitalists can only be realized if they operate in political alliance with the working class. Our comparative advantage is that we can genuinely improve lives. Wokeness has created opportunities for Republicans because it drives working class voters away from the Democrats.

But the Republicans will blow their chance if all they offer is their own variety of performative gesturing. Right now, their program is to pare back restraints on pollution and fraud, together with lower taxes, indiscriminate tariffs and immigration restrictions. Economists will tell you that this won’t raise wages, but the economists are increasingly marginalized in the GOP.

To borrow some Marxist terminology: The reality-based community is a class in itself. It needs to be a class for itself.

Andrew Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, is the author of “Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.”

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