The Passion of the Elites

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He joins

Christine Emba

and

Damir Marusic

to discuss his new book, We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality, and the Rise of a New Elite. Don’t worry: the book is not another culture war polemic. Instead, it’s something much more useful: a work of social science that explains what “woke” means in terms of class and culture in the United States.

In our conversation Musa describes the inner workings of a group that has gone by many different names: the PMC (Professional-Managerial Class), the New Class, the cognitive elite or the symbolic capitalists. This group enjoys higher wages and more autonomy than most workers, and its power is derived from knowledge-based work, which requires (at the very least) a college degree.

Damir thinks that the PMC is merely hypocritical and self-interested, while Musa sees things differently. He argues that while this group has sincere interests in advancing social justice, they also have an interest in maintaining their own elite status. This contradiction is the source of so much of the insanity we see in American society today. Christine presses Musa for details about this insanity: to what extent is the symbolic capitalist class actually sabotaging positive social change, in order to preserve their privileges?

Among the topics discussed is the nature of symbolic capital; whether self interest and political idealism are necessarily contradictory; how wokeness and anti-wokeness have similar incentives; violence and social change; and the economics of victimhood. This practical and illuminating episode will make you smarter about how America works.

Required Reading:

• We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality, and the Rise of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton University Press).

• Alex Press, “On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich” (Dissent).

• Musa al-Gharbi, “Social Movement Requires Force” (Salon).

• Musa al-Gharbi, “The Symbolic Professions Are Super WEIRD” (Substack).

• Musa al-Gharbi, “The Absurd Spectacle at Columbia Occludes the Grim Realities of Gaza” (Compact).

• “Georg Simmel” (Encyclopedia Britannica).

• Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Amazon).

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This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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