WE HAVE NEVER BEEN WOKE: CONTRADICTIONS OF THE NEW ELITE BY MUSA AL-GHARBI
Princeton University Press, 2024
432 pages
Written September 2024 By Matthew Donovan
In We Have Never Been Woke, Musa al-Gharbi’s method resists easy categorization — it thrives on dispute and risk, crafting a critique that mirrors anti-woke rhetoric while fracturing it. Drawing from a prismatic ideological spectrum, he fuses demographic data with historical analysis, while consciously avoiding centering his own experience. The book’s aim? It seems to rupture progressive epistemic bubbles — not to align, but to pierce — with a near-cynical edge that evades a definitive political stance. He is less activist and more pariah, traversing but alienated from right-wing media and academia alike. This text is one of the first to put wokeness within a historical context longer than a century — a late elegy, endlessly recycling the lexicon of tensions, where wokeness and its antithesis collapse into indistinguishable iterations.
In some respects, al-Gharbi’s work echoes Catherine Liu’s Virtue Hoarders from two years ago, arguing that the professional-managerial class has transformed political struggles into opportunities for virtue signaling, hoarding moral capital while neglecting material inequalities. Expanding on this milieu the following year, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Elite Capture argues that, instead of advancing the causes of marginalized communities, powerful actors manipulate these movements, redirecting them toward symbolic victories that reinforce elite control. al-Gharbi’s book expands the strain of thought, explaining how the “symbolic capitalists” cloak their ambitions in the fabric of the so-called culture wars. Far from the organic uprisings they are marketed as, Al-Gharbi sees these conflicts as struggles among a professional class who mask their status, mask their symbolic gestures, and leave the material conditions untouched. We hold two irreconcilable desires: to be elite and egalitarian. According to al-Garbi, “egalitarian social climbers” cannot exist.
al-Gharbi argues that woke and anti-woke movements are parallel performances, each leveraging identity politics for cultural capital rather than real change. The woke sanctify representation; the anti-woke mock these rituals as defenders of free speech. What begins as anti-woke critique often morphs into alignment with conservative positions. Initially independent, anti-woke figures ally tactically with conservatives against wokeness, but over time they are pulled into the orbit of reactionary ideologies. Engagement with right-wing networks gradually leads to reliance on conservative platforms and resources, transforming these critics into true adherents of the very traditionalist values they once resisted. Both camps, with the exception of those who do not trade their capital for political power, fortify the status quo they claim to dismantle.
One is left to wonder how these symbolic values will be repurposed when progressive cultural cachet shifts. Consider Kamala Harris: Her political choreography epitomizes countersignaling — progressive abortion autofiction, a sidestep on identity politics, a hardline stance on immigration, and a horseshoe politics endorsement of gun rights. This calculated ambiguity allows her to signal in all directions — Democrat and Republican, woke and anti-woke — while, upon her entry into the race, Wall Street surged to support her like a bull run, eager to back a candidate capable of straddling the ideological divide while safeguarding their interests. Symbolic capitalists may soon abandon progressive signaling altogether, opting to become more Republican-coded than Trump, as Harris did by reviving Clinton-era pragmatism that repackaged the 1980s GOP.
. —MATTHEW DONOVAN