I recently had a conversation with American sociologist Musa al-Gharbi at an event hosted by the Free Speech Union of Australia. Musa is on tour promoting his book We Have Never Been Woke, a well-researched critique of the New Left from a more mature, economics-focused leftist perspective.
His core argument is that the radical ideological shift across Western institutions throughout the 2010s, now known as the Great Awokening, was never doing what it said on the box. Drawing on a range of datasets, journalistic resources, and theory, Musa presents a case that the Awokening was a cultural revolution of aspiring elites against career rivals within the overcrowded symbolic professions of media, academia, the arts and sciences, NGOs, consulting, finance, and government bureaucracy.
The title of the book, We Have Never Been Woke, points to the awkward fact that the marginalised people Woke ideology claims to uplift never saw any material benefit from the 2010s Awokening, and in many respects are now worse off. The spoils of the cultural revolution went to the already privileged, whom Musa calls “symbolic capitalists”.
If you’ve been following my work, much of the book will feel familiar, but it’s vindicating to see these arguments backed by meticulous data and research. Musa is also an interesting guy, determined to push the left to reckon with its elitist derangements. With his careful, data-heavy approach and backing from establishment strongholds like Princeton and the Open Society Foundations, it seems the power players on the left might finally be ready to listen to a critique.
This would map with many other changes I’m observing on the left since the disastrous DNC loss to Trump. If I’m reading the digital tea leaves correctly, we should see the left continue to move away from abstract discursive theory and toward a more material, economics-driven phase. In the short term, we’re likely to see some of the weirder perturbations of the rainbow blob cut loose, economically socialist voices elevated, and a tacit relationship with the left’s more muscular and violent fringes fostered as part of a broad rebranding effort.
If you want to catch Musa at another stop on his Australian tour, check the Free Speech Union’s website for details. And if you're a paid subscriber to The Process, DM me - I’ll sort you out with a comp.
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