Are We the Baddies?
How Symbolic Capitalists Ruined Politics
Middle and upper class America has never been more liberal. We ask for pronouns, buy antiracist books for our children, and spent far too many of our waking hours agitating for greater equality online. Yet, racial and gender inequalities in wealth, income, and educational attainment persist. Even worse, the places where middle and upper class America lives (metro areas) and studies (college campuses) are havens of inequality, where well educated, highly paid, and largely left-wing professionals live like royalty on the backs of poorly paid (and often black and brown) service workers. As Musa al-Gharbi puts it, in his provocative new book: We have never been woke.
While I’m only about halfway through We Have Never Been Woke, it seems to me to be that it well explains our collective political fecklessness: Highly educated, creative class workers, whom al-Gharbi calls “symbolic capitalists,” have come to dominate politics.
And I think the problem is bigger than just racial inequality. As we saw during the pandemic, even basic public health politics has become an unproductive mess. In short: We use more sensitive language. We’ve built up large new bureaucracies and created arrays of NGOs staffed with elite college graduates. All the while, major public problems, running from the governance of nuclear waste and urban segregation to kids’ tests scores and racial socioeconomic divides, haven’t actually gotten a whole lot better. How could governments be great again?
Recognizing decades of policy failure helps explain popular dissatisfaction with government. Many of the concrete gains in people’s lives can be explained by good luck and a rising (albeit unequal) economic tide produced by technological advances and overall increasing wealth. Politicians’ main contribution has been simply giving away money to industries to build stuff, along with some incremental improvements, such as Obamacare’s expansion of insurance offerings.
That’s not to say that Congress doesn’t do anything. The national legislature isn’t exactly the completely gridlocked mess we take it to be. Matthew Yglesia calls it the “secret Congress.” While bathroom bills and other hot button issues get played out in front of the cameras and on social media, Congress has passed laws to overhaul Veterans Affairs, ban plastic microbeads, set aside billions for green energy, and raise the legal age to purchase tobacco.
Yet for the more salient, chronic problems, we seldom overcome political gridlock. That has me wondering why. According to al-Gharbi’s analysis, the reason may be that we symbolic capitalists actually undermine political progress, because we claim to be acting on behalf of the downtrodden and oppressed, but really our political actions too often boil down to striving for status.
Keeping Up (Politically) with the Jones’s
Symbolic capitalists take a front seat in contemporary politics. To begin, they dominate online political discussion and social media. It ends up that that “online idiot” you’re arguing with on Twitter is probably a very intelligent, highly credentialed professional.
Symbolic capitalists are overrepresented in most activist activities, including “Not in My Backyard” movements. Symbolic capitalists led Black Lives Matter and the Occupy Movement. The latter had no effect on policy and deflected from all the wealth and opportunity horded by the top 20 percent of citizens, while the former pushed for policies that were actually unpopular with black people.
It’s unsurprising that elites dominate political participation. What is fascinating is that the growing preponderance of symbolic capitalists in political spaces has seemingly only made it more difficult to hammer out durable compromises for many political problems.
That is probably explained by the fact that symbolic capitalists tend to be far more dogmatically ideological and dismissive of their political opponents, but they’ve only recently become large enough to function as a political class. The Democratic Party now largely caters to this sizable minority of the population. Reading al-Gharbi’s analysis, it’s hard not to conclude that most political progress probably happens despite the participation of “high information”, symbolic capitalist voters and influencers, rather than because of them.
Symbolic capitalists can only afford to be so dogmatic, so willing to gum up the political machinery until all their demands are met, because they don’t actually face a real pressing need to solve chronic political issues. They are largely elites who live relatively comfortably compared to the rest of the population.
For instance, while no doubt some non-tenure track or “contingent” college faculty make poverty wages, many are merely being underpaid compared to other symbolic analysts. At my own institution, an adjunct that managed to secure a full-time load would make almost exactly the New Mexico median salary. Full-time, non-tenure line instructors make 40 percent more than that. That’s not to say that such a salary isn’t hard to live on. I had to make due with a paltry TA stipend and then a bottom quintile assistant professor salary for most of a decade. But low-paid college teaching is decidedly not the same as digging ditches or stocking Walmart shelves. Many of the poorest symbolic analysts are actually doing alright, relatively speaking.
As al Gharbi describes, symbolic capitalists face relatively rare threats to their well-being: periodic economic downturns or the threat of being conscripted. Their proposals to fix inequality, such as forgiving college loans, are often more for the benefit of their own class than those who are truly impoverished.[i] While their political clout lefts them fight inequality in self-serving ways, the relative affluence of symbolic analysts enables them to harness politics as just another means to quest for status. While once the elite distinguished themselves through their consumption choices: fancy clothes and gaudy chandeliers, today’s elites seek to be conspicuous through their political stances. Public problems and the people affected by them “are largely abstractions for us,” notes al-Gharbi, “little more concrete than the principles we are trying to score points for.”
Even on the anti-“woke” side, politics is increasingly reduced to its symbolic elements. Katherine Cramer’s work on rural resentment finds that, despite the heavy subsidization of small town America by urban wealth, many red county conservatives are consumed by the perception that urbanites have turned their back on them, that metro area professionals and politicians disrespect them and their way of life. And, it should be noted, the staunchest Trump supporters have been rural county business owners and managers, people often rich enough to own boats but otherwise shut out from the country’s power centers in metro areas. Political polarization in America is ultimately an intra-elite problem.
Often Donald Trump gets blamed for turning politics into entertainment. For instance, some observers are aghast at recently leaked texts showing high-level administration officials seemingly to only care about “optics” when deciding to bomb the Houthis in Yemen. Strategy wasn’t simply an afterthought but hardly a consideration at all. But al-Gharbi alerts us to the fact that politics has long been a kind of reality show, a striving for popular clout. The Trumpists’ version is just crasser.
The Way Out
We’ve written in the past on so-called clumsy solutions. These are policy answers to complex problems that try to combine opposing moral visions of the causes and solutions to society’s problems. For instance, France’s initial abortion policy gives conservatives a partial moral victory by requiring a one week waiting period and that the woman certify (without having to supply evidence) that procedure was necessary and not elective, while otherwise making the procedure legal.
Given that symbolic capitalists primarily engage in politics on a symbolic level, even if pursuit of those symbols actually harms the people they claim to want to help, shrewd partisans should work tirelessly to advocate for policies that are symbolically clumsy, which allow multiple sides to see their preferred principles at work. Leftists committed to actually reducing police shootings would pair seeming restrictions with additional support, like beefing up internal affairs departments alongside greater funding for non-lethal methods.
We symbolic capitalists might end up learning a lot by having to adjust our own demands and strivings in the face of opposition from the people that we claim we want to help.
That’s a step in the right direction, but the typical dogmatism of symbolic capitalists (along with their educational training) probably means that they’ll sniff out any sign of clumsiness and decry the betrayal of what they know to be the right political principles.
The most durable solution to that problem might be to create governing bodies that explicitly limit their number of symbolic capitalists allowed to participate. Multiple countries have experimented with “citizen assemblies,” within which non-politicians try to figure out solutions for pressing problems. But I suspect that few of them have explicitly tried to match the educational make-up of the society being represented. In the US, that would be that the majority of people participating would *not* have a Bachelor’s degree.
I can’t guarantee that the debates happening in such a body would be less dysfunctional than those between todays woke and anti-woke symbolic capitalists, but it’d at least be dysfunctional in a different way. At a minimum, it should help set political agendas and highlight solutions that are more like to solve the problems that America’s least privileged citizens face. And we symbolic capitalists might end up learning a lot by having to adjust our own demands and strivings in the face of opposition from the people that we claim we want to help.
In any event, We Have Never Been Woke is a rare book, one that targets symbolic capitalists directly and tries to wake them up to their own privilege, and not in a virtue signaling way. There have been several passages so far that have felt like gut punches, where I felt my pulse race as I realized how self-serving (if not pointless) many of my own engagements in politics have been. And the world will be better served, I think, if as many symbolic capitalists as possible effectively become class traitors, deemphasizing our own parochial theoretical commitments in order to genuinely put our expertise in the service of less privileged citizens.
[i] In New Mexico, in-state student tuition was long covered by the Lottery Scholarship, which was, in effect and on average, a tax on the poor and working class to subsidize the education of the children of symbolic analysts. No doubt it has also helped first generation rural and Native American students climb out of the bottom quintile, but we can easily imagine alternative policies to more specifically target those demographics.
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Thanks for the book recommendation!