How the woke transmit wealth and inequality

By Stephen Saunders

Suddenly, America's having a war-on-wokeness. Down Under, where we deny the consequentiality of woke, war on voters continues.

In three days President Trump pulled America from the Paris Agreement and "net zero" emissions, declared a national "energy emergency", suspended "alien invasion", and kiboshed federal "diversity, equity, inclusion" (DEI) programs.

Now check the steady Labor platform and analogous Liberal plan. Regardless of Election 2025, voters get "energy sellout, regressive education, unfair taxation, mega migration, and housing hunger games".

Both sides affect "net zero" – but each refuses to disrupt our ruinous gas-cartel. Though acknowledging immigration to be 70% higher than ever before, Liberals refuse to offer voters low migration.

Yet woke commentary paints Peter Dutton as an ominous Mini Trump of far-right fantasy and hard-right push.

Al-Gharbi's opus (We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, Princeton University Press)offers a reality-check.

Reportedly his book-tour includes Australia. In my dreams, ABC Laura Tingle would showcase him at her Press Club. His book's better marshalled than Eric Kaufmann's The Third Awokening.

Once an Arizona shoe-salesman, the late-blooming biracial author is now a New York sociology-prof. A log-cabin story unlike those of Mr Dutton or Mr Albanese.

Let's tour his chapters.

Introduction

Freshly immersed in Big Apple's racialised "caste system", al-Gharbi was unsurprised by Trump's 2016 victory. His privileged fellow-students were inconsolable.

Though recognising protest upheavals (Great Awokenings) of this century and last, he didn't see these making much difference. Hence "we" [educated classes or professions] have "never really" been woke.

How could elites be egalitarian, when their social-justice hobbies don't solve social problems? Despite "unambiguous" gains for identity-groups, high inequality persists.

On Wokeness

Al-Gharbi invokes French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "symbolic" (cultural, academic, political) capital that has real clout. You can parlay it into financial capital.

He himself is now a symbolic capitalist. You too, maybe, if even bothering to read him.

History rhymes. The Bible, al-Gharbi reminds, warns against "performative" righteousness. The Puritans had their Elect and Damned. "Noblesse oblige" and meritocracy paper over privilege.

"Woke" as a term supplants "politically correct". What does it mean? The author lists these kinds of indicators:

Identifying as an "ally" of special (disadvantaged) groups, "aesthetically embracing" diversity and inclusion, validating identity and subjectivity, "recognising" one's privilege, embracing "unconscious bias", tightly focusing on special-group disparities.

Ordinary people "don't talk or think like this" but symbolic capital can and does.

It has birthed supposedly altruistic professions like journalists, social scientists, economists, urban planners, human resources.

The super wealthy – top 1% – allow those in the next 20% a handy share of the loot. Contingent upon them "managing" economy and society, pro the 1%.

The Great Awokenings

Incidentally, this chapter underlines the perverseness of Labor ever-expanding university education.

Like Kaufmann, al-Gharbi locates Awokenings in the 1960s, 1980s, and 2010s. Even a fourth, from the late 1920s, ameliorated by Roosevelt's New Deal.

The root cause is "elite overproduction".

A surge of disaffected youth builds - wannabe symbolic capitalists. Though they protest vociferously – an Awokening – they don't shift unequal "institutions and allocations of resources". Things settle, as the economy somehow absorbs them. Rinse and repeat.

In al-Gharbi's take, what heightened 1960s US protests wasn't so much Vietnam War itself, or civil-rights. Only when college-enrolment ceased to afford draft-deferral did middle-class kids "radicalise".

The author deploys stats tables plus 100 pages of notes and references.

Evidencing America's latest Awokening, post 2011, he cites exploding numbers of BA holders, suddenly rising media coverage of prejudice and discrimination, heightened white-liberal advocacy around race and ethnicity.

Here's what's really driven the discontent: nearly half of upper-middle-class children born in the 1980s failed to replicate their class position by age 30.

Seeds for yet another Awokening exist. But (Table 2.1) most US job-growth through 2030 is lower-paid service occupations not plum college-track jobs. Implying tougher competition, over slimmer pickings.

Symbolic capitalists are "always" left of Americans generally. Awokenings intensify that.

The "social justice sinecures" in US universities and government don't equalise society. Decreasing socioeconomic equality has attended increasing gender equality.

Symbolic domination

As America angsts over the 1%, the 20% "opportunity hoard" to protect and bequeath their symbolic (and financial) capital.

At Table 3.3, which excludes government, America's production economy is still a big GDP value-add (44%) compared with the knowledge or "symbolic" economy (42%).

Yet symbolic-economy firms "largely own the rest of the economy and often dictate how it operates".

Their obliging professionals "set the pace…exerting immense influence over the shape, character, and trajectory of society". They can outsource mundane requirements like victuals – even sexual services – to disposable labour like minorities and migrants.

The academic (professoriate) class is "very different" to most Americans. Journalism, as in Australia, gets written "by and for the affluent".

Postmaterial politics

In crass terms, the name of this chapter is Arrogance.

Voting with their feet, symbolic professions concentrate in the "symbolic hubs" of America's trendy cities and university precincts, practising "assortative mating".

Much of the political "melodrama" and media participation plays out within their coterie. Decrying "misinformation", they assume they best know "the facts". Hang on, enjoins the author, they're also tribal, dogmatic, and partisan.

Professionals used to swing Republican. Now it's Democrat.

Compared with society at large, elites in both parties tend pro "market" economically but pro "left" culturally.

When only 3% of Americans had degrees, it was harder for graduates to disengage from the common folk. Now it's a third.

With symbolic capitalism now setting the US economic agenda, research drifting from industry into academia, innovation seems to have stagnated not blossomed. This echoes the US rise-and-fall analysis of Robert Gordon.

Totemic capitalism

Symbolic capitalists have developed a fancy fourth form of capital – totemic. Theirs is a victimhood culture looking to "directly embody" the vulnerable and disadvantaged. Cut out the middleman, as it were.

Men, al-Gharbi ventures, like power, caring less how they make others comply. But group- and status-conscious women increasingly dominate the ranks of symbolic capitalists. Their self-esteem wants the masses to conform "for the right reasons".

In the US, a "black" identity can work in a person's favour, more so if it's multi-racial. LGBTQ persons can also scale the elite ranks. This doesn't of itself mitigate "hardships" faced by the disadvantaged.

"Special group" achievers (not excluding the author himself) may be taken to possess totemic knowledge, insight, morality.

They can become "consecrated" public voices – provided they play nice.

In the US, also here, relatively privileged persons may cosplay at black, first nations, transracial, traumatised, even disabled. They do this for a payoff.

Al-Gharbi characterises symbolic-economy firms as "less diverse" than other workforce sectors. They can compensate via DEI hires.

Mystification of social processes

Like, how symbolic capitalists muddy the waters.

Racial privilege works for affluent whites, al-Gharbi contends, not poor whites.

Being "aware" of privilege doesn't help the underprivileged, hypocrisy being the "ultimate power move".

Mastering woke speak and frameworks can "signal elite status" and "enhance professional flourishing". The symbolic professions can "cancel" non-elites - the reverse rarely applies.

Liberal whites zealously "identify and prosecute" obscure forms of racism. Using twee labels, such as Latinx or BIPOC (black, indigenous and people of colour).

Their policy-discourse expands to embrace minority-elites - yet restricts approval to groups (voices) deemed "credible or authentic". These are forms of moral cleansing.

Large American cities are "more segregated" now than in 1990. This new division derives from deliberate political choices – it isn't a legacy from Mr Nobody.

Similarly, nobody remotely takes the rap for shattering the Australian Dream. Gee, what a wicked problem, sighs federal government and its million-dollar mandarins.

"Wokeness," the author concludes, "does not seem to be associated with egalitarian behaviours in any useful sense."

But, as he also acknowledges, any theories (not excluding his own) are children of their time and place, perhaps handling "some things well and explaining other things poorly".

In that context, many elite views that are associated with wokeness would seem "correct".

For instance, defining the concepts does speak volumes about power-relations. Then there's overreach, lending too much weight to symbols and symbolic "gestures".

Similarly, you can have a modicum of "critical race theory, postcolonial theory, feminist standpoint epistemology, and queer theory". And you can have too much.

Conclusion

Here are key takeaways.

The symbolic professions (or 20%) are legitimised by fake altruism, attracting "ideological, conformist" personalities. Sure, check out Australia's Economics Society or Planning Institute.

The Awokenings are more about frustrated elite-wannabes than justice.

Selfishly, the winners prioritise symbolic "standing" over lesser people's material conditions. More woke = less equal. Rather than innovation, wealthy nations are experiencing "stagnation and declines…dysfunction and mistrust".

Though his is a US investigation, al-Gharbi points to similar analyses of other WEIRD (western, highly educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) nations.

As with Kaufmann, my regret is the scant coverage of environmental (climate) woke. "Committing" to a net zero economy is the ultimate catnip for the 20% or 1%.

How else could this impractical conceit conquer WEIRD nations and minds, so few years after its UN canonisation?

Why else would "Labor" Albanese have "Liberal" Matt Kean chairing his Climate Change Authority? Having simultaneously been NSW Treasurer and Environment Minister, the latter represents "environment repair + net zero" via endless growth. Hypocrite.

Plaudits to al-Gharbi for a notable - but readable - treatise. Not expecting its closing sentiments to sway Australia's power-elite:

"Equality is not something to be believed in but rather something to be enacted…It's something we do."