Critics Respond to We Have Never Been Woke

A brief sketch of how folks have been reacting to the book plus my thoughts on some common lines of critique.

So far, the response to We Have Never Been Woke has been almost unanimously positive – to a degree that’s almost overwhelming. The book has blurbs from scholars whose work has been hugely influential, such as Richard Florida, Tyler Cowen, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett and Tyler Austin Harper.

Advance praise in the New York Times said that the book heralds my arrival as a “rising intellectual star.”  The Washington Post review said the book establishes me as “one of the most insightful and provocative sociologists” of my generation. One of my absolute favorite book reviewers described We Have Never Been Woke “probably the most incisive and interesting” book that has been written on wokeness. Another emphasized the book is an “exhilarating, challenging, and reflective read that truly is one of a kind. There’s really no other book on ‘wokeness’ quite like it.”

Mother Jones listed We Have Never Been Woke as one of the best nonfiction works of 2024, describing it as an “eye-opening book” that was “prophetically published less than a month before Trump’s second victory.” Thomas Frank, whose work on populism has been a big influence of mine, described the project as “a brilliant book, a masterpiece of relentless, careful, creative destruction” during a book discussion event at NYU.

Truly, wild stuff.

Even more heartening than the positive reception in the mainstream circuit has been the way the book has defied easy categorization across ideological and political lines.

The Reception Across Political and Ideological Lines

Headed towards the book launch, a consistently expressed worry by interlocutors in podcasts, talks, and in conversations with the press was that the book might be hated by its target audience — the people who need to hear the message — while being embraced by antiwoke and conservative people, and leveraged as a tool in the culture wars in a way that was out of step with the intent of the project.

My approach going in was to not worry about this overmuch. As I detail in the text, the perennial joy and terror of putting ideas in the world is that, after a point, they cease to be “yours” and take on a life of their own, which you cannot fully predict or control. You can try to speak out against misuses and misinterpretations – but that doesn’t necessarily stop them (as I illustrate in sections 1.9 and 2.15 if the book, among others).

For my part, I just tried to control what I could control. I sought to answer the questions the book seeks to explore as fully, honestly and fair-mindedly as possible. And I resigned myself to let the post-release politics stuff sort itself out.

It looks like that approach paid off.

To date, the book has been received warmly on the left. Advance praise at HuffPost described the book as “at the same time a serious study of the sociology of culture and one of the most interesting investigations of the woke phenomenon.”  The Guardian called the book “one of the most useful starting points” for understanding the outcome of the 2024 election. Sublation Magazine described the book as a “rigorous, wide-ranging, self-image smashing analysis” that “deserves to be a discourse-shifting, delusion-decimating” release. The Marx & Philosophy Review of Books and Jacobin¹ had great things to say about the text as well.

In fact, the main pushback so far has come from anti-woke and right-aligned critics. Many seem to have gone into the work expecting a brutal takedown of the left and instead discovered a deep study of the political economy of the symbolic professions – a book that analyzes antiwoke and right-aligned symbolic capitalists symmetrically with peers on the left. Rather than a reactionary screed, the text contextualizes the current moment in terms of broader socioeconomic and cultural trends (with a 100 year historical arc that is deeply inconvenient for many right-aligned accounts of “wokeness”²). Although the book is accessible and compelling (as reviewers consistently praised), We Have Never Been Woke is also a scholarly text that dispassionately analyzes society without an interest in moralizing, and which doesn’t lend itself easily to “owning the libs.”  

I’m thrilled to have cultivated a politically and ideologically diverse readership in my years writing for outlets across the spectrum and working for organizations like Heterodox Academy. Anyone who wants to more deeply understand contemporary social problems will likely find a lot to play around with and learn from in this book. However, it seems that folks hungry for culture war fodder have been leaving somewhat disappointed.

Make no mistake: We Have Never Been Woke is discomforting reading for folks on the left. It starts in a really bracing way. It remains challenging throughout, all the way to the final page. The conclusion willfully denies readers any type of closure or catharsis. Yet, interestingly, it was right-of-center readers who seemed to be most troubled by the book’s overall tone…

Am I a Cynic?

One striking element of the book’s reception to date is that many right-aligned and/or anti-woke critics have viewed the book as overly harsh on symbolic capitalists, while most other reviewers praised the book for its charity, grace and lack of judgement.

As an example, Quillette reviewer Jon Kay contrasted my book to Nellie Bowles The Morning After the Revolution and concluded, “Al-Gharbi, the academic, is less charitable, arguing that social-justice sloganeering can serve as a means for elites to hoard symbolic capital while deflecting unwelcome scrutiny of their wealth and privilege.”

National Review emphasized, “Though [al-Gharbi’s] book is carefully argued, extensively documented, and highly persuasive, one wonders: Can the emotions unleashed by the Great Awokening, however hypocritical, be reduced primarily to an expression of class interests? … Haven’t “we” — or at least some of us — tried to be woke?”

Meanwhile, the review for the Washington Free Beacon was titled “The Cynics Guide to Wokeness.” The reviewer claimed, “the weakest point of We Have Never Been Woke is that al-Gharbi can be relentlessly harsh on the woke, and on symbolic capitalists more broadly.”

Self-identified antiwoke writer (and “Grievance Studies” hoax collaborator) Helen Pluckrose agrees, arguing the book exhibits a “distinct lack of charity when evaluating the motivations and goals of others.” (more specifically, she seemed offended at my insistence that the antiwoke crowd is driven by the same mix of dispositions and incentives as the people they define themselves against).³

For contrast, the review (by a left-leaning writer) for Christianity Today declares, “Al-Gharbi repeatedly acknowledges he’s a symbolic capitalist, too. He’s asking his peers to be honest with themselves about their complicity in America’s social breakdown. He doesn’t question their motives or principles, but he does reveal the tension produced when those principles are paired with a very human desire to maintain one’s advantages and to pass them on to one’s children. That gentle example deserves imitation.”

Real Clear Books observed, “Written with a remarkable sense of humility and with charity for those he critiques, his work comes off more as a labor of love than as a polemic.”

The Atlantic declares, “Al-Gharbi is neither an adherent of wokeism nor an anti-woke scold. He would like to both stem the progressive excesses… and see substantive social justice be achieved for everyone, irrespective of whether they hail from a historically disadvantaged identity group or not.”

Mother Jones stressed, “Al-Gharbi’s tome isn’t a rant about ‘wokeness’; it’s a careful study of the highly educated, progressive-leaning world of what he calls ‘symbolic capitalists.’”

Matt Taibbi notes, “We Have Never Been Woke misses opportunities for humor, is heavy on postmodern jargon, and frankly could be a lot meaner. But it’s well-researched and never stops being interesting.”

The UnHerd review emphasizes, “Al-Gharbi declines to offer concrete recommendations. His conclusion that ideological ferment follows predictable cycles seems to suggest we’re doomed to suffer some other madness in a decade or two. Yet his personal behavior — especially engaging in dialogue with a wide range of audiences — suggests a certain optimism that it’s possible to be a better symbolic capitalist, and perhaps also forge a healthier symbolic capitalist culture… In eschewing the self-aggrandizement and moralism typical of woke and anti-woke literature alike, al-Gharbi offers a model for others to follow.”

Not everyone hoped others would follow my lead.

For some reviewers on the right, the charity I extended to mainstream symbolic capitalists – the fact that I took their sincerity at face value and merely described their ideology and its operation in the world rather than seeking to evaluate whether their beliefs were “good” or “bad” or “right” or “wrong” – this was something they found frustrating.

For instance, the review at Front Porch Republic noted, “Probably to his credit, al-Gharbi puts the best possible face on a reality that is variously amusing, infuriating, and even occasionally relieving… the considerable merit of al-Gharbi’s book is in its fearless commitment to detailing who benefits from wokeness. Its main drawback, I think, lies in its periodic avoidance of the reality that, at least in many cases, the causes championed by woke elites are seriously detrimental to human flourishing and would be even if their champions were so selfless as to pursue them for no personal gain whatsoever.”   

The Wall Street Journal review likewise stressed,⁴ “Mr. al-Gharbi’s effort to move proudly analytic symbolic capitalists to analyze themselves is important. He is mainly in the business of describing, not moralizing, but the self-serving blindness of woke symbolic capitalists seems like a moral failing.”

As a review for the Russell Kirk Center put it, “Al-Gharbi is at pains to point out that he is not accusing symbolic capitalists of insincerity in their advocacy for social justice. But is he justified in excusing them? Are these people really ‘true believers?’ I have no doubt that they have convinced themselves that they are, to a great extent so that they can hold onto their power and prestige with a clear conscience. But isn’t this more a case, as Aquinas would have it, of a corruption of the intellect through sin? …al-Gharbi does say that while symbolic capitalists are sincere about their belief in social justice, it is simply far less important to them than their own status. But I do wonder if this is a distinction without a difference.”

As part of avoiding strong normative claims about “wokeness,” the book also declines to provide people with any sort of guidance on how they should behave. There’s no preaching here. No solutions offered. No checklists of advice. Its purpose is to help people see something they didn’t see before. What to do with that knowledge is something that is outside my job as a social scientist. Declining to offer this prescriptive content is something that reviewers on the right also found annoying.

For instance, the Law and Liberty review emphasized, “Readers on the right may be tempted to lick their lips with schadenfreude at this thorough and devastating indictment of woke elites, but to do this would be to miss al-Gharbi’s intended point… his brief treatment of conservative and anti-woke symbolic capitalists is not any more favorable. Though they occupy slightly different niches in the symbolic economy and espouse different ideas, they wield those ideas toward the same end, namely, to secure their professional status at the expense of those below them on the social ladder. This brings me to my key critique of al-Gharbi’s work, which is phenomenal overall… Since We Have Never Been Woke is written by and for symbolic capitalists, one might hope for more targeted guidance on what responsible symbolic capitalism would look like.”

Put simply, while some right-aligned readers saw cynicism and ruthlessness in the work, most center and left reviewers saw lots of charity and grace – even as other right aligned critics thought the book went way too easy on symbolic capitalists and their ideology by eschewing moralizing in favor of thick description. With respect to tone, your mileage may vary.

However, setting aside these manners of taste, I’ve been asked few times now in reviews, interviews and talks about whether I see myself as a cynic. Let me answer that directly “on the record” here.  

In Ancient Greece, cynicism was an intellectual and social movement comprised of people dedicated to telling the unvarnished truth – without any concern for decorum or taboos. They highlighted that the desire for comfort, predictability, wealth, and status often interfered with human flourishing (eudaimonia). Rather than bringing us fulfillment, chasing these false idols typically rendered people miserable, anxious and unsatisfied. Worse, attaining these empty “goods,” typically in a fleeting manner at best, often came at the expense of others.

To drive these points home, cynics highlighted the absurdity and futility of pursuits people often dedicated themselves to. They pointed out contradictions between what people said they wanted or valued versus how they were actually structing their lives, or how they were actually investing their time, energy and resources.

However, and this is critical, the cynics were fundamentally optimistic. They argued that it is absolutely feasible to achieve fulfillment in this life. In fact, they argued, living a good life is a lot simpler than we’ve been led to believe. It’s accessible to virtually anyone willing to shed superfluous things that we’ve been conditioned to erroneously view as important.  

In that sense, the Ancient Greek sense, I could definitely see a kinship between my project and cynicism. Of course, there is also a lot of overlap between cynicism in this sense and, say, the preaching of Jesus (as many scholars have noted). On this account, it is perhaps fitting that We Have Never Been Woke closes by evoking Jesus of Nazareth (spoiler).  

But of course, this isn’t what folks generally mean when they paint me as a cynic or ask me if I identify this way. With respect to the modern (pejorative) sense of the term -- no, I am not a cynic.

As many reviewers noted, the book takes pains to emphasize that mainstream symbolic capitalists are not cynical either. They’re sincere in their pursuit of social justice. However, it’s also the case that egalitarianism is not their top priority (especially relative to attaining, preserving or enhancing an elite status and lifestyle for themselves and their loved ones).  

With respect to the question of whether I’m pessimistic about humanity or the human condition, here I think a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald is helpful, “One should… be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” This is roughly where I land on many of the problems explored in the book.

The text is relentless towards mainstream symbolic capitalists because, as highlighted at length in chapters 4 and 6 (and on this Substack), symbolic capitalists are masters at motivated reasoning – far more than most others. Given any kind of slack, loophole or “out” we find ways to exempt ourselves from analysis — we find pathways to embracing arguments of a book like this while convincing ourselves that it’s actually about “others.” So I provided no quarter.

Likewise, the book is focused narrowly on “us” and not other contributors to social problems because symbolic capitalists have immense difficulty controlling our tendencies towards “whataboutism.” Indeed, if readers are eager to hear how people other than mainstream symbolic capitalists are responsible for social problems… they can read just about anything else mainstream symbolic capitalists produce analyzing said problems. There’s not a lot of value added by me adding more self-serving narratives to the heap. The book instead tries to fill in the parts of the picture that are systematically neglected.

In a similar vein, the book doesn’t spend a lot of time praising symbolic capitalists because we praise ourselves plenty when we talk about ourselves in most other contexts. Indeed, many other works studying the rise and impact of symbolic capitalists have been so positive at time of publication that their authors have felt compelled to issue correctives later, acknowledging that, in fact, we play a major role in fomenting social dysfunction. I decided to skip straight to the “corrective” phase of these others’ works. But, for folks interested in what I think is actually good about symbolic capitalists and our social order, see here. 

Finally, the book doesn’t close with easy solutions because I don’t think there are any. I wanted people to sit with the weight of the challenges we face -- the immensity of the task before us -- if we’re really committed to our expressed social justice goals. And again, I assume that most of us are sincerely committed.

The problems we face are big. But symbolic capitalists are far from powerless. To push us past our tendencies towards feigned helplessness and poverty larping, I dedicated a whole chapter of the book (Chapter 3, and much of Chapters 5 and 6 as well) to illustrating how symbolic capitalists have immense influence over institutions and society. If we’re actually determined to make things otherwise – if we’re willing to accept risks and costs, to exert genuine and disciplined effort to change things – then it is absolutely within our power to transform society. Some tentative thoughts on what that might look like will appear in a separate essay soon.

Who Cares About Hypocrisy? (Not Me!)

I don’t think hypocrisy is particularly interesting as an analytic matter. I stress this point explicitly in the introduction to the book (pp. 21-22), and repeat this point throughout.

The goal of We Have Never Been Woke is not to “expose” left-aligned symbolic capitalists as hypocrites (as though anti-wokes or conservatives are not just as bad!). As I’ve emphasized elsewhere, these kinds of attempts at “unmasking” (usually accompanied by uncharitable and non-reflexive motive-mongering) are not particularly valuable outside of scoring points in the culture wars.

We Have Never Been Woke does illustrate a lack of correspondence between symbolic capitalists’ words and deeds – not for the sake of trying to “own” anyone – but because symbolic capitalists are elites. As elites, the distance between what we profess and what we do is of significant practical consequence to lots of other people, including and especially those who are genuinely marginalized, vulnerable and disadvantaged in society. And so, if we want to understand how many social problems come about and persist, who benefits from them and how, then we need to study the actions and behaviors of elites, and how those relate to their legitimizing narratives. That is what the book is trying to do.

In the service of this project, I analyze antiwoke, conservative, and mainstream symbolic capitalists symmetrically. Sections 1.5 through 1.6 and 2.16 highlight how right-aligned and anti-woke symbolic capitalists share similar psychologies and orientations towards politics as the “woke” people they condemn. Indeed, virtually everything in Chapter 4 of the book (explicitly!) applies just as much to right-of-center symbolic capitalists and their mainstream peers. In these same sections, I highlight how Great Awokenings often give rise to “antiwokeneings” and devolve into culture wars. Critically, I stress, the people who drive “antiwokenings” tend to be structurally similar to the people who drive “Awokenings” – with participants apparently motivated by a similar mix of goals (sincere commitments to improve society supervened by desires to enhance status, wealth, power, etc.).

Not everyone has loved this. On social media, and at least once at a talk (so far), I’ve had antiwoke folks fume because I shrugged off hypocrisy per se, and/or because I analyzed folks like themselves in an equivalent manner as the “wokes” whom they define themselves against.

Others somehow deeply misunderstood the project of the book, and seemed confused that I brought up conservatives or antiwokes at all. For instance, the Institute for Family Studies review began by describing symbolic capitalists as, “white-collar workers… academics or nonprofit employees or government functionaries… al-Gharbi argues this class of people will never be paid that much—certainly not as much as the bankers and consultants or philanthropists with whom they associate.”

Again, I dedicated an entire chapter of the book (Chapter 3) to dispelling precisely this narrative. I emphasized at length that, although symbolic capitalists like to say stuff like this (“we live such poor and humble lives”), it’s nonsense. We get paid a lot compared to normie workers. And have much higher social status, better benefits, better working conditions, and many other auxiliary benefits too. It is deep ignorance of how most other workers live that allow us to think we’re “poor” or “ordinary joes” (by comparing ourselves to folks like Jeff Bezos instead of clerks at Wal Mart). As I take pains to illustrate, even “exploited” symbolic capitalists tend to be much better off than most others in America. We’re not “in the same boat.” And what’s more, we don’t want to be. “Great Awokenings” are, at bottom, revolts carried out when elite aspirants do actually find ourselves facing the prospects of normie lives and jobs. It’s a prospect we militantly recoil from. That’s a big point of the book, emphasized over and over, so its striking that the reviewer somehow missed this.

Moreover, literally all of the folks the critic tries to juxtapose in that paragraph are symbolic capitalists! It doesn’t make sense to juxtapose bankers and consultants from professors and journalists, because bankers and consultants are symbolic capitalists too! Millionaires and billionaires are increasingly drawn from the symbolic professions as well. I repeatedly and explicitly include consultants, finance bros, et al. in the symbolic professions throughout the book (and on this Substack for good measure). And I have a whole section of the book that starts by highlighting how millionaires and billionaires are increasingly “us” — and in any event, almost everything the “1 percent,” “multinational corporations,” et al. do is with “us” and through “us.”

Awokenings happen because of tensions within the symbolic professions – they are fundamentally power struggles between established elites and frustrated elite aspirants -- and they were very pronounced in all of the fields named by the reviewer. McKinsey, JP Morgan Chase, and the nonprofit sphere went super "woke" in the 2010s as well (just ask former GOP presidential nominee Vivek Ramaswamy, who has written two books on this topic!). And they underwent an Awokening simultaneously and for the same reasons as higher ed, journalism, and other symbolic fields.

I say this not to drag the reviewer (whose review was very kind on the whole!), but because these are very important points for others to understand. Similar realities hold for the reviews’ misguided discussion around hypocrisy. Again, I’m explicit that I don’t care about hypocrisy at all. Yet, towards the end of the review, the critic claims:

“Though he notes that most symbolic capitalists are liberals, he also notes that most of what he will say also applies to right-leaning symbolic capitalists because they, too, attach great significance to language. It’s an odd point since most of the book is not in fact about symbolic capitalists’ primary focus on language but rather how different their language is from their actions… In an otherwise deeply researched and observant book about his own milieu, it seems odd to have a throwaway section about another group with whom al-Gharbi seems to have little familiarity. Perhaps he believes this seemingly evenhanded approach will save him from the wrath of his symbolic capitalist colleagues. I wish him good luck with that.”

Working in reverse order here, I’m famously unconcerned about the wrath of my colleagues. The idea that I would throw in criticism of the right for that kind of petty purpose is silly on its face: I publish articles about how research and journalism is biased against Trump and his supporters, how DEI is typically counterproductive, and calling for deeper engagement with conservative and religious thought. I served as the communications director for Heterodox Academy. I’ve published articles in National Review, The American Conservative, and other right-aligned outlets (although, I’ve also, previously, been cancelled by Fox News… so… you know… I’ve really experienced all angles of the right).

This deep engagement and charity with the right – and the fact that I grew up in a conservative family and community (as the introduction to the book discusses) – these realities not only falsify the notion that I’m super concerned about seeming pure to my peers, they also highlight cleanly my deep familiarity with conservatives — pace the author’s claim to the contrary. The evenhandedness that the reviewer criticizes (criticizes!) is not an attempt to ingratiate myself with my colleagues. It’s an attempt to tell the truth in a comprehensive and fair-minded way.

More to the point, it’s just false that the book is primarily about hypocrisy. You don’t even need to read the book to know this, you can just check out the jacket cover which reads, “Al-Gharbi’s point is not to accuse symbolic capitalists of hypocrisy or cynicism. Rather, he examines how their genuine beliefs prevent them from recognizing how they contribute to social problems—or how their actions regularly provoke backlash against the social justice causes they champion.”

We Have Never Been Woke is an exploration of how social problems come about and persist, who benefits from them and how. If right-aligned and anti-woke symbolic capitalists live in similar communities as their mainstream peers, work in similar institutions, enjoy similar lifestyles, and so on – then they are benefiting from and perpetuating these problems the same as their mainstream peers. The fact that they happen to believe and profess different things is completely irrelevant. A big argument of the book is that symbolic gestures, or the contents of hearts and minds – these matter far less than behaviors, relationships, allocations of resources, etc.  And this is just as true for conservatives or antiwokes as it is for progressives.

If conservatives or antiwokes contribute to these social problems but don’t really care, that’s between them and God. Whether or not someone portrays themselves as advocates of the marginalized and disadvantaged has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not they exploit or perpetuate inequalities in their actual lives. It’s the latter thing the book is interested in: how do social problems come about and persist, who benefits from them and how. I’m not interested at all in moralizing about hypocrisy.

But, for the reference, it’s just not true that conservatives don’t have a similar gap between their rhetoric and their behaviors. They absolutely do! Read any mainstream symbolic capitalist outlet (or Google phrases like “Conservatives are hypocrites”), and you can easily be presented with hundreds of examples, with new takes produced daily. But, again, for my purposes, hypocrisy is completely beside the point – for conservatives, antiwokes and progressives alike.

Here I should add: this particular reviewer is not alone in the misplaced focus on hypocrisy. Many, many, reviews and essays about the book (across the ideological spectrum) have focused on apparent hypocrisy. And in interviews, I’ve repeatedly had to reroute conversations away from conversations about hypocrisy. I don’t find hypocrisy interesting, and I’m very explicit about this in the book.

Of course, I understand why folks find hypocrisy to be annoying in others (even if it typically goes unnoticed in ourselves). I get that it’s a sexy thing to talk about when dunking on opponents in the culture war. But that’s not my project at all. Yet, as noted at the outset, a perennial joy and terror of bringing ideas into the world is that people use them however they want, often in ways you couldn’t predict, don’t approve, or can’t control. There’s no way to stop folks from dwelling on hypocrisy, it seems. Even if the book directly and repeatedly tries to discourage this.

All said, though, the reaction to the book among critics to date has been overwhelmingly positive,⁵ really generative, quite satisfying, and occasionally surprising.

Now’s your chance to weigh in: as colleagues Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy stressed in the book, The Ordinal Society, rankings are of major practical importance for whether and how things succeed in contemporary society. If you purchased the book on a site that allows reviews, please take a minute to add your own review when you get the chance. A five-star review (or equivalent) would be great— the more of those the better. But just provide your honest rating when you can, if the purchaser provides a means to do so. With my thanks.

For those interested in diving into the critical reception in greater detail, a roundup of all professional reviews published to date follows below. And stay tuned for additional thoughts on some of the more interesting provocations in some of the reviews and discussions about the book.

Reviews

• Washington Post

• The Atlantic

• Mother Jones

• Library Journal

• The Guardian

• The Unpopulist

• Marx & Philosophy Review of Books

• Los Angeles Review of Books

• Claremont Review of Books

• Times Literary Supplement

• Wall Street Journal

• UnHerd

• Washington Examiner

• City Journal

• Christianity Today

• America: The Jesuit Review

• The Australian

• Real Clear Books

• Racket News

• Sublation Magazine

• Tingis Magazine

• Jacobin

• Dagens Nyeheter

• Axess

• El Heraldo de Mexico

• First Things

• Front Porch Republic

• Law & Liberty

• Mercator

• The Equiano Project

• Hedgehog Review

• The Hill

• Russell Kirk Center

• National Review

• Quillette

• Sydney Morning Herald

• The Arts Fuse

• Commonweal

• The Ideas Letter⁶

• Public Discourse

• The Critic

• Washington Free Beacon

• Institute for Family Studies

Advance Praise

• New York Times

• HuffPost Italia

1. Despite the overall positivity, there was one claim in the Jacobin review that is just incorrect and worth clarifying.

The critic states, “The Progressive Era reformism of the 1910s and 1920s broadly conforms to [al-Gharbi’s] theory, as do virtually all liberal crusades since the late 1960s. Yet al-Gharbi stretches his theory too thin. Bafflingly, he claims the ‘First Great Awokening’ was Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.”

This is not my argument. In fact, my argument is that the First Great Awokening was ended by the implementation of the New Deal, precisely because the New Deal resolved the drivers that gave rise to the Awokening (I argue Awokenings tend to happen when you have a combination of acute elite overproduction + popular immiseration. Both were ameliorated by the New Deal). Much of the criticism that follows in the section entitled “When Did Woke Start,” flows the reviewer (mis)understanding me as claiming that the New Deal was an example of an Awokening. What I hoped to show in that section was that the New Deal was the reason the first Awokening ended. It was put into place, as I note, by a politician that symbolic capitalists were cool towards. But after its implementation, they not only disengaged from a lot of their other activism, but became some of the most ardent supporters of the new establishment FDR ushered in.

Other criticisms in the (overall positive) review were matters of taste or interpretation, or were broadly fair critiques (if contestable). But this one point is worth responding to directly because it inadvertently misrepresents a point that is very important for understanding the broad argument of Chapter 2.

2. Any account of “wokenesss” focused on the unique characteristics of “kids these days” or contemporary ESG mandates, for instance, would be helpless to explain phenomena that have been ongoing for over a hundred years.

More historically-minded right-valanced accounts trace “wokeness” to the 1960s ‘cultural revolution’ or contemporaneous civil rights legislation. However, as We Have Never Been Woke illustrates, there was a Great Awokening prior to any of these developments (in the 1920s and early 30s), and many of the modes of political activism and thought associated with “wokeness” go back more than a century — and developments from the 1960s can’t plausibly be their root cause.

I should add: the right-aligned books in this latter genre also don’t really explain why we have these outbursts of Awokenings at particular moments. Why hasn’t it been constant tumult since the 1960s? Why do we instead see these moments of Awokening and moderation? The most popular historical and genealogical accounts of “wokeness” are ill-equipped to explain these kinds of things.

All this matters in a practical way for politics because, to the extent they clearly seem to have misdiagnosed the cause of (what they view as) a problem, their proposed “solutions” are likely to have lots of unanticipated and perhaps undesired consequences without changing much about the core phenomenon they are expressly concerned with.

Put another way, We Have Never Been Woke provides resources for people to push back against many right-aligned arguments from within conservative and antiwoke interlocutors’ own moral and ideological frameworks. It provides a way to explain to people on the right why many antiwoke political entrepreneurs are probably, at bottom, selling them a bill of goods. If the goal is to eliminate “wokeness,” that won’t be accomplished by, say, eliminating gender and women’s studies programs or dismantling / curtailing the Civil Rights Acts. These kinds of measures do nothing to address the root cause of “wokeness” and would do nothing to prevent a future “Awokening” (and may, indeed, accelerate and exacerbate the next “Awokening” instead). In some cases, people may have additional reasons to want to pursue various political actions — but if the core goal is to “stop woke” (as a law championed by Ron DeSantis put it), then my book shows how many right-aligned folks seem to be barking up the wrong tree.

3. Helen’s review for The Critic is one of the only mostly-negative reviews of We Have Never Been Woke published to date. However, her review seems to fundamentally misunderstand the project of the book.

If you are someone who is really into animals, and you pick up a book called A Jaguar is Not a Jaguar: Why Automakers Lean on Animalistic Imagery, you probably won’t learn much about the diets and habitats of large jungle cats, their closest evolutionary cousins, and so on. However, it would be strange to describe the aforementioned book as a “deeply flawed” study of jaguars because it doesn’t go into these topics. It’s simply not a book about jaguars. It’s a book about how the automobile industry leverages images and associations with animals to enhance their bottom line. To call it a “deeply flawed” book about jaguars is to miss the point of the book entirely.

In a similar vein, We Have Never Been Woke is NOT a book analyzing the sincerity and/ or correctness of beliefs, nor is it a book trying to critique or genealogize and taxonomize a set of ideas. It is a study of the history and political economy of the knowledge professions. Quite explicitly!

In her review, Pluckrose expresses annoyance that the book doesn’t cite or engage with books in the antiwoke “wokeness studies” genre (including and perhaps especially her own). But, of course, the reason my own book doesn’t do this is because it isn’t trying to participate in that genre at all. The introduction of the book spells out quite clearly the intellectual traditions the book is speaking to, and it engages deeply with those traditions. And its endorsed on the cover by prominent scholars who wrote influential works in its core genre (exploring the rise of symbolic capitalists and their growing influence on the social order), such as Richard Florida and David Brooks.

If the critic had read the book in relation to the scholarly tradition it is explicitly trying to participate in (rather than inappropriately trying to shoehorn it into a different genre entirely, and then complaining that the book doesn’t deeply engage with a genre it doesn’t even want to be part of), she may have found it a much more pleasurable read.

Indeed, reviewers have consistently expressed delight in discovering that the book isn’t, and doesn’t want to be, a culture war tract, or a takedown of “wokeness.” Helen, unfortunately, never had this realization. Her priors about what the book is (or should be) were so strong that she instead did the equivalent of reading A Jaguar is Not a Jaguar: Why Automakers Lean on Animalistic Imagery cover to cover, and being perplexed at the end because the book never discussed the ways jungle cats use feces and urine to mark their territory. A lot of the claims the critic made in her review seem to stem from this fundamental misunderstanding of the book and it’s arguments.

For instance, she bemoans the fact that I don’t spend a lot of time taxonomizing, genealogizing or interrogating various belief systems, or arguing for why they’re “true” or “false” or “good” or “bad.” That’s correct! And this is a feature for the book, not a bug. Going into these tangents in We Have Never Been Woke would be akin to the author of A Jaguar is Not a Jaguar spending tons of time talking about the mating habits of large felines. The book isn’t *about* that.

This confusion repeatedly leads straightforward mischaracterizations and misinterpretations of the book and its arguments. For instance, she says “The anti-woke are not conservatives, we are told, without justification, but, confusingly, they often align themselves with the political right. Meanwhile, symbolic conservatives are something else, who mirror ‘mainstream symbolic capitalists’ (the left?) in thinking that words, ideas and symbols are very important.”

In reality, the sections of Chapter 1 she’s referring to stress that antiwoke, conservative and liberal symbolic capitalists all take words, ideas and symbols far more seriously than most other Americans. They all engage in politics in pretty similar ways, for pretty similar reasons. Additionally, symbolic capitalists of all ideological stripes tend to share pretty similar lifestyles, live in similar communities, and work in similar institutions. As a consequence, basically everything I have to say about mainstream (liberal and leftist) symbolic capitalists holds just as true for antiwokes and conservatives. They should all be analyzed in a symmetrical way. That was the argument in the sections she’s commenting on. The goal wasn’t to show how these various groups are different, but how they’re the same. Her characterization literally inverts the point of that section.

This misrepresentation seems to be a consequence of the fact that she thinks the book is “about” wokeness, and is assuming I’m ineptly trying to taxonomize different belief systems in these sections. I am not. These sections in the first chapter are instead oriented towards briefly sketching out rival factions within an overarching elite formation — with a particular emphasis on what these different actors hold in common (to help folks understand how they are, in fact, part of the same broad elite formation).

A similar misunderstanding seems evident with her discussion of “leftists v. liberals.” To save time, I’ll simply urge readers to compare her characterization of my argument with the actual content of the book (pp. 36-38, “The Symbolic Mainstream”). Incidentally, this is another case where the critic takes me to be attempting some belief-based taxonomy when, in fact, the explicit point of that section is (once again) that what matters for the purpose of my project is people’s lifestyles, behaviors, relationships and social engagements — not their feelings or beliefs. Liberals and leftists, I argue, enjoy similar lifestyles in similar communities. They share similar modes of political engagement (and tend to vote for the same candidates to boot). Consequently whatever difference they have in feelings or beliefs is somewhat irrelevant to my project.

In fact, a central argument of the book is that beliefs and feelings matter a lot less for understanding society than attending to things like behaviors, relationships, social structures, and allocations of resources and opportunities. The book takes for granted people’s sincerity, but also stresses that sincere feelings don’t necessarily determine actions, and independent of actions, sincere feelings don’t matter much.

We Have Never Been Woke is focused primarily on things that can be directly observed “from the outside” — what people say, what they do, the correspondence (or lack thereof) between the two. I’m really not interested in the contents of hearts and minds at all. I don’t attribute nefarious motives to anyone. In fact, I stress repeatedly and consistently that symbolic capitalists are neither cynical nor insincere. However, acknowledging this fact isn’t inconsistent with recognizing that people often leverage these discourses in ways that enhance their standing, undermine their rivals, and so on.

Indeed, virtually the only time I talk about psychology and cognition in the book is when I’m trying to help readers understand how people can simultaneously

1. Be sincerely committed to “social justice” (however defined)

2. Actively benefit from, exploit, and perpetuate the very social problems they decry, and leverage “social justice” discourse in the service of their ideal and material interests, AND simultaneously

3. Remain convinced that they are the “good guys,” and that the problem are “those people” who think, feel and say the “wrong” things about race, gender, sexuality, and so on (even if they benefit less from the prevailing order and exert less influence over the systems and institutions than “we” do).

That is, I only talk about “hearts and minds” at all to explain how people can mobilize “social justice” in self-serving ways without being cynical or insincere.

In “the Discourse” we often assume that if people mobilize beliefs in instrumental ways, they must not be “true” believers. The book emphasizes that this is a strange way to think about thinking. The consensus in psychology and adjacent fields is that our brains seem fundamentally geared towards advancing our interests and furthering our goals. If we take this point seriously, we can see that there’s no contradiction between believing something sincerely and mobilizing it instrumentally. If we have an interest in believing something, we’d be more likely to sincerely believe it. And we’d try to get other people to believe and profess it to. Interest promotion and sincerity are not in any kind of fundamental tension — they typically travel together. This is something I repeat over and over in the text.

From the introduction through the conclusion, I explicitly assume that people are

1. Sincere in their expressed beliefs, but

2. They are also oriented towards enhancing the wealth, status, and prospects for themselves and their affiliates.

Simply granting both of these premises simultaneously is the position that most closely approximates the contemporary scientific consensus about how humans perceive and think about the world. It also allows me to quickly dispatch with fruitless debates over who the “real” social justice advocates are, who the “true” believers are, and so on. I’m not interested in those kinds of debates at all.

[That said, I’ll note that it’s a bit rich for the author of a book entitled Cynical Theories to clutch her pearls and accuse me of being uncharitable. Especially because the chief source of her outrage is that I noted how antiwokes seem to be pursuing a mix of goals when engaging in activism… just like progressives, conservatives and everyone between — including myself. For heaven’s sake, the book is called We Have Never Been Woke, not You Have Never Been Woke, or They Have Never Been Woke.]

Unfortunately, despite being really repetitive with these points throughout the book, they seem to have been lost on Helen. She characterizes me as saying antiwoke people are especially “bad” (when, in fact, I stress they’re no different from other symbolic capitalists. This is what she actually seems to hate). She says I describe people as cynical or insincere, despite me emphasizing over and over in the text that symbolic capitalists are typically well-intentioned and believe what they say. She slots the work into a genre it doesn’t even try to be part of, and then critiques the work for being a “flawed” entry into that genre. None of these are matters of taste or interpretation, they’re just straightforward misrepresentations of what he book actually is and says.

It’s a wild review!

4. The Wall Street Journal review is overall very positive. I’m honored and flattered! It contains one critique on tone — arguing that I perhaps should have been a little more judgmental about the subjects of the book. Towards the conclusion, it also contains a brief empirical criticism, namely:

“As social science, We Have Never Been Woke sometimes overreaches… for the awokening that started in the mid-’60s, the evidence doesn’t neatly fit the thesis that elite economic dissatisfaction helped launch it. For example, Mr. al-Gharbi observes, citing the economist Richard Freeman, that only 6% of doctorate students graduated in 1958 ‘without specific career prospects,’ compared to 26% in 1974. That could suggest that the labor market for college graduates worsened in the run-up to the second awokening. However, Mr. Freeman’s comparison isn’t between 1958 and 1974. It’s between 1968 and 1974. That’s consistent with Mr. Freeman’s analysis, which finds a bust for college graduates starting around 1969. But that bust came too late to ignite Mr. al-Gharbi’s second awokening.”

Quick response:

The critic caught a typo here. That sentence in the book should say 1968, as the original source does. Perhaps the reason I didn't catch the typo despite the rounds of editing is that, if you change that line in the book to say 1968 instead of 1958 -- it really actually doesn't matter. It doesn't change anything about the substance of that sentence, and it doesn't in any way interrupt the argument of that paragraph. 

Here it’s worth emphasizing a more substantive point about the timing of the 1960s Great Awokening: the chapter says that what precipitated the massive unrest in the 1960s was the changing of draft laws in 1965 (the second Awokening was from the mid 60s through the early 70s). And then, a subsequent financial crisis made it tough for elites to get jobs, ramping things up further. The chapter lays it out precisely this way, as a sequence of circumstances, and then discusses at length how one way the first two Awokenings were different than the latter two is because, in the first two incidents, elites didn't just face economic pressures related to overproduction, they also faced a real prospect of being deployed into a war.

This is a more drastic crisis for elites than economics: a tough job market is one thing. Possibly getting killed, maimed, or mentally scarred for life is a whole other matter that much more severely threatens their ability to live the elite lives they expected and aspired towards.

Put simply: the first two Awokenings are tied to two distinct but co-occurring crises for elites: elite overproduction and the prospect of a draft in the context of an ongoing or impending war. This latter element of elite crisis was eliminated by Nixon after the second Awokening, precisely to help bring said Awokening to an end (successfully) -- as the book discusses in great detail. And so, the element that cuts across all four Awokenings is the elite overproduction. The latter two were driven exclusively by economic pressures for elites:  they no longer had to fear getting pulled into wars. And, perhaps not coincidentally, antiwar activism did not play a central role in subsequent Awokenings. 

I was a little surprised that the critic somehow missed this point in the book because I, personally, feel like this was robustly emphasized in the sections about the first and second Awokenings. But the reviewer is a sharp cookie, so I’m also perfectly open to the idea that this is something I could’ve somehow been a little clearer on. In interviews since the WSJ review came out, I’ve begun spelling this point out more explicitly (how the elite crises of first two Awokenings differ from the latter ones) when discussing the drivers of the Great Awokenings, — under the assumption that this is something that may have been insufficiently explicit in the text. But it’s definitely on the page — and I suspect any readers who were primed with, say, this essay will notice these points immediately in the text (the question is: would they have caught these points where it not for this intervention?).

5. The first review that I would characterize as “negative” was published in Public Discourse. It’s an extremely perplexing review, to the point where it’s genuinely unclear to me if the critic actually read the book. I don’t say this lightly!

I’ll walk through a couple examples:

The author claims, “Al-Gharbi seems to adopt a Marxist understanding of ideology in which ideas are generally false and misleading, capable of mystifying class relations and serving the material interests of the dominant class(es). He would do better to embrace Louis Althusser and instead see the object of ideology not as the listener but as the speaker. In short, professionals are mystifying and legitimating themselves to themselves.”

In fact, the argument of my book is precisely the Althusser argument he says I should make. Nowhere in the book do I claim that symbolic capitalists widely succeed in manipulating the masses. Instead, I repeatedly stress in Chapter 3 (“Rich, White and Blue”) and Chapter 4 (“Tempest in a Teacup,” “The Curse of Knowledge”) that the primary consumers of symbolic capitalists’ narratives, and some of the only people being persuaded by them, are symbolic capitalists themselves. I spend a whole chapter of the book (Chapter 6) showing how symbolic capitalists claims about social justice mystify inequalities to symbolic capitalists themselves — and demonstrating how these inaccurate understandings among elites have negative consequences for the people we want to help. I stress throughout the book and my other work that “normies” absolutely do not buy into our preferred narratives about the world — this is, quite explicitly, a key source of the legitimacy crisis our professions face.

In short, the reviewer creates a straw man of my argument here, and then takes the actual explicit argument of the book and presents it as an objection to this strawman. Wild stuff!

In multiple other places, the reviewer claims things are absent from the book that are, in fact, quite present. For instance, the reviewer treats it as some kind of unsolved mystery why “young, educated men’s self-interest in avoiding the military draft plays a central role in al-Gharbi’s explanation of the awokenings of the 1930s and late 1960s to early 1970s, yet it plays no role at all in the awokenings of the late 1980s to early 1990s and of today.”

The answer, of course, is obvious: there was no military draft in the 80s or today! The book spends a lot of time, multiple full pages, explicitly detailing how Nixon ended the draft during the second Awokening to help break the movement. Successfully. And after that, elites no longer faced a prospect of being drafted into a war, and as a consequence, subsequent Awokenings were driven exclusively by economic issues. Because subsequent elite crises did not involve the prospect of being drafted into a war, antiwar activism became peripheral to the third and fourth Awokenings. Again, this is something I discuss at length, so it’s truly a bizarre “objection.”

Likewise, the reviewer says “Wokeness is not the only intellectual–moral structure of the professional class. In fact, it is not even the primary one. Al-Gharbi overlooks meritocracy and the role that merit—particularly intelligence and intellectual achievement—plays in professional class culture.”

It’s strange to say that I overlook meritocracy, when I dedicate multiple sections in Chapter 4 (The Curse of Knowledge; Disciplined Minds) walking through symbolic capitalists’ explicit narratives about intelligence and intellectual achievement, showing that they these narratives, in fact, do not map on well to reality. I acknowledge and rather aggressively try to dismantle our understandings of “merit” in a direct and protracted way.

Moreover, I dedicate three full sections of the book (‘Woke Capitalism’ in Chapter 4; ‘Backwards in Heels’ and ‘The Rich Get Richer’ in Chapter 5) detailing at length the relationship between “identitarian” claims and “meritocratic” claims – showing how the former reinforce the latter. The exact words “merit” or “meritocracy” or “meritocratic” appear roughly 40 times in the manuscript – or roughly once every 10 pages. The idea that the book does not discuss “merit” is silly and bizarre.

At least five full sections of the book – nearly a full chapter’s worth of content (in a six-chapter book) – are dedicated to directly explicating and debunking symbolic capitalists’ preferred narratives about “merit,” and then showing how “meritocratic” discourses relate to the “totemic capitalism” stuff. According to many lines of thought, these two legitimation discourses are in fundamental tension. But as I detail at length in the book (and have repeatedly emphasized in other publications as well) – in fact, the “identitarian” and “meritocratic” legitimation narratives are complementary and mutually reinforcing.

The reviewer notes, “As al-Gharbi himself recognizes, the fundamental social justification for the professions is effective public service.” Not only do I recognize this explicitly, I go on to illustrate at length how our own actions and behaviors reinforce and exacerbate many of the social problems we claim to be committed to solving. I dedicated an entire chapter of a six-chapter book (Chapter 3) to driving this point home. So, again, the idea that the book doesn’t take seriously or address claims about “merit” and “efficacy”… It’s genuinely astonishing!

The rhetorical force of the book is precisely rooted in demonstrating that despite our claims of efficacy, etc., and despite the immense socioeconomic and symbolic capital at our disposal, we have not, in fact, delivered the goods.

Elsewhere, the critic claims, “The failure of American awokenings to accomplish material change for black Americans or the working class does not mean that they have had no material effects at all, however. Here al-Gharbi both undersells his theory of intraclass struggle and ignores many significant demographic changes within the professional class.”

This is another set of truly wild claims. The book explicitly notes in the introduction that one of its big contributions is to recognize and analyze the growing diversity of contemporary elites (pp. 13-14). And the book delivers on this promise by dedicating one full chapter of a six chapter book (Chapter 5) to exploring how the growing diversity of the knowledge professions transformed struggles over power and status within those professions. So the idea that the book “ignores many significant demographic changes within the professional class” is… something.

The book focuses on how some people from institutionally dominant groups (whites, men, etc.) pretend to be something they aren’t in order to appropriate “totemic capital.” But it emphasizes, at length, that this is not something unique to the institutionally dominant groups. “It isn’t just whites like Krug, Dolezal, and Seltzer who attempt to enhance their position by playing to these scripts, often appropriating experiences that are not their own. Elites of color regularly do the same” (p. 244). This point is then hammered home at length, focused exclusively on non-whites and other minoritized identity groups.

The review says I paint non-whites elites as helpless victims who don’t have any real influence or control – despite stressing at length how non-white elites, in fact, do exert significant power and influence. For example, from page 265:

“Put simply, symbolic economy elites often do defer to consecrated voices from historically marginalized and disadvantaged populations. Consecrated intellectuals and creatives really do influence how elites think and talk about the world. They largely ‘set the agenda’ for what the most pressing issues for their group are perceived to be; their modes of analyzing and talking about issues are rapidly and widely adopted by mainstream symbolic capitalists; their outputs are widely disseminated and used by everyone from corporations to K–12 public schools.”

I go on to stress that less advantaged elites are still elites, and I actively dismantle claims made by black, queer, female and other symbolic capitalists that present themselves as helpless victims, while the people with “real” power are the cisgender heterosexual straight white men.

The review is filled with many other bizarre and straightforwardly false claims. But I won’t write another book about how this book review was so extraordinary. I’ll close by noting just three quick but telling “criticism.”

The critic states, “there are no novel empirical findings presented in We Have Never Been Woke.”

That is a wild statement. Chapter 2 literally begins with a summary of pioneering research colleagues and I did to measure the “Great Awokening” – demonstrating that there was, indeed, something that shifted after 2011, which can be empirically measured. It’s not a moral panic. It’s not “vibes.” The book extends my published peer-reviewed empirical research by showing that the same patterns hold for arts and entertainment industries (including video games, as I showed on my Substack), and many other realms. This statement is just false on its face.

What’s more, I explicitly discuss the method and contribution of the book in the introduction, emphasizing:

“Methodologically and theoretically, this work draws heavily from an interdisciplinary tradition called science, knowledge, and technology (SKAT). Work in this field tends to be very ‘meta.’ SKAT scholars think about cognition, talk about discourse, conduct research on the process of research, analyze others’ analyses, theorize about theory, and so on and so forth. The emphasis is less on producing novel empirical studies than on reporting on, contextualizing, synthesizing, and criticizing other research from disparate fields. This integrative work often helps us advance our knowledge (and understand the state of our knowledge) much more powerfully than one-off empirical studies. This book, to be clear, will include lots of original empirical research. It will also bring together academic scholarship from a wide range of fields, research produced by think tanks, and occasionally, primary reporting by journalists. Putting together this mosaic should allow us to see something new and important that we would not have been able to perceive by examining any of the components in isolation. And seeing the world in terms of this big picture can, in turn, change how people subsequently understand and utilize the research drawn on here, or any new pieces of scholarship that others produce that might help us expand the picture further.”

The reviewer seems to acknowledge that the book, in fact, accomplishes this task. But he still presents the intended and explicit methodology of the book as if it’s some kind of original “critique” – albeit, undergirded by a nakedly false statement declaring I conducted no empirical research to write the book.

Strikingly, the critic later argues, “the book is overflowing with empirical claims, all abundantly cited. Should the reader want to evaluate any of those claims, however, she will have to sift through fifty-six pages of references on her own to do so.”

This is presented as a critique, but it’s literally just how citation works! For literally any book that has references, if you want to verify a cited claim, you have to go to the back of the book, find the reference, and then consult that source material. It’s strange to present the normal way citations work as a criticism about the work. Should I have provided less substantiation for my empirical claims? Would that have been “better” somehow?

Finally, the reviewer posits, “Al-Gharbi recently noted that his book ‘has been warmly received on the left.’ I think this is so because the Left does not see itself in al-Gharbi’s critique.”

What’s really striking about this statement is that the author himself links this very Substack post, which summarizes and provides links to all the reviews published to date. If he wondered whether left-aligned critics “saw themselves” in the book, he could’ve just clicked on any of the left-aligned reviews, and been presented with statements like this:

“Al-Gharbi’s tome isn’t a rant about ‘wokeness’; it’s a careful study of the highly educated, progressive-leaning world of what he calls ‘symbolic capitalists.’ That is, it’s a study of us: me, my colleagues, our bosses, our entire industry, the public figures and academic experts we often write about, and countless others with expensive degrees—all trying to leverage our new Bluesky accounts into a permanent place in these collapsing job markets. If you are reading this, it’s likely about you, too, he notes.”

In my interviews, public talks, and in the left-aligned reviews it’s clear that left-aligned symbolic capitalists absolutely do see themselves in this book. They describe it as a devastating and uncomfortable read that hits close to home. They talk about how they see themselves and their institutions and colleagues and friends in it.

But apparently, rather than engaging with the content of the reviews (despite linking to a page presenting them all together!), the critic decided to just riff on what people on the Left ‘must’ think about the book, based on his strong priors. Rather than engaging with the actual content of the reviews, he just made stuff up and argued against that.

It seems like this is basically the approach that was adopted towards his ‘reading’ of the book itself too -- because the text as described in the review is demonstrably and wildly out of synch with the actual book.

6. My response to this review is here.