Daniel Bell and Me

The sociologist and journalist is a big influence on my thinking – through his work, yes, but also his example

The sociologist Daniel Bell is my intellectual great-grandfather: one of his advisees, Mustafa Emirbayer, was the dissertation chair of Shamus Khan, who was my dissertation co-chair.

One strand of my intellectual lineage flows from Daniel Bell, through his student Mustafa Emirbayer, who supervised the dissertation of my advisor, Shamus Khan.

Each of our work focuses on institutions and processes tied to knowledge and culture production. Each of us has a passion for sociological theory.

Daniel Bell’s journey is also reminiscent of my own in many respects: he had a non-traditional route to and through academia. He attended college off and on while adjuncting, working as a journalist and engaging in private studies. Eventually, he ended up graduating with a PhD in sociology from Columbia University after a book he independently sold was allowed to retroactively stand as his dissertation.¹

Like me (and my mentor, Shamus Khan), Daniel Bell was committed to public sociology – to connecting academic research to the problems and concerns of ordinary people, and talking about the social world in ways that were accessible and compelling to non-academics.

Bell published seminal works in the genre I’m currently working in, charting the rise, behaviors and influence of symbolic capitalists – books that deeply shaped my own thinking on these topics.

As an acknowledgement of my intellectual debt, I helped establish (and currently hold) the Daniel Bell Research Fellowship at Heterodox Academy. The subtitle of my first book (We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite) is a nod to his landmark work, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.

In the introduction to that book (p. ix), Daniel Bell describes himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” As I’ve noted elsewhere, this isn’t exactly how I’d describe my own leanings but, broadly speaking, we’re fellow travelers… at least in our self-conceptions. In reality, at the time Bell published these words, his description of his own politics seemed like a bit of a stretch.

Bell’s early work foregrounded socialist commitments. He worked as a labor reporter. He wrote a great book on socialist and communist movements in America (published in 1952) that, incidentally, well-describes the dialectic between Awokenings and anti-Wokenings (discussing the first Awokening of the 1920s and 30s):

“The Communists, living in the society while seeking to promote a revolutionary movement, sought to maintain their zeal by establishing a psychological distance from the society (by nurturing a wholesale distrust of all institutions as ‘bourgeois’ institutions) and by instilling a combat posture in their adherents. But it was that very distance, and the sense of strangeness it created, which allowed individuals to magnify the fear of Communists and make them such ready targets of hostility during the Korean war and the McCarthyite excesses in American life.” (p. xlii)

A 1972 article summarizing the core arguments of that book (and attempting to signal the likely aftermath of the then-ongoing Awokening of the mid 60s and 70s) continued:

“Communism as a social movement did not, with the brief exception of the late I930’s, achieve any sizable mass following in the United States. Its main appeal, then, was to the dispossessed intelligentsia of the depression generation and to the ‘engineers of the future’ who were captivated by the type of elitist appeal just described. Within American life, its influence was oblique. It stirred many Americans to action against injustices, and left them with burnt fingers when, for reasons of expediency, the party line changed and the cause was dropped. It provided an unmatched political sophistication to a generation that went through its ranks and gave to an easygoing, tolerant, sprawling America a lesson in organizational manipulation and hard-bitten ideological devotion which this country, because of tradition and temperament, found hard to understand. But most of all, through the seeds of distrust and anxiety it sowed, communism has spawned a reaction, an hysteria and bitterness that democratic America may find difficult to erase in the rugged years ahead.”

By the time the article quoted above came out and, indeed, by the time Cultural Contradictions was published, Daniel Bell’s politics had shifted significantly from his early days.

Like many other Jewish intellectuals in the U.S. and abroad, Bell was horrified by the flaccid response by socialists and liberals to the Nazis and the Holocaust.² In the decades that followed, he grew increasingly disturbed by the tendency of leftists and intellectuals to carry water for totalitarian regimes (while condemning their own society as fundamentally depraved).

Not only did many on the left justify, deny, minimize or ignore atrocities by ostensibly leftist regimes but, even when these crimes were occasionally acknowledged, few bothered to interrogate any implications that the trajectories, failures and excesses of these left-valanced regimes might have for their own politics. And for all their talk about class politics, few on the burgeoning “new left” were particularly thoughtful about their own social position (and the responsibilities entailed thereby).

Bell was particularly frustrated by the currents of illiberalism and radicalism on college campuses in the 1960s which, in his view, were driven largely by people of privileged backgrounds who clearly hoped to, themselves, become elites downstream. However, few of these activists seemed to be particularly honest with themselves or others with respect to these facts – leading them to engage in rhetoric and behaviors that undermined the institutions and norms they would need to rely on for any claims to authority they might later hope to make (see pp. 119-120 of WHNBW for a more extended treatment of Bell’s thought on these points). To Bell’s mind, these burgeoning leaders of tomorrow displayed temperaments that were fundamentally unsuited for wielding power. It was therefore important to limit the influence of these erstwhile elites and constrain the corrosive influence of their thought and behaviors.

Operating under these assumptions, Bell became more and more preoccupied with resisting communism and (what we would today describe as) “wokeness.” This placed him and his fellow travelers into a growing alignment with the political right. Gradually, socialist commitments became more muted in his work. Indeed, Bell is now recognized -- alongside Nathan Glazer, Daniel Moynihan, Seymour Lipset,³ Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz -- as one of the founders of neoconservatism.

The neocons, in turn, were responsible for most of the disastrous policy blunders of my lifetime – from the sweeping surveillance state justified in the name of fighting terrorism, to the failed efforts to terraform Afghan society and culture in the aftermath of 9/11 (leading to the death and immiseration of innumerable families and communities in the U.S., Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond…. including the loss of my twin brother).

In his early embrace of neoconservatism, Daniel Bell is not a model, but a cautionary tale.⁴ To my mind, his friend and frequent interlocutor Irving Howe provides a better example for navigating the tensions that led Bell to flirt with reactionary politics (and led many of his peers to outright succumb thereto). Howe, like Bell, emerged as a fierce critic of the “New Left.” But rather than letting his frustrations curdle into alienation, he put his nose to the grindstone to reform the (then) contemporary left from within.

Introducing: a three part series on the left (and my evolving relationship with it)

I’ve been thinking about Daniel Bell a lot lately as I’ve been writing my second book because the process of researching and writing We Have Never Been Woke was disorienting – morally, politically and otherwise.

As I discuss in the opening to the book (pp. 1-5), for much of my adult life I subscribed to the “banal liberal” worldview. If you had asked me who was responsible for virtually any social ill, I would’ve responded “the millionaires and the billionaires” and “those damn Republicans” – and I would’ve understood these groups to be largely coextensive. Therefore, the solution to most social problems would be to help the Democrats win, which would enable them to more effectively tax and constrain corporations and super elites — and ultimately redistribute the captured wealth to the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society.

I no longer see the world this way.⁵

Shifts in political coalitions (that have been ongoing for most of my life but came to a head over the last decade) have upended previous assumptions about which party represents elites. These days, each party represents importantly different elite constellations: the Democrats are aligned with multinational corporations and symbolic capitalists, the GOP with “family businesses” and enterprises focused on physical goods and services. Conventional class analysis has grown less predictive for understanding political, cultural and ideological allegiances than looking at the industry sectors folks participate in and the type of work they do therein. Many other contemporary political divisions (the gender divide, the class divide, the diploma divide, the urban-rural divide, racial dealignment) seem to be proxies for this more fundamental schism. There is no “party of the people” today. It certainly isn’t the Democratic Party.

A reductio ad absurdum proof against the “vote blue no matter who” approach to resolving social problems is that many social problems that are supposed to be mitigated by empowering Democrats are, in fact, much worse in communities that Democrats control with one-party rule. Giving Democrats more power is unlikely to address social problems if said issues tend to be more pronounced in areas where the party exercises a near monopoly on power.

Supporters of the Democratic Party often stress that its faults should be overlooked because the alternative is fascism. But as Orwell stressed nearly a century ago, those who hold themselves up as the bulwark against fascism rarely conduct themselves as if that’s literally true. This remains the case with the Democratic Party today: while branding Trump as a danger to democracy itself, party operatives and leaders adopted indulgent and alienating political messaging and strategies that ultimately led to the election of the “fascist” they were supposed to be protecting us from.⁶ And over the course of the Trump 2.0 administration, many disastrous policies implemented by Trump and the GOP were piloted, justified, endorsed or (at best) met with limp resistance from the “opposition” party.

Small wonder that, even as the public grows increasingly alienated by Trump, the Democratic Party continues to be held in extremely low esteem.

The more I looked at the political world through the lens of my book, the less confident I felt that the problems I was concerned about could be meaningfully addressed through partisan politics. And so, rather than putting all of my eggs into a single political basket, I try to engage with stakeholders across the spectrum on issues I care about.

As my next essay will describe, the process of researching and writing my first book also deeply complicated my perceptions of redistribution as a lever for addressing social ills.

The third (and likely final) essay in this series will be on varieties of contemporary socialism.

All three essays will adopt a more personal and introspective approach than I usually feel comfortable working within — I’m trying something out as I work on book II.

Stay tuned!

In the meantime, one of the big lessons I take from Daniel Bell is that it’s good to let your work and circumstances change you: one’s beliefs, priorities and commitments should evolve along with world events and one’s own deepening understanding of the political, social and cultural realities. But in the process, it’s important to keep an eye on your compass; otherwise, you run the risk of getting lost.

Daniel Bell’s disorientation ultimately led his public persona to stray far from how he conceived himself. He allowed himself to be entangled in movements he later felt compelled to disown.⁷ These are fates I would like to avoid.

1. At the time I attended, Columbia University’s sociology program sought to attract and cultivate people who would push the field in a new direction or put sociology into deeper conversation with other fields. The program was structured to facilitate this. In the first year, all students took the exact same classes to give everyone a solid foundation in sociological theory and methods. After that, there was near total freedom: you could take any class, in any department, at any institution, and it all “counted.” You could replace classes with guided individual studies with professors on areas and topics and topics of interest. I took liberal advantage of this latter option in order to make schooling work with my other commitments.

Nonetheless, my PhD process took longer than I desired or expected because I worked full-time as a comms director for at an educationally-focused non-profit in order to help support my family of four in New York City – and I supplemented my salary and grad stipend through freelance writing and public speaking.

My original department-approved PhD dissertation proposal was a traditional quanty set of studies analyzing public attitudes towards race-targeted assistance programs like affirmative action. I sold my first book and intended to pursue it as a side project while completing my planned dissertation. However, the process of researching and writing the book was very demanding, to the point of crowding out my other projects. And so, when finished, We Have Never Been Woke was retroactively accepted as my dissertation (which had the added benefit of giving it a second, independent, round of peer review from my stellar dissertation committee).

And of course, my path to Columbia was quite unorthodox.

2. Historically, many leftists and progressives, from Marx and Engels forward, embraced eugenics – including in the United States. In the leadup to World War II, U.S. laws and policies with respect to eugenics, segregation, immigration, citizenship and “miscegenation”—advocated for most fiercely by U.S. progressives – were a key source of inspiration for the Nazis (which is perhaps why it is now taboo in many left circles to talk about the influence of genes on social patterns or life outcomes at all).

Meanwhile, U.S. foundations and corporations supported Nazi scientists and Hitler’s regime during the buildup to the second world war (and in some cases, throughout the war). U.S. media widely praised Mussolini, downplayed the threat posed by Hitler, celebrated the Nazi’s provision of infrastructure, jobs, public order and social services, and failed to convey the stark realities of their rule.

As Hitler ramped up his campaign at home and abroad, most Americans – including overwhelming majorities of college students (undergoing an Awokening at the time on many other issues) – rejected the idea of accepting Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. America’s progressive president, FDR, largely declined to criticize Hitler throughout the 20s and 30s and refused to accept Jewish refugees or destroy gas chambers (after the U.S. discovered them in 1942).

Even after the war — when the atrocities of the Nazis were known to the world — the U.S. continued to refuse most Jewish refugees, as did many European countries from whence these survivors were displaced. The creation of Israel (and strong U.S. and European support for a Jewish state), was embraced, in large part, as a way of dealing with this huge population of displaced people without accepting survivors (back) into their own countries.

To put it mildly, progressives, the left, and institutions of knowledge and cultural production did not cover themselves in glory during this period – certainly not in the eyes of American Jews. Daniel Bell was far from the only observer whose perceptions of the left were deeply shaken by the Holocaust. Although most Jewish Americans continued (and continue today) to broadly affiliate with the left, their relationship with the left was durably changed by the the second world war… and many abandoned the left altogether.

3. Much has been made of the fact that most of the founding neoconservatives were Jewish New Yorkers. It is less discussed but, to my mind, it’s super interesting that a huge share were sociologists and most of the rest were journalists (as I’ve noted elsewhere, there is a deep and longstanding relationship between these two fields). I don’t know what to make of this fact, but it’s something that stands out and has been broadly neglected – including in the field of sociology itself.

4. In one of my favorite interviews about We Have Never Been Woke (around 33 minutes in) I walk through some other cautionary tales that have shaped the way I approach public life.

5. As I explained in an interview with John Tomasi, my confidence in partisan politics was originally shaken, of all things, by being cancelled by Fox News… or, more precisely, my reaction to getting cancelled by Fox News:

And then, as I detail in my book, moving to New York City and attending Columbia University really threw a lot of my moral, cultural and political assumptions into disarray, generating the questions that We Have Been Woke sought to answer.

And seeking and providing answers to those questions disoriented me further.

6. In the 2022 midterm elections, Democratic operatives actively boosted extremist GOP candidates because they viewed them as easier to defeat than conventional Republicans. Their calculations were correct: these candidates significantly underperformed and helped stave off a “red wave.” Nonetheless, this strategy betrayed a deep cynicism with respect to their claims about the threat posed to democracy by the elevation of these types of candidates (and of course, in 2016 Democrats infamously adopted a similar cynical strategy that backfired spectacularly, helping usher in the age of Trump). Voters seem to have picked up on this cynicism. It’s likely one of the reasons Democratic narratives about contemporary dangers to the republic largely fall on deaf ears.

7. Despite broadly aligned with the early neocons, Bell consistently refused to endorse or vote for the GOP. Yet, as his peers and the broader movement developed, neoconservatism became more overtly right-wing, more deeply tied to the Republican Party, more militarist and foreign-policy oriented, and increasingly zealous and apocalyptic. Alienated by these trends, Bell eventually disavowed the intellectual movement he’d been associated with … leaving him more-or-less politically homeless.