On Inequality and Socialism

The final essay on how my moral and political views evolved while researching and writing We Have Never Been Woke

Sociology has historically been a capacious enterprise. In recent decades, however, the field has narrowed considerably. Many areas that were foundational to the discipline (such as religion, morality, social cohesion) have become marginal. As I elaborated in a recent (~10 min.) talk:

Click to expand on each screenshot from the talk

Work on inequality has crowded out other research (with inequalities tied to race, gender and sexuality occupying more attention than socioeconomic inequalities per se).¹ Almost any phenomena analyzed by contemporary sociologists is framed in terms of social inequalities. To illustrate, roughly 80 percent of articles published in contemporary flagship sociology journals these days touch on inequality:²

This work is often moralizing and is regularly framed in terms of social justice advocacy. For instance, the theme for the 2026 annual meeting is, “Disrupting the Status Quo: Putting Sociology to Work for a More Equitable Society.”

In reality, however, sociologists produce very little empirical work on how to practically improve life chances for working people and the poor. Contemporary sociologists analyze and describe social problems in great detail. We identify and measure new axes and instantiations of inequality, even in the most minute and niche contexts. But for all that, we dedicate comparatively little effort to conceptualizing, testing or raising the salience of plausible tactics to mitigate societal challenges, leaving us with little to offer policymakers, activists, non-profits or other stakeholders who are focused on solving concrete problems for actually-existing people in the real world here and now.³

We Have Never Been Woke (WHNBW) was my PhD dissertation, and had to be defended to a committee of prominent sociologists for me to graduate. Then, in order to be published by a university press (which was a necessity for my job prospects), the work had to be peer reviewed by a separate panel of respected scholars in the field. This was my first book and, therefore, my introduction to the wider discipline for those as-yet unfamiliar with myself or my work. My job market talks would also, necessarily, be tied to this project. And so, for all the big swings it takes, the book also follows many contemporary disciplinary norms. This was necessary to make the book legible, and to be accepted, as a significant contribution to sociology.

Commensurate with disciplinary norms, the book is descriptive rather than prescriptive. It is focused on social problems and does not present solutions or articulate a thick positive vision of society. To the consternation of some, I argue almost entirely within popular frameworks of the discipline (extending the arguments and findings of feminist standpoint epistemology, critical race theory, queer theory and so on to what I view as their logical conclusions — taking their core premises for granted rather than problematizing or rejecting them). The book focuses intensely on inequalities – how they come about and persist, who benefits from them and how. My answers to those questions may be unique and disconcerting, but the questions themselves were broadly “on brand” for the discipline.

This approach paid off… literally. The book was published by a prestige university press with a generous advance. It has so far enjoyed solid citations and positive reviews and media coverage. The press has moved more than 25k copies to date across formats, generating well over half-a-million dollars in sales.⁴ Interest has been so widespread and persistent that I’ve spent the last two years touring across the U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand to talk about the book and its themes. The success of the first book allowed me to easily place my second book. In the process, I secured a tenure-line job at an R1 research university and I’m going up for tenure as we speak (in roughly half the typical time for tenure-line appointments).

Within the discipline, I did an interview with Contexts (the public-facing magazine of the American Sociological Association or ASA) that became the most read and watched interview they’ve ever done to date – followed by a separate interview with the ASA’s culture section magazine. During the 2025 ASA conference, I joined a panel on normativity in the discipline (organized by the History of Sociology and Social Thought section) and completely filled the space – standing room only and tons of energy – with conversations that spilled into the hallway for a long time after the session. I also moderated a special panel about politics on campus at that same conference. In the 2026 Eastern Sociological Society meeting, I’m slated to appear on a presidential panel, “Teaching About Difference.” Last year, I was selected to give the keynote for University College London’s annual sociology conference. The year prior, I delivered the keynote for UMass Boston’s annual sociology research symposium. I’ve been invited to participate in tons of sociology colloquia across the country, and I’ve taken part in as many as I could.

Long story short: the book is a clear success story in terms of strategic communication. It has been very well-received within sociology and beyond. It has provided tools for constructively talking and thinking about important social developments. The information it conveys is true and genuinely interesting. I’m proud of the book. If you haven’t read it yet, you should definitely give it a spin.

But for all that, as a condition of its success, the work embodies some attributes of contemporary sociology that I personally view as suboptimal⁵ – to include an inordinate focus on inequality per se.

Deuteronomy 15:11

To be sure, inequality can be problematic.

Extreme inequality can allow elites to disregard -- and facilitate them losing touch with -- the preferences, views and experiences of ordinary people. As inequalities grow more pronounced and the interests and experiences of elites and non-elites diverge, insofar as institutions favor elite priorities, they can grow increasingly unresponsive to large swaths of the public too.

To the extent that ordinary citizens recognize this growing gulf and come to feel like they don’t have a voice or a stake in social systems or institutions, they tend to mistrust those entities and their representatives (and grow more receptive to conspiracy theories involving the same). They also become more supportive of unconventional political entrepreneurs who promise to bring those systems or institutions to heel (or destroy them outright).

In a similar vein, in contexts of high inequality, it can be easy for elites to engage in corruption, opportunity hoarding, nepotism and regulatory capture or to cling to positions well past their prime – reproducing and enhancing their own position at the expense of the proper functioning of processes and institutions, while undermining opportunities and mobility for others.

Most people are content to be judged on their merits (ability, skill, effort, ingenuity), even if this leaves them in a worse position than others (who are more talented, creative, ambitious, and so on). Likewise, people broadly find ways to make peace with outcomes driven by providence or chance. However, to the extent that people come to feel like their prospects are adversely shaped by a game that’s rigged in favor of others who don’t have to play by the same rules – many would rather kick over the board than to indulge in that type of farce. The perception that normal processes are inadequate to deal with these problems (or in fact, reinforce them) makes people more receptive to nihilism and extremism.

In these senses and others, inequality can contribute to, or exacerbate, social problems. But is inequality, itself, a social problem to be eliminated? Or is it an inevitable social reality to be managed? The answer seems less than obvious to me.

For one thing, inequality is deeply connected to economic growth and dynamism. It’s hard to increase the latter without growth in the former (although policy decisions can offset this to a degree).⁶ Inequality is also deeply connected to scale and complexity: it is difficult for societies to support large and diverse populations over broad territory without inequalities emerging. In fact, inequality rarely sees rapid, dramatic or lasting declines below a certain threshold outside of cataclysms that durably level everyone down (e.g. violent unrest, foreign invasion, plagues, famines, environmental catastrophes).

As socialists Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr. illustrated, a tight focus on disparities can often introduce new forms of injustice while leaving more pressing and foundational problems unaddressed (I also expound on this theme in the introduction to WHNBW).

Marxist sociologist Vivek Chibber and socialist anthropologist James C. Scott have both detailed how attempts to centrally plan and manage the economy – trying to coerce the world into approximating an ideal distribution, Bed of Procrustes style – consistently (and likely inevitably) ends in disaster.

These realities were not lost on Karl Marx, who recognized that people have different levels of ambition, ability, ingenuity and determination. They have different priorities, preferences and desires. They make different decisions with how they allocate their time, energy and resources. Inequalities of various sorts tend to naturally emerge as a result of these differences – and in his view, these inequalities were not incompatible with a just society. In fact, Marx argued that “equality of outcomes” is an absurd and undesirable political goal – one generally pursued through morally unacceptable and practically untenable means.

And for whatever it’s worth, aggressive attempts to level all outcomes tend to be unpopular with lay citizens too.

Working People Aren’t Haters (Usually)

As has been consistently noted by scholars, working class people often resent and mistrust symbolic capitalists because there are many ways we directly antagonize them in their day-to-day lives. However, they don’t hate the rich. In fact, they often admire wealthy and successful people and are entertained by the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Normie folks don’t care much about inequality per se under most circumstances. Most are far more concerned about poverty, exploitation,⁷ insecurity, stagnation, condescension, or unfair processes than they are about whether or not others have more wealth or income than they do. That is, they care about other problems that often exacerbate or are exacerbated by inequality; in that sense, inequality can be understood as a symptom of some problem they actually care about. However, the fact that all people are not the same in most respects does not, itself, trouble most overmuch.

To the extent that people engage in social comparison, they tend to look to others in their immediate context for cues to what is normal rather than focusing on trends outside their social group and community or focusing on people far “above” or “below” them. And, to the extent that folks do engage in social comparison, they’re mostly concerned with being at (or a little higher) than what they perceive to be “average.” They’re satisficers, not maximizers. As such, they’re not enraged if (especially, distant) others have more than them so long as they and their loved ones have enough to get by comfortably.

In contexts of opportunity and dynamism – if folks see pathways for upward mobility for themselves and others, and if they and the people they care about aren’t struggling to survive – most are generally untroubled by inequality as such. The happiest countries on planet earth tend to be places with lots of millionaires and billionaires but low levels of poverty and corruption.

Generally speaking, it’s only when lots of folks are struggling, the economy is stagnant, the future seems bleak, and elites and institutions seem to be insensitive to their plight that regular people start to notice and care about inequality per se -- especially if we’re talking about macro inequalities.

For symbolic capitalists, however, their attention to disparities tends to be far more intense and less conditional – often to a degree that undermines their life flourishing, their subjective well-being, and their ability to have normal interactions and healthy relationships with regular people.

Symbolic capitalists’ lives and livelihoods are tightly oriented around what we know, who we know and how we’re known. Status and status differences matter more to us in a very literal sense. Critically, unlike wealth, status is basically zero sum. As I explain in WHNBW:

When people are engaged in an actual or perceived zero sum competition, they regularly adopt a posture that Nietzsche aptly described as hostility towards life: they grow obsessed with ever-more minute differences, slights and (dis)advantages. Rather than continuing to strive towards what they view as good, beautiful or important, folks become focused on negation and control. Flourishing gets subordinated to the goal of taking others down a peg.

An example of zero sum thinking from the Bible (1 Kings 3: 16-28): as anti-life as it gets (and the origin of the phrase “splitting the baby”).

Research has found that zero sum thinking is correlated with support for redistributive policies and affirmative action. Other correlates of zero-sum thinking include being a strong Democrat, being at either pole of the income or education distributions, living in a city, being male, being under 50, or identifying as black or Hispanic.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Americans most prone to zero sum thinking are basically the same blocs of the public that are most likely to self-identify as “socialist.”⁸

However, socialism need not be zero sum in theory or practice.

Positive Sum Socialism

There is a tradition of socialist thought that recognizes that success is generally a product of an individual’s effort, discipline, persistence, ingenuity and cultivated ability but also unearned advantages, the confluence of favorable circumstances, the efforts and support of others and/or public infrastructure and investments. Success is rarely not a product of individuals’ talents and effort. However, it isn’t purely (or in many cases, primarily) a product of individuals’ attributes and labor either. It’s virtually always both/ and rather than one or the other.

The fact that success is generally achieved with and through others means that prosperity should be shared as well. There shouldn’t only be a few people who benefit from a collective endeavor — even if the level of benefit is proportional to one’s contribution to an enterprise (and, therefore, not equal). It is appropriate for individuals to be rewarded for their extraordinary accomplishments and contributions, but no one should be succeeding at the expense or to the exclusion of the rest of society. No one should be allowed to privatize gains achieved with and through others while socializing risks and costs onto everyone else.

This same strain of socialism insists that we shouldn’t have “working poor”: if someone is working full-time they should be able to live a decent life on their wages. People who genuinely can’t work because they’re infirm, disabled, old, children shouldn’t be destitute. In the event of market caprice, economic downturn, layoffs, exogenous shocks, people should be some kind of social safety net and insurance policy that keeps households afloat. Citizens’ basic survival shouldn’t be hostage to circumstances beyond their ability to predict or control. Opportunity hoarding and regulatory capture among the affluent should be constrained to promote economic dynamism and social mobility.

This approach to socialism recognizes, on the one hand, that people are not atomistic entities who create themselves and can flourish independently of others. Instead, persons are products of society who are embedded in societies. But this does not mean we’re indistinguishable from or reducible to the communities in which we belong, or that purported ‘greater goods’ can be obtained at anyone’s expense without regard to their personal dignity, autonomy and aspirations.

This form of socialism is concerned, above all, with the practical flourishing of actually-existing people living in the real world here and now. Gains that are supposed to accrue to collectives, abstractions or hypothetical entities don’t matter if they fail to tangibly assist (or if they come at the expense of) flesh-and-blood persons in particular contexts navigating their life circumstances.

As Orwell noted, insofar as normies support socialism, this approach is what they seem to have in mind: its goal is not to make sure that everyone is equal in every respect, but to make sure that everyone in a prosperous society can live a decent life.

To the extent that this version of socialism is concerned about equality per se, it is equality in the political and legal sense: Competitions should be open, transparent and procedurally neutral. Systems, processes and institutions should work more-or-less the same for everyone. It shouldn’t be the case that people from certain demographic or political blocs operate with impunity – unbound by rules and norms that govern most -- while others are tightly surveilled and policed or provided inadequate protection from others’ sadism, bigotry or interference.⁹ It shouldn’t be the case that the wealthy and well-connected can subvert institutional processes, bend leaders to their will, and impose their preferences on everyone else while large blocs of the broader society have little effective representation. Institutions should be accountable and responsive to the people who comprise them.

This is a demanding set of expectations for institutions and the law. But it is also, at bottom, compatible with significant levels of organic social differentiation and non-trivial material inequalities.

Because this form of socialism centers the dignity and flourishing of persons (over collectives), recognizes the value of markets for mitigating information and coordination problems, but insures against market risks and failures through robust social safety nets, while prioritizing equality under the law over other forms of egalitarianism – this tradition is most typically referred to as “liberal socialism.”¹⁰

Discursively, liberal socialism tends to be optimistic in its orientation – focused on broad-based growth and flourishing over zero-sum struggles. It is oriented towards a positive vision for the present and future — unlocking possibilities — instead of litigating and trying to rectify the past. Rather than quibbling over blame for social problems, advocates focus on solutions to those problems.

Liberal commitments orient advocates of this version of socialism towards consensus-building. They emphasize what unites people over what divides them: superordinate identities, shared values, common goals, overlapping interests. Commensurate with their liberal ethos, they emphasize persuasion over coercion (even though this often entails more incremental change over a longer time horizon than an illiberal approach might).¹¹

Liberal socialists tend to be morally ambitious but pragmatic: they seek significant change through the disciplined transformation of actually-existing systems and working within particular cultures, histories and traditions rather than predicating their vision on a societal blank slate (presumably established through nihilistic revolution). They work with people as they are, rather than basing their approach on idealized agents or a theorized new type of person who will emerge in post-capitalist societies.

This approach to socialism has a robust and proud track record. Many may not recognize this reality because “radical” socialist accomplishments are now baked into most contemporary liberal societies.

For instance, people used to routinely work 12-16 hour days or more. Six or even seven-day workweeks were not uncommon. In the late 19th century, the typical industrial worker put in 100 hours per week. Many struggled to get by despite spending most of their waking hours laboring. Socialists declared that this was unacceptable. They insisted that all workers should be entitled to at least 8 hours of sleep every day, and 8 hours of time to use as they wished – and they should have days off to spend with their families or recuperate. Hence, work should be contained to no more than 8 hours per day and five hours per week, and wages should allow workers to support themselves on 40 hours of weekly labor. This was perceived as a radical or utopian demand at the time — an unworkable set of expectations that many predicted would ruin the economy and place extreme strain on industries and employers. Resistance was fierce (and sometimes bloody). Yet, in Capital (Vol. 1, Ch. 10), Karl Marx marveled at how effectively and how quickly socialists in America elevated the cause of the 8-hour day nationwide – a cause that had been slower to catch on in Europe. Now the 8-hour day (with overtime compensation above 40 hours a week) is standard in the U.S. and most other Western liberal countries. Thank socialists (and, ironically, Henry Ford).

Socialist writer Upton Sinclair produced a novel intended to shed light on capitalist exploitation, The Jungle. The book was a runaway success and ushered in new workplace protection and food processing sanitation laws in response to the public outcry over the conditions it described. Other socialists in coalition with progressives would build on these early successes and push developments further. If you appreciate the existence of the Food and Drug Administration or OSHA (previously, the Bureau of Labor Standards), thank socialists.

The Civil Rights Movement, too, was led by socialists, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Baynard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, WEB DuBois and beyond. Socialists have also been at the forefront of women’s rights. If, on the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, you’re proud of America’s progress towards the ideals enshrined in its founding documents, thank socialists.

In fact, socialists’ advocacy didn’t just dramatically improve the quality of Americans’ lives, lift people out of poverty, and save lives – they may have also helped preserve liberal democracy and the market economy writ large.

FDR’s New Deal was created to help stabilize capitalism in the aftermath of the Great Depression, stave off the growing specters of communism and fascism, and consolidate the left into the Democratic Party. In order to achieve these objectives, he implemented huge swaths of what U.S. socialists had been campaigning for: massive public works investments, employment programs, worker protections, wage floors, and much more. As the Executive Committee of the Colorado Socialist Party noted in the early 30s, “Roosevelt is putting into effect most of the 1932 socialist platform.” John Meynard Keyenes was also deeply shaped by socialist arguments and advocacy, and their influence on his policy recommendations is unambiguous.

By integrating socialists’ most popular and ambitious ideas – first into the Democratic Party platform and then into U.S. policy and the broader liberal economic and democratic order -- FDR successfully took the wind out of the sail of socialist movements in the U.S., converting many socialists into banal Democrats as he’d hoped. Nonetheless, it’s important to bear in mind that, as an historical fact, the New Deal was comprised largely of plans that were designed and long advocated for by liberal socialists. When implemented, they radically transformed U.S. society and culture, improved the lives of generations of Americans, and served as a model for many other liberal democracies worldwide. What we understand as banal liberalism today is already a hybrid of classical liberalism and socialism.¹²

In the present moment, however, both capitalism and liberalism again find themselves under strain. It is possible that other “radical” ideas advocated by contemporary liberal socialists – such as universal basic income – may help liberal democracies successfully navigate these crises and once again and, once again, get baked into a new social contract.

Outside of the United States, the Nordic countries provide another good look at what liberal socialism can look like in action: markets paired with robust social safety nets, generous universalized benefits, and broad based public investments to make sure that everyone has a decent standard of living, access to core services (like education and healthcare) and reliable infrastructure. Corruption, nepotism and discrimination are low. Trust in institutions and fellow citizens is high. Life satisfaction is among the highest in the world. The state delivers geopolitical peace and cooperation alongside widespread domestic prosperity and freedom. These countries have some of the highest concentrations of millionaires and billionaires on the planet, but the “floor” everyone else is also high. This is what liberal socialism broadly advocates for.

The goal of liberal socialism is not to punish or limit success, eliminate the rich, or flatten all inequalities but to make sure that all citizens can share in social prosperity and live a decent life. The aspiration is to keep wealth flowing – having it change hands, get spread widely, and be productive -- rather than seeing it consolidated into a small number of coffers and hoarded across generations. Liberal socialism is fundamentally oriented towards growth, economic dynamism and social mobility, expanding opportunities, and protecting personal liberty.

But, of course, liberal socialism is not the only brand of socialism out there.

Authoritarian Socialism

There is another broad tradition of socialism that leans very hard into zero-sum thinking. Its adherents tend to analyze the world in terms of group conflict. They perceive and talk about the world primarily in identitarian terms – nationality, socioeconomic position, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, political party, or some other axis of difference upon which people can be organized for struggle.

Advocates of this approach aggressively fixate on differences between groups, irrespective of whether those disparities are material or symbolic, significant or small. Virtually all inequalities are viewed as presumptively illegitimate (whether differences between populations at the macro level or gaps between individuals who are made to serve as a synecdoche for their respective groups) -- especially if the “wrong” side seems to be in a better position.

Observed inequalities in any particular context are held to be expressions of immoral systems – patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, white supremacy – each of which are, themselves, subordinate to (and expressions of) capitalism. These inequalities, in turn, are held to be the cause of virtually all problems individuals face in their life. By implication, pretty much all problems humanity has ever faced (since even before the emergence of capitalism) can be overcome with this one neat trick of overthrowing the prevailing order (and replacing it with a theorized utopia).

While awaiting the revolution, lawless and selfish behaviors from advocates such as shoplifting, looting and vandalism are justified on the basis of sticking it to the capitalists… even though it tends to be less advantaged people who actually bear the cost of these actions.

Meanwhile, any perceived obligation for advocates to adjust their own lifestyles and behaviors – to make costly sacrifices themselves -- is conveniently sidestepped under the auspices that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” To expect people to take any responsibility for what they can, in fact, control is derided as a capitalist plot to inscribe systemic failures onto individuals – at least when costly obligations are placed upon adherents themselves. As I elaborate in WHNBW (pp. 285-6):

“According to some prominent accounts, America is fundamentally racist, and it always has been. “Progress” has been largely mythological. Injustices are so deeply entrenched and pervasive that nothing short of revolution can rectify the situation. Smaller ameliorative measures may even be counterproductive insofar as they make a bad situation more tolerable, thereby forestalling the dramatic change that needs to happen.

However, revolution does not seem to be on the horizon in the foreseeable future, nor is there an obvious path from the current status quo to a (leftist) revolution. Hence, it seems as though the only thing that the clear-eyed can do is carry on as usual (albeit with occasional pangs of guilt) and regularly condemn the system we profit from even as we continue to actively exploit it.

Arguments like these are superficially radical yet functionally conservative. They allow adherents to feel self-righteous, and to present themselves as deeply committed to substantial change (especially as compared with those focused on incremental and piecemeal reforms, whom they often mock), while neutralizing any apparent obligation to do anything (beyond saying, thinking, or feeling the “right” things).

Although the people advancing these arguments often evoke ‘systems’ and ‘structures,’ precisely what their pessimism allows them to avoid is any hard thinking about concrete changes that could be made to the system in order to ameliorate social problems—let alone working through specific processes, mechanisms, and consensus-building campaigns that would allow these changes to be successfully implemented. That is, precisely what these pessimists are not doing is thinking in genuinely systemic or structural terms.

This pessimism also tends to be applied in a highly selective manner. For instance, an individual’s vote virtually never changes the outcome of an election, certainly not at the national level. Any particular individual participating in a protest, writing a letter to one’s representatives, or engaging in political discourse online or in other public forums is similarly unlikely to, themselves, influence or overturn the prevailing order in any meaningful way. However, symbolic capitalists don’t tend to assert, ‘If it doesn’t bring about revolution, it’s not worth doing,’ when we engage in expressive politics. We don’t shrink before the apparent futility of our actions when engaging in cosmic warfare over symbols, rhetoric, or partisan struggles (i.e., when we’re doing things that are satisfying or useful for us). Instead, the “drop in the bucket” argument gets conveniently trotted out when we’re challenged to take inconvenient actions or make costly sacrifices in pursuit of our expressed ideals.”

Of course, in keeping with this selectivity, it is emphatically not a capitalist plot to expect “others” to adjust their behaviors, lifestyles and aspirations. Those whom activists fail to sympathize with are viewed as being 100% obligated to do whatever is in their power to rectify social wrongs, even at great risk or expense to themselves. Failure to comply is held up as proof of complicacy with various systems of oppression (white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on). It is only social justice advocates and their favored groups that exist in a moral state of exception.

Operating under this double-standard, adherents slice the salami any way they can to demonstrate unequal distributions of status or resources and then, on the basis of these disparities, insist that the allocations of resources, opportunities and attention needs to be revised… typically in ways that better accord with their own personal ideal and material interests (albeit often in the name of the least well-off).

The explicit goal in these bids is to consolidate power and resources into the hands of the “good guys,” who will then redistribute these assets in a more fair and rational manner. In practice, things almost never work out that way. Instead, the primary beneficiaries of these expropriations tend to be the advocates and activists themselves, with precious little “trickling down” to the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society.¹³

Discursively, this zero-sum approach to socialism tends to accentuate differences and division. It emphasizes the negative, leaning into the envy and resentment that seems to fundamentally underlie it.

The sociologist Helmut Schoeck once argued, “The envious man does not so much want to have what is possessed by others as yearn for a state of affairs in which no one would enjoy the coveted object or style of life.” In keeping with this picture, many socialists seem to care less about helping the least advantaged than bringing low the rich and powerful. As George Orwell put it nearly a century ago:

“Sometimes I look at a Socialist – the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation—and wonder what devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is love of anybody, especially the working class, from whom he is of all people furthest removed… Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred – a queer, theoretical, in vacuo hatred—against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs… the net effect is to give outsiders the impression that there is nothing in Communism except hatred.”

Nearly 70 years before Orwell put these words to page (and roughly a half-century before the 1917 Russian Revolution), Dostoevsky observed this same tendency growing within the bourgeoise. He warned that it wouldn’t end well for anyone if elites continued to humor, nurture or elevate these impulses. This warning is worth repeating today.

Put simply, this darker current of socialist activism is as old as socialism itself. It seems to be most pronounced among elite aspirants whose lives and life prospects fall short of what they feel they are entitled to. It seems to spread most rapidly when “elite overproduction” grows especially acute (see Chapter 2 of WHNBW for more on these points).

Incidentally, this approach to social justice activism also tends to be deeply unpopular. This is, perhaps, why this strain of leftist politics virtually always leans heavily on surveillance, coercion, censorship, social isolation and other forms of oppression (often in the name of liberation) in order to achieve its designs.

In light of these tendencies, it may be most apt to label this tradition “authoritarian socialism.”

Keeping it “Real”

Often, when confronted with negative versions of an ideology, people often try to claim that unpopular exemplars aren’t real adherents (e.g. the Islamic State aren’t really Muslims). I believe this is a dishonest way of describing the world in most cases.¹⁴ It would definitely be inaccurate to pretend as if authoritarian socialists are not “real” socialists.

For one thing, illiberal approaches to socialism share a lot of intellectual lineage with their liberal cousin. For instance, both draw heavily from Marx, with authoritarians leaning even more into his conflict-oriented understanding of society than liberal socialists do. Authoritarians largely ignore Marx’s vision that the only way out of unending struggles between groups over scarce resources was to strive towards abundance, dynamism and growth (to radically increase economic productivity and then spread that wealth around). Instead, they often favor versions of degrowth (to the extent that they talk about growth at all).¹⁵ Authoritarian socialists also fail to heed the aforementioned stern warnings against trying to socially engineer equality of outcomes. Nonetheless, these ideologues are clearly children of Marx. And there are many other common strands that both liberal and authoritarian socialists draw from as well, even if they interpret and apply these influences in a radically different fashion.

For my money, instead of quibbling over who the real socialists are, it’s more productive to recognize that socialism is many things, much like empire, Christian nationalism, capitalism and myriad other phenomena.

However, a challenge liberal socialists face is that, although not particularly prevalent in terms of genuine allegiance, authoritarian socialism is nonetheless institutionally dominant within many symbolic capitalist spaces – leading to all sorts of unfavorable dynamics, institutional dysfunction and reputational challenges within the symbolic professions. This outsized and negative influence within these highly visible sectors, paired with the historical prominence of left authoritarian regimes,¹⁶ has led many to conflate authoritarian socialism and socialism writ large.

Unfortunately, many on the right and left actively reinforce this error.

Authoritarian socialists often deride the liberal approach as evidence of comprised integrity, weakness of will, or a refusal to take core premises to their proper conclusions. They insist that liberals, basically, are posers. They’re the “real” left.¹⁷

Of course, this suits the political right just fine. They, too, insist that authoritarian socialism is socialism in its truest form – its inevitable endpoint. According to their narratives, liberal socialists are just authoritarians in waiting – wolves in sheep’s clothing – or else useful idiots for authoritarians (who will be trampled underfoot once the door to socialism is opened). The only way to prevent the authoritarians from taking charge, they argue, is to reject socialism wholecloth.

In this way, authoritarian socialists and conservatives collude to present the zero-sum interpretations of socialism as the “real” version.

Yet, when pressed on horrific legacies of left-authoritarian regimes and failed policies, authoritarian socialists will often alternate between carrying water for those regimes and insisting that any excesses they are unwilling or unable to justify are not really socialism because real socialism has never been tried.

In truth, the problem is that there are (at least) two¹⁸ very different approaches to politics that fall under the label “socialism.” Both have been tried in countries around the world. They have very different track records.

Apocryphally quoting Engels, Rosa Luxemburg famously declared that “bourgeois society stands at the crossroads: transition to socialism or regression into barbarism.” Authoritarian socialists’ reply to Luxemburg seems to be, “Why not both?”

Cards on the Table

The process of researching and writing We Have Never Been Woke reshaped my thinking on many moral and political issues – from crime and policing, to redistribution, to partisan politics and beyond.

At the beginning of this series, I quoted Daniel Bell who described himself as “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture.” At the time, I emphasized that this isn’t exactly how I’d describe myself, but it isn’t far off either. I’m now in a position to elaborate a bit.

The first thing to know about my politics is that the only reason I care about politics at all, really, is because my family knows loss from war. This experience drove home to me more powerfully than any abstract argument that the stakes of politics are, ultimately, life and death. If one takes this premise seriously, then purity matters far less than efficacy. Political correctness (taking the “right” positions, using the “right” language, making the “right” gestures to impress peers) matters far less than persuading those audiences who need to be convinced (generally people who are not already part of the choir) in order to accomplish one’s goals. In both the philosophical sense and the more colloquial sense, I’m oriented towards pragmatism.

In the aftermath of this tragedy I also became consumed with questions around knowledge — first as an applied social epistemologist (focused narrowly on foreign policy and national security matters), then as a sociologist of knowledge (working on a broader range of issues). My views on how people perceive, talk about, think about, and create a shared understanding of the social world structure my politics as well as my research.

The last essential thing to know about me is that I’m a Muslim. As a Muslim, I have deep concern about protecting the vulnerable, caring for the weak, uplifting the poor, and being a good steward of the earth. I feel an obligation to speak the truth and defend others’ ability to do the same — including and especially when the truth is inconvenient. I support a role for religion in public life, and I think symbolic capitalists increasing ignorance, prejudice and hostility towards religion is unlikely to serve us well (and, in fact, makes it difficult in some cases to understand our own impulses and behaviors).

I am not a conservative in any sense. However, as a result of the aforementioned commitments, I do have deep respect for mores, folkways and traditions. I support pluralism — epistemological, political, and otherwise.

I’m also quite alive to the possibility existing social patterns may have encoded wisdom: orders often arise the way they do in response to problems that may not be obvious to subsequent generations. The fact that I cannot personally see a good reason why something is the way it is doesn’t mean there is not a good reason. Of course, this doesn’t mean the status quo is necessarily well-founded or should not be changed. Society, institutions and individuals are constantly in flux. Attempting to prevent this is a fool’s errand that can often lead to stagnation or death for the thing one wishes to save. Recognizing that the existing social order contains embedded wisdom means we should seek to understand something before we try to cast it aside.

I recognize that it’s much easier to tear things down than to conceptualize, build consensus around, and erect something to replace it – but nature abhors a vacuum and, as a consequence, something that was carelessly torn down without any real plan for what’s next is often replaced with something that’s even worse than the status quo ex ante. It is therefore important to not just look at problems, but also to cultivate and exercise our affirmative capacities: What works? Why does it work? How does it work? What is good and worth preserving about the prevailing order? What are examples we can draw from and exemplars to aspire towards? This is important to ensure that we have something to replace suboptimal policies or institutions with.

After getting cancelled by Fox News, I responded by engaging more deeply with right-leaning audiences and intellectuals. This deepened by own understanding of many social problems and dramatically increased the quality, reach and impact of my work. I have seen first hand how generative deep and good-faith engagement with the right can be. I’m far from the only person on the left to expand my horizons in this way. For instance, socialist anthropologist David Scott has a wonderful book demonstrating the value of putting conservatives like Burke and Oakeshott into conversation with illiberal thinkers like Kosselleck and Nietzsche, and agonic liberals like Alasdair MacIntyre, and pragmatists like Richard Rorty or Ian Hacking and postcolonial scholars like Edward Said and Partha Chaterjee.

This is basically what I try to do as well: put these divergent perspectives into fruitful conversation. Zizek has argued that the closest any individual can get to objective truth may be in moments of transition between one perspective and another. I don’t know if he’s right, but I know that I personally gain a lot by engaging seriously and charitably with a wide range of views.

My work on the sociology of knowledge has sensitized me to how the composition of fields shapes the knowledge the gets produced in those fields. An awareness of this reality, paired with concern about the left’s failure to learn anything from devastating electoral losses (because they were too busy pathologizing voters) – led me to recognize widespread and glaring errors in research about Trump and Trump voters that are basically invisible to many other scholars for the same reason that water is invisible to fish. At this point, I have an allergic reaction to mainstream symbolic capitalists attempting to explain “others” thinking, talking or behaving in ways “we” don’t like by appealing to deficits and pathologies that supposedly define “those people.”

My commitment to liberalism has an ethical dimension – aversion to needless coercion or using others as mere means – but if I’m fully honest, it derives more from epistemological concerns than moral ones. My work on knowledge has deeply sensitized be to the beauty and resilience of emergent phenomena and organic processes — and the high probability of iatrogenesis or other unplanned and unwelcome second order effects that often accompany central planning, dramatic top-down social change, or outside interventions into complex and dynamic systems.

The history of America and abroad is filled with cases of well-intentioned ideologues and technocrats who either caused great harm to the populations they wanted to help, made everyone worse off, or just wasted tons of effort and money due to insufficient knowledge and care, or a failure to defer sufficiently and learn from the populations they ostensibly wanted to help. As much as possible, I believe that decisions should be made by the folks who will bear the costs should things go wrong — i.e. those with real “skin in the game.” This is not just important for democratic reasons, but because it often leads to more accurate and effective decision-making.

Ethically, my commitments to broad-based flourishing, peace, prosperity, and assisting the least among us orient me towards socialism. However, I recognize the value of markets and other forms of spontaneous order for solving information and coordination problems. These same concerns about information demands make me wary of heavily idealized or centralized approaches to social design or intervention.

Concluding Thoughts

We Have Never Been Woke, like most other sociological research, identified social problems without offering concrete and plausible alternatives to the status quo or any type of positive vision. There were many reasons I struck this posture:

• a desire to make the work sufficiently conventional within my discipline,

• a conviction that it was a non-sequitur to conclude a century-spanning exploration of the political economy of the symbolic professions with a set of social justice tips

• a sense that ‘what should be done’ will be context dependent rather than pithy generalizations

• a feeling there was no way to satisfactorily provide an adequate response to the problems raised by the book within the space allotted to me in the conclusion

• a genuine uncertainty as to what that positive vision should be in the wake of many of my views being challenged or overturned.

• a desire to avoid becoming an inverse Kendi-style guru (which becomes much easier if I decline to give advice)

I continue to believe this was the right way choice for the book. However, I also recognize that you can’t beat something with nothing.

At the end of the day, if the goal is to move symbolic capitalists away from modes of moral and political activism I find to be unhelpful or pernicious, they need some other vision they can rally behind instead. As far as I can tell, liberal socialism is perhaps the best candidate out there. In any event, if I was going to put myself into a box or affix myself to a positive vision, I would describe myself as a liberal socialist.

One of my favorite living political theorists, Matt McManus, has two excellent recent books on this political tradition: a scholarly exploration of its origins and developments, and a more accessible, affordable and concise book for the public on its most essential components and their practical upshot. I highly recommend them as starting points for others interested in learning more about the genealogy and implications of liberal socialism.

Click on each cover to expand view

And I cannot resist plugging an excellent forthcoming book by another of my favorite living political theorists, Teresa Bejan. It is she who gets the last word in We Have Never Been Woke:

Bejan’s forthcoming book, First Among Equals, explores how a longstanding and widely held belief that all people are fundamentally equal (even if they differ in many respects) came to eventually be attached to a set of political demands (around representation) and, later, economic demands (around redistribution).

A blurb from yours truly will appear on the back of the book when it comes out this October, but this seems like as good a place as any to enthusiastically recommend it to anyone interested in these themes. And while you’re waiting for its release, you may enjoy her first book, Mere Civility, which I also really liked.

That’s it for the series on my evolving moral and political views. Next up will be an essay on persuasion: What is it? What does it demand? Why is it important? Why is so little work actually persuasive in structure or effect? Stay tuned!

1. The “steel man” interpretation of this trend is that, as a matter of fact, inequalities had been increasing dramatically from the 1960s through the 90s (with slowdowns and some reversals in more recent years). And so, perhaps, the increased focus on inequality is just sociologists responding to changing realities “in the world.”

The problem with this narrative is that the primary dimension on which equalities have grown during this period is the socioeconomic dimension — the aspect that received the least focus. Sociological research on labor, firms, occupations, class, social mobility, exchange, charity, demographics and communities has declined in recent decades.

Meanwhile, as socioeconomic inequalities grew (and sociological research on relevant topics saw relative declines), inequalities along the lines of race, gender and sexuality have either narrowed or levelled off — they did not see major increases during these periods “in the world” — yet, scholarship has increasingly focused on these other dimensions of inequality nonetheless.

That is, sociologists have centered the aspects of inequality that have grown the least while increasingly neglecting the dimensions that have grown the fastest over the period in question.

And, of course, there were other major social changes over this timeframe other than growing socioeconomic inequalities. For instance, there were contemporaneous declines in social cohesion. Here’s a nice chart from Putnam visualizing this point:

Yet, sociological work on social cohesion declined while research on (identity-based) inequality continued to expand.

Across the board, patterns in research focus do not seem to be tightly responsive to underlying social trends “in the world.” Other factors seem more dispositive.

2. Critically, this analysis just looked at the specific terms “inequality” or “inequalities.” If we introduce terms like “equality,” “equity,” “inequities,” and so on into the analysis, the numbers would be higher still.

3. Sociology in the United States was originally established as a handmaiden of the progressive social reform movement. American journalists set about to document social problems whilst sociologists worked to identify and build elite consensus around solutions. From our contemporary vantage point, much of what these sociologists advocated for seems illiberal and immoral. It is perhaps this ignoble history that has led contemporary sociologists towards gnostic criticisms of “the system” and away from public policy.

Even as the field has shifted away from practical application, articles in sociology journals have increasingly relied on left-wing framing of social issues. In the phrasing of Anton Jager, sociology has become “hyperpolitical.” The form of politics is increasingly accentuated but without concrete substance.

This is a shame. As I’ve previously stressed, “There are a lot of social problems in the world. Societies are complex, interests diverge, some people are just bad actors, environmental crises occur, facts can be unclear, and so problems emerge — real problems about how we can peaceably live together, coordinate our actions, and learn from one another, etc. At its best, social science can help us understand those problems and address them — through grounded theory and empirical research.“

In my view, this is what sociologists should be in the business of. Nothing more, nothing less.

4. For those outside the publishing world, these are really wild numbers. As I detail in WHNBW, the typical academic press book sells a few hundred copies at the high end and costs the press more than they ever recoup to publish it. To move 5000 units is an extraordinary success. 25k units is… something else entirely (although I’m still only 1 percent of the way to Capital in the 21st Century).

WHNBW outsold many books labeled “NYTimes bestsellers” (it usually takes somewhere between 5-10k in early sales to hit the list… although there is a lot of politics to the process too). However, my book is not a “New York Times Bestseller” because they don’t look at lifetime sales to make this designation, but, rather, sales in the first week from release. Many “bestsellers” have strong opening sales (often artificially juiced by the authors and publishers) and then drop off the face of the earth. My own book had an organic and exponential growth rate over the first year with strong continued sales since and outperformed many of these “bestsellers” (even ones published significantly earlier than my own book) in lifetime sales to date.

It’s really an honor to have produced a work that resonated so strongly with people. And it’s been a privilege to travel around the world talking to people about it. If you’re one of the folks who picked up a copy: thank you so much for your interest and support. And if you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, the paperback is now out with a new intro and lower MSRP. There’s never been a better time to snag a copy.

5. I am not the only one who views trends in sociology as suboptimal. Many seem to be voting with their feet and exiting the discipline and its professional associations.

For instance, I linked above to an essay showing that membership in American Sociological Association sections tied to inequality and (especially) race have seen increases even as most others are declining. The declines in most sections are at least partially explainable by the fact that membership in the ASA writ large has seen steep declines. Since 2007, membership has decreased by more than a third, to record lows.

Of course, the fact that the overall membership has contracted so much makes the steep growth in those particular sections all the more striking.

The discipline has also seen significant drops in enrollments in BA degrees (since 2013), MA/MS degrees (since 2004) and PhDs (since 2015). Click to expand:

Part of the story is that college enrollment in the U.S. overall saw consistent declines from 2010 - 2020. However, U.S. undergrad enrollments have broadly levelled off in recent years, but the declines in sociology have continued nonetheless. Meanwhile, grad school enrollments in the U.S. have significantly increased overall even as master and doctoral level sociology enrollments continued to fall. The main issue the discipline faces isn’t declining enrollments overall, but that growing shares of those who do sign up for college are opting out of sociology and into other majors.

Among those who do enroll, sociology consistently ranks as one of the most regretted majors in the U.S. That said, the field does rank marginally better than some other social science disciplines, perhaps because the unemployment and underemployment rates of sociology graduates, while not great, are a little better than these other, even more regretted, majors.

Unfortunately for aspiring sociology faculty, decreased enrollments have done little to ease their plight because PhDs have decreased less than other levels of the major, and the the tenure-line sociology job market has contracted since 2016.

In short, as the discipline and its main organizing body have grown increasingly insular in their politics and their areas of focus, they have also become smaller in a very literal sense. This is likely not sustainable.

I should stress: I'm a proud sociologist. I believe the field has a lot to offer for understanding the social world. But if the field is going to turn around these trends and flourish in the U.S. downstream, it will likely have to broaden itself across several dimensions.

I'm rooting for the discipline, and trying to be a part of the change I want to see. It's been a bit tricky up to now (the main reason I'm a professor of journalism and communications and *not* a professor of sociology is that, at the time, sociology departments uniformly refused to hire me despite applying to hundreds of listings across multiple cycles at a wide range of institutions). However, as noted in the introduction to this essay, there has been encouraging movement in recent years, both with respect to my own relationship to the discipline and looking at trends in the field writ large.

Lots of contemporary sociologists realize that something must change, and they're committed to improving their discipline, broadening participation, and widening its area of focus. And as the charts and tables above well-illustrate, the field has recovered from significant declines in the past. It could see another revival downstream with a little luck and a lot of sustained and disciplined effort.

No one should count American sociology out yet.

6. Although growth tends to bolster inequality – including and especially during particular phases of the growth curve and among particularly affected subpopulations – it’s also the case that excess income and wealth inequality (or, better said, some of the aforementioned frequent accompaniments of inequality) can derail growth and suppress mobility. Extremely high or low levels of inequality can undermine economic dynamism in different ways and for different reasons. Put another way: moderate levels of inequality seem conducive to economic flourishing. Inequality, in itself, is not necessarily bad -- although it can contribute to social problems if left unchecked or too aggressively suppressed.

7. Some critics have noted that I evoke the term “exploitation” at various points in the book, but don’t define it. This is an oversight. Within the sociological literature, exploitation is often understood as a situation where one party’s advantaged position is predicated on keeping others down.

An exchange between rich people and poor people is not necessarily exploitative. An exchange where both parties benefit, but benefit unequally, is not necessarily exploitative. In Chapter 3 of WHNBW I detail how the idiosyncratic lifestyles and tastes of symbolic capitalists are predicated on others’ desperation and vulnerability. They take actions – from insisting on insecure labor contracts, to reliance on undocumented workers (to pay submarket wages to people who cannot easily protest unreasonable demands or poor working conditions) , to paying non-livable wages for goods and services consumed, and beyond – that help them preserve and enhance their own position at the expense of others’ prosperity and security. It’s exploitation because their relatively advantaged position is premised on taking advantage of others’ vulnerability and exacerbating that vulnerability.

8. There are interesting differences apparent with respect to who identifies as a socialist in the abstract and who supports specific socialist organizations and politicians.

For instance, DSA members skew even more affluent and highly-educated than “socialists” writ large and are roughly 90% white. Commensurate with this skew, when AOC unseated Joe Crowley to win the primary that ushered her into power, it was affluent, highly-educated and white voters who carried the day for her. Crowley performed better in less affluent and white neighborhoods. The same dynamics held for the slate of Democratic Socialist candidates who pulled off upsets in the 2026 NYC Democratic primaries: they performed most strongly with highly-educated, relatively-affluent, white progressive voters.

In contrast, when you look at the electoral coalition that supported Zohran Mamdani in the 2024 general election, it broadly mirrors national patterns in “socialist” identification in polls along ethnic lines (e.g. black voters were more supportive than whites). However, you see some interesting pattens with respect to class. The educational patterns hold (more educated = more supportive of the socialist). However, with respect to income, both the least and most affluent New Yorkers voted against Zohran Mamdani, while folks in the middle favored his candidacy. In public opinion polling, the opposite pattern is evident: middle income folks are the least supportive of socialism.

9. As sociologist Vivek Chibber explored, Marx and Marxists have long believed that most other forms of domination and exploitation were subordinate to economic injustice (e.g. misogynistic violence and patriarchal exclusion, or white supremacy and ethnic hatred, or violence and animus against religious minorities, or distaste for others sexual practices). The theory was that once the economy was reworked, most of these other social tensions would melt away. In the century and a half since Marx’s death, three things have become apparent:

First, the tendency of people to notice and ascribe meaning to systematic differences, and then sort with people on the basis of those differences, and treat people who are more similar to themselves (and their blood kin) better than they treat “others” – this seems to be a human universal that predates capitalism and would likely survive it as well. The problem of managing difference is not going away, in fact, it may become harder because…

Second, decreased material precarity leads people to invest even more in culture wars and status differentiation. Struggles around representation, respect, worldviews, lifestyle choices, rhetoric, images and the like are likely to grow more not less severe as people have increased material security and prosperity.

Third, as far back as human history goes, there have always been some people who take pleasure in dominating and harming others. The existence of these impulses is not a creation of capitalism (although capitalism may encourage or facilitate them in various respects). The need to manage people governed by these impulses will persist in any socialist system just like in capitalist and pre-capitalist societies.

Finally, just as scarcity creates problems, Georges Bataille presciently argued that excess can create problems too. For instance, research in the cognitive and behavioral sciences shows that too many choices can be oppressive. Too much information from too many sources makes it harder for people to determine what is true, what matters, who to trust and how to act. Americans’ health suffers, in part, due to an overabundance of delicious and high-calorie food options. As Orwell correctly noted, too much unstructured or recreational time undermines a sense of meaning and purpose. People don’t fill the time learning other languages, writing poetry and fishing with friends (as Marx envisioned). Instead, too many compelling entertainment options available in one’s pocket at all times has undermined the will to socialize or “do” anything for growing shares of the public and has absolutely wrecked people’s ability to focus. As problems of scarcity recede, “problems of progress” like these often grow increasingly pronounced.

Long story short, abundance solves lots of issues but creates new challenges in the process. Earlier iterations of Marxism had not given sufficient weight to this reality and were, as a consequence, overly utopian. However, contemporary socialist thought tends to be more attuned to how these tendencies interact with economic systems to create novel and enduring challenges for governance and flourishing.

10. “Market socialism” is another term that is often applied to this tradition. Many interpretations of “democratic socialism” are also broadly in line with this tradition insofar as they insist on decentralization of authority and having ordinary people play a decisive role in running the communities and institutions they participate in. However, there is a lot of ambiguity about what is meant by “democratic socialism” in the contemporary context because the most prominent organization oriented around the concept – Democratic Socialists of America – has also given itself over to coercive, unpopular and unnecessary culture war positioning at various stages of its recent history. Many of its candidates take all sorts of positions that are out of step with liberal socialism or orthogonal to socialism per se.

Outside the U.S. “social democracy” is perhaps the most common alternative term for liberal socialism.

11. It would be too much to unpack in an already-long essay, but as I’ve detailed elsewhere, most successful social movements, to include “non-violent” movements, do ultimately rely on some form of violence or coercion. Persuasion can build a broad consensus — and it is tough for any social order to survive without some form of acceptance from the governed (it is impossible to effectively surveille everyone all the time and punish any violation of any rule, and the costs and second-order effects of attempting to try can be destabilizing) — but significant social changes are rarely achieved through persuasion alone, especially when a new law, norm or policy is first being established. And there will virtually always be folks who dissent from even well-established and widely-accepted policies. Insofar as these folks impose significant risks or costs on others, they need to be constrained in any social order. To fail to exercise coercion against them is to allow them to exercise tyranny over others.

The difference between liberals and authoritarians is not about whether they use coercion at all but, rather, about whether they use coercion frequently and as something like a first resort (because they don’t respect the rights and perspectives of those who disagree with them and they’re not interested in waiting to build consensus or learning from feedback) v. something that is used rarely and as a last resort. Authoritarians fall into the former camp, liberals the latter.

12. What we describe as “banal liberalism” is the combination of classical liberalism and liberal socialism. There is an unfortunate alternative synthesis that combines corporatism with authoritarian socialism. It is often called state capitalism, and it’s growing in popularity both in the U.S. and abroad (e.g. China, Singapore). It is basically the inverse of liberal socialism.

13. Many of Marx’s contemporaries viewed this as an inevitable result of any approach to socialism that relied on centralization and/or imbuing power in the hands of a moral and political vanguard. As I detail in the book (p. 113):

“The revolution itself, on Marx’s account, would ultimately be premised on the emergence of people who understand society as it really is (i.e., epistemic elites) and are simultaneously committed to social justice (i.e., moral exemplars) uniting the proletariat and then leading them to take control of the state. Many contemporaries of Marx viewed this as a fatal defect of his thinking.

Mikhail Bakunin, for instance, argued it was unreasonable to expect the emergence of some alliance of noble leaders who would seize control over the state and all the nation’s wealth, and then redistribute it all fairly, taking nothing extra for themselves, their families, their friends, their own communities, or their allies—and who would then voluntarily dismantle the state and live among their fellow citizens as equals. More likely, those who took control of the state would find justifications to give themselves more than others, find reasons to perpetuate and expand the state indefinitely, and target anyone who challenged these maneuvers as traitors and enemies of the revolution.

No one, Bakunin argued, is or could be immune to these temptations: ‘If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.’ Bakunin’s arguments have proved highly prescient virtually everywhere people have attempted to establish an ostensibly ‘Communist’ state.

Nonetheless, symbolic capitalists, from the first Great Awokening through today, have imagined themselves as just the kind of people whose wisdom and beneficence allow them to transcend the myopia and selfishness of common folk and serve the greater good. We are just the kind of people who could avoid being corrupted by wealth or power—which is why, we argue, a larger share of wealth and power should be consolidated in our hands as opposed to others’.

With this in mind, it is not hard to understand why symbolic capitalists would find Marxism particularly appealing, nor why the working classes may have been wary of it.”

14. See also Chapter 6, footnote 6 (p. 357) for similar pushback against the notion that the bundle of policies and discourses that have been branded as “CRT” aren’t really critical race theory. In the opening and closing of that chapter (and in Chapter 2, pp. 116-119, and Chapter 1, pp 52-54), I detail how there is a significant distance between these “critical” theories as they were conceived of by their founders and a lot of the more contemporary stuff done in their name. But noting that these differences exist doesn’t change the reality that this later work is clearly derived from critical race theory and explicitly identifies with it. It is simply not credible to pretend as though there is no relation. If one thinks some particular example is bad approach to critical race theory or politics more broadly, this is a sensible position. But to attempt to assert that this content flatly isn’t part of the tradition that it is *very clearly* drawn from is a fool’s errand.

15. In fairness, it used to be the case that, for instance, economic growth was associated with increased environmental devastation. There was a version of degrowth tied to the reality that this relationship was unsustainable. In more recent years, however, this relationship has reversed. Countries have been able to grow even as they reduce environmental harm.

In a similar vein, dire predictions about overpopulation have likewise been proven false. If anything, declining birthrates have emerged as a major challenge for many societies. The problem isn’t too much growth, but not enough.

This would not be a surprise to Karl Marx who argued that, for most social issues, the way out was through increased growth, development and innovation. He has been broadly vindicated since. As discussed in footnote 9, “growing the pie” doesn’t solve every social problem (symbolic problems often grow more pronounced alongside prosperity). However, this strategy does mitigate a huge share of social issues — especially problems that arise from material scarcity or precarity.

Nonetheless, degrowth remains a prominent feature of more zero-sum approaches to socialism.

16. Ironically, despite the atrocities and prominence of left authoritarian regimes, within the social sciences, until recently there was a longstanding and widespread assumption that the left literally could not be authoritarian. Studies were designed in prejudicial ways that used right-wing views as measures of authoritarianism and then, unsurprisingly, found that authoritarianism seemed to be the exclusive domain of the right. And because social scientists skew overwhelmingly “left”, few seemed to notice or see a problem with this straightforwardly circular reasoning. This is far from an isolated case.

One of the early contributions of my friend and colleague Tom Costello was to call attention to this issue and then pioneer and (with co-authors) validate a left-wing authoritarianism scale to allow social scientists to study authoritarianism in a more holistic way. It’s wonderful that Tom had an opportunity to make such an important contribution so early in his career (this research was his PhD dissertation). However, the fact that such a glaring hole went unfilled for so long is itself an indictment of the field. It’s unlikely to be breaking news to anyone outside the symbolic professions that people on the left can have authoritarian impulses too.

17. Authoritarian socialists are often terrible to each other and behave even worse towards liberals, but when dealing with non-socialists they regularly attempt a motte and bailey maneuver where

1. they lean into the intuitions that unite socialist traditions, then

2. introduce unpopular policies as the fulfillment of those intuitions, and subsequently

3. treat skepticism or negative reactions to those controversial proposals as rejections of the commonsense idea (articulated in #1).

In this way, they treat highly controversial proposals and behaviors as natural extensions of broadly shared ideals. They attempt to paint extreme views and policies as what socialism necessarily entails… generally lowering the appeal of all versions of socialism in the process.

18. Indeed, although I’ve only focused on two broad approaches to socialism here, there are others.

For instance, there is a rich tradition of anarcho-socialism exemplified by Mikhail Bakunin, Noam Chomsky, James Scott and left (“Bleeding Heart”) libertarians. This model of socialism is much more skeptical of the state and other forms of authority than either authoritarian or liberal socialism. It has also been deeply influential on my thinking.

However, there is a deep kinship between anarcho and liberal socialism insofar as both take seriously both the failures of unconstrained capitalism and also the risks of centralization, planning and state intervention. Between the two, I chose to center liberal socialism in this discussion because it is more common and has a richer history of success to draw from. Moreover, in practice, most anarcho-socialists and syndicalists are indistinguishable from liberal socialists on most issues. In most real-world contexts, this is a distinction without a massive difference.

Something similar holds for many other varieties of socialism: they can be fruitfully collapsed into either the authoritarian or liberal family resemblances. Adherents of these different subvarieties are often passionate about hair-splitting, but this is rarely a good use of anyone’s time and would certainly not be a good use of space in this post.