Trump Changes Nothing

Some argue I should either self-censor more or grow nakedly political during the Trump II regime. I strenuously disagree.

In his “vocation lectures,” sociologist Max Weber stressed that, at bottom, politics ultimately comes down to violence, coercion and expropriation: who gets to enact these, against whom, under what conditions, and towards which ends.

I have personal experience with how the stakes of politics are ultimately life and death, and this completely transformed my work. However, under typical conditions, most symbolic capitalists are insulated from the actual consequences of politics. As I put it in We Have Never Been Woke (p. 201-202):

“The government programs on the table for being cut or painfully restructured aren’t usually ones that we directly rely on; it is generally not our jobs being automated or outsourced; our neighborhoods are not being hollowed out by economic forces, ravaged by drugs, or plagued with crime and blight; it’s not our children getting caught up in the criminal justice system, deployed into a war, or staring down especially grim life prospects. “Those people” and their problems are largely abstractions for us—little more concrete than the principles we are trying to score points for, or the hypothetical future generations for whom our symbolic advocacy, we assert, will somehow pay off.”

This lack of “skin in the game” allows us to approach politics as alternatively a sport, a holy war, or a means of self-expression. It lets us feel comfortable seeking purity over pragmatism, engaging in political behaviors that may cost us influence, or undermine the institutions or causes we associate with, but that seem worth doing anyway because they feel good for us.

For example, there is abundant data showing that mainstream symbolic capitalists are out of touch with most other Americans on political and moral issues, have pretty bad instincts for what messaging will resonate with “normie” voters, and are quite resistant to recognizing just how extreme and alienating we actually are. However, even when political practitioners exercise discipline in identifying and refining messages that should play well with the masses, party activists and representatives regularly go “off script” and deliver political messaging that is persuasive and satisfying to them personally, with little regard for the available information on what might resonate with others.

We saw this play out in 2024, when Democrat-aligned polling consistently showed that the “democracy is on the ballot” messaging was their weakest strategy for moving voters. Nonetheless, the Harris campaign, her surrogates and supporters hammered this message home aggressively, at the expense of more effective strategies, because it was the message that was most satisfying for them to tell: they were brave heroes turning the country away from contemporary Nazism and towards a progressive and prosperous future. Sounds good, except the “Nazis” ended up winning, in no small part because the “good guys” couldn’t be bothered to focus on addressing the priorities and concerns of other people… whose votes are needed to win elections. Even after losing, and as her former opponent gets ready to return to office on January 20th, Harris continues to double and triple down on her failed “democracy” messaging on the way out the door. She can’t help herself, apparently.

Here’s what’s striking about this to me:

In a world where stakeholders truly felt democracy was on the ballot, it seems obvious that they should aggressively rally around the empirically strongest message – even if it isn’t satisfying for people like themselves, even if it entails focusing on issues that people like themselves don’t care about, and even if it entails making narrative choices that annoy “the groups.” But that’s not what Democrats chose to do. Instead, they focused on the message that was most resonant and satisfying for mainstream symbolic capitalists like themselves, even at the cost of failing to persuade “normies,” and therefore helping the “fascists” win. As Orwell pointed out roughly a century ago, this has been a chronic problem with “resistance” liberals: they define themselves as the last line of defense but often end up increasing the appeal of “fascists” in practice due to their indulgent approach to politics.

We don’t just see this dynamic at work in elections, it’s present throughout the symbolic professions. Consider the culture industries: movies, video games, TV shows, and so on. There are lots of data points suggesting that inserting ham-fisted progressive messaging and symbolism into these cultural products alienates audiences, leading the product to “bomb.” One might think professionals who produce these cultural outputs would aggressively work to avoid this. After all, bylines tied to highly-successful outputs can open lots of doors. However, reality does not conform with expectation here.

This is, first, because a byline from a major studio output “counts” for boosting everyone’s resumes even if the product is not successful. And it’s easy for any individual contributor to pass the blame — to tell stories about how their work was rock solid and the failure of the product was caused by “others” making bad decisions. As a result, it’s possible to chronically kill the products one touches while successfully painting yourself as a valuable contributor nonetheless (who has had the misfortune of getting saddled with bad teams who messed up high-potential big studio projects against your alleged protestations). Put simply: there is little career accountability for those who insert financially destructive moral and political content into works. There’s no real “skin in the game.”

And so, for many, if they had to choose between a non-“woke” blockbuster versus a product that aggressively pushes progressive politics but fails commercially – they’d choose the latter, no contest. The people whose opinions they care about are demonstrably not those of prospective consumers (who, if they don’t “get it,” f*** them); they’re far more worried about distinguishing themselves among their peers. The commercial success of the product is somewhat beside the point. The same holds for the products’ concrete political impact, for that matter.

We can see this latter point clearly because as politics, the messaging and symbolism inserted into these products is usually self-defeating: if you want a cultural work to persuade, you must get people to consume your content who don’t already agree with you. In a world where the cultural product is so overtly skewed that it only ends up getting consumed by a small and niche subset of society who are already fully on-board, then the work is politically and culturally sterile. It’s not “radical,” it’s pointless. Those genuinely committed to “moving the meter” politically would be better served by adopting a more subtle and moderate approach to progressive messaging and symbolism to ensure that the people who “need” the message actually consume it (instead of trying to maximize on moral and political purity at the expense of losing audience).

But again, such practical concerns are often lost on mainstream symbolic capitalists, many of whom would rather be “correct” and “pure” while losing than make any kind of moral or political compromise and succeed. And we have the luxury to adopt this posture because we’re largely insulated from the actual consequences of politics and economics. But this insulation may not hold up forever – and this brings us to the present, and Donald Trump’s impending return to the White House.

Trump’s first inauguration. Sequel dropping shortly.

How Will My Political Posture Change Under Trump?

A frequent question I’ve been asked, especially after the election, is whether and how the 2024 electoral outcome changes the way I plan to engage on the themes and arguments of We Have Never Been Woke in the coming months and years.

There are a few versions of the question, but they boil down to concerns that:

1. The book and its arguments could be “weaponized” by “bad actors” in the current moment – and I have a purported responsibility to prevent that (either by self-censoring my criticisms, or becoming more overtly supportive of the “good guys”).

2. The symbolic professions are at a particularly weak and vulnerable place in this current moment, maybe it would be better to have this conversation later (say, after the Republicans are no longer in power and our institutions are no longer under the same threat).

3. Mainstream symbolic capitalists will be one of the main sources of #Resistance to Trump – it seems like we should be doing anything we can to support them rather than criticizing and potentially undermining them, and

4. Wouldn’t it be better – especially now -- for me to concentrate my fire on the political “right” and associated elites rather than focusing on elites, institutions and political discourses associated with the “left”?

A colleague asked a well-crafted version of this question at a recent event at the NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, and that exchange made its way into a subsequent New Yorker profile of the event (and my work more broadly). Since the publication of that profile, iterations of the question have become a staple of media interviews. So let me save future interlocutors some time by comprehensively responding to the different dimensions of this question decisively and “on the record” here.

My tweet-length response is that Trump’s reelection doesn’t change much of anything for how I plan to go about my work. The longer version of my answer follows below.

As a Social Scientist, Politics Isn’t My Job

We Have Never Been Woke is not a political book. The text doesn’t conclude with any policy platforms, social justice “tips,” or anything of the sort. Although the book and its arguments certainly help clarify the outcome of the 2024 election, it isn’t “about” the election (it was written and published prior), and it doesn’t aspire to provide political advice for any particular faction in the U.S. or abroad.

The purpose of the book is to understand the history and the political economy of the symbolic professions -- from the interwar period through the present. There are a number of puzzles the text wrestles with, and blank spots in the literature that the book is attempting to fill (as the book’s introduction and conclusion walk readers through). My writing strategy was to try to illuminate these areas as honestly and fully as I could -- nothing more, nothing less – and let the political and moral stuff work itself out post-publication.

Often, symbolic capitalists adopt or advocate for an alternative posture: they try to turn their work into moral and political “interventions.” They try to design and frame their work as contributions to particular social, cultural and political causes. These moral and political projects often come at the expense of their empirical projects. But more to the point, these interventions tend to be ineffective as politics because, again, symbolic capitalists tend to be far out of synch with most other Americans, and many of our attempts to “move the meter” end up generating backlash instead.

As I show in the book, this is the modal consequence of “Great Awokenings.” In periods when symbolic capitalists, our institutions and our outputs grow especially political, the main thing we actually achieve is backlash against “our” causes, organizations and institutions – often driven by the very people we view ourselves as advocates for and representatives of (in the 2024 election, for instance, GOP gains were driven by less affluent and less educated people, religious minorities, young people, women and non-whites, even as highly-educated and affluent whites went the other direction).

One might think the core “trust the science” constituency would defer to the abundant evidence that symbolic capitalists’ attempts at influencing politics through their work rarely produce the desired outcomes and, perhaps, they would refrain from distorting their work into (likely counterproductive) moral, political and cultural “interventions.” But alas, that is not the world we live in.

Instead, the first time Trump was elected, large numbers of scientists, engaging as scientists, took part in “March for Science” demonstrations which implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) positioned “science” in opposition to being a conservative, Republican or Trump supporter. As political scientist Matt Motta later showed, these demonstrations did nothing to undermine support for Trump. Their main effect was to reduce trust in scientists.

This result should not have been surprising: the evidence is overwhelming that people don’t like politicized science. Even when constituents agree with the message, scientists engaging in politics tends to lower public trust. Citizens want scientists to help illuminate issues of public concern – but by acting as “honest brokers” providing information to help contextualize or evaluate competing claims and considerations, thereby empowering people to make their own decisions (rather than serving as “epistocrats” dictating to people what they should think or feel and how they should behave).

Scientists ignoring these preferences and engaging in indulgent #Resistance activities after the 2016 election proved highly consequential. The March for Science ended up polarizing trust in expertise right before the onset of a major global pandemic, when trust in science suddenly became extraordinarily important. The people who grew most alienated from scientists in the leadup to the pandemic were the same people who ended up shifting towards the GOP in subsequent elections: religious and ethnic minorities, young people, less urban, affluent or educated folks, and so on. These same populations had among the lowest vaccine uptake rates, and some of the highest rates of excess fatalities, over the course of the pandemic.

Put another way, there are people who are dead today who may have survived the pandemic if experts (and their cheerleaders) hadn’t engaged in alienating behaviors. Disproportionately found among the “excess dead” are the very people we often view ourselves as champions of: non-whites, religious minorities, the less materially “privileged,” and so on. However, precisely because it was mostly “those people” who ate the costs while most of “us” were personally insulated from the downsides of the March for Science and parallel movements, very little was learned from our poorly-conceived activism.

Indeed, despite the blowback against scientists after their ill-calibrated response to the 2016 election, many scholars and scholarly institutions and organizations nevertheless doubled down on partisanship during the next presidential contest.

Nature, for instance, endorsed Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Research (admirably) published in the same journal unsurprisingly found that the main effect of this endorsement was reduced trust in the publication and its articles. Here a reader might think, “surely, given this empirical result in their own pages about their own policy, the science periodical decided to step back from overt politics downstream, right? #TrustTheScience.” If only. In reality, after the 2020 election, Nature publicly pledged to increase censorship in their publications based on moral and political considerations. And in 2024, they once-again explicitly encouraged readers to vote for the Democrat (because “the world needs a U.S. president who respects science”), once again joined by Scientific American and other peer publications.

None of these science publications seem to care one whit about what “the science” says about the impacts of their political activism. For many, it feels good to engage in this activism, and it endears them to mainstream symbolic capitalists, so they’re committed to doing it, “real world” consequences be damned. Other subscribe to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “naive interventionism” — the belief that it’s important to “do something.” That “doing something” is better than standing idly by (even in the face of evidence that the “something” we want to do probably won’t work). However, in reality, there are many situations where refraining from action is the better path. For instance, it’s clearly better to “do nothing” than to to take actions that are actively counterproductive to your professed causes and harmful to the institutions you belong to and the constituents you want to support. This kind of action would leave you in a weaker position to "#Resist in the event that your opponents win, and could also increase the chance that said opponents win. It’s all downside, no upside.

What did the political and moral “interventions” of scientists and scientific publications and organizations yield in recent cycles? What did they burn so much of their social capital to accomplish? Less than nothing! Trump is back in the White House, with the GOP again controlling both chambers of Congress, but this time with an even larger Supreme Court majority and having won the popular vote too. Meanwhile, public trust in knowledge economy institutions and outputs continues to hover near record lows (higher ed, media, scientists). Support for the Democratic Party is at it’s lowest point in decades.

If this is “resistance,” I’d hate to see what active support of the Orange Man looks like!

To put it plainly: independent of any moral considerations about objectivity, democratic deference, or serving a broad swath of constituencies – completely bracketing concerns about how trying to advance moral and political goals may come into conflict with following the truth wherever it leads and telling the truth plainly – just as a purely strategic and empirical matter, symbolic capitalists should recognize that we generally suck at politics, and when we’re trying to do politics through our work, we’re veering way outside our domain of expertise… likely with results we’re not going to be proud of in a few years.

Consider this thread by a Yale #Resistance historian:

This is not really “political” content in any practical sense of the term. It’s unlikely to meaningfully advance any concrete political objectives.

Nor, as a side note, is this content likely to crown his profession in glory. Instead, any ordinary American who had the misfortune of stumbling across this thread -- presented as “serious” analysis (even expanded into a full Substack post, and perhaps soon, God help us, another #Resistance book) – they would likely walk away from the encounter more amenable to suggestions that the humanities are ripe for defunding than defending.

I suspect that the only stakeholders who could read a thread like this and find it compelling and worthy of this person’s station and profession are those already elbow-deep in #Resistance fanfic. The author doesn’t seem remotely interested in engaging other constituencies, apparently having learned nothing over the past 10 years about why that might be important (but having made a lot of money during this period nonetheless through sterile “political” “activism”).

Insofar as producing or circulating this type of drivel is what people typically seem to mean by #Resistance, count me out. And while you’re at it, count the “Mump oligarchy” guy out too. Rather than doing anything concretely political, he’s making the most apolitical play possible: absconding to Canada.

I get it: why work to actually resist when you can just move from an elite institution in the U.S. to an elite institution abroad, and continue living your wealthy life unimpeded? This guy, and his fellow Ivy League “refugees,” continue to rank among the foremost #Resistance voices…. and that really says everything that needs to be said about the movement. It’s by and for rich white folks at elite institutions pretending as if they’re guerilla heroes while demonstrating a clear unwillingness to personally absorb any genuine risks or costs. Folks who would rather move to a different country than try to understand and constructively engage with people who don’t already agree with them. These are not my people.

So no, I’m not planning on being part of the #Resistance this round either. And, likewise, I’m not at all concerned about my work undermining the #Resistance in the second Trump administration (although, to be clear, I’m not actively trying to undermine the #Resistance either -- what I would like most of all is to ignore them!). With or without my contributions, the #Resistance is likely to continue sabotaging themselves – with most of the cost for their indulgent behaviors continuing to get absorbed by the causes, institutions and professions they associate with (rather than the #resisters themselves), alongside the populations they claim to support (but in fact, regularly alienate and often harm). Meanwhile, I am going to continue researching and educating people about society to the best of my abilities. Because that’s my actual job.

We Have Never Been Woke Isn’t Easy to “Weaponize”

As my colleagues and I detailed in a recent essay for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, censorship in science is driven heavily by scientists themselves, often under the auspices of prosocial goals.

Narratives that politically inconvenient findings might be “weaponized” by “bad actors” are perennially popular among would-be censors, who often strongly imply that if colleagues don’t censor themselves, their peers will censor the work anyway, and the lack of self-censorship will be taken as evidence that the target scientists are motivated by the “wrong” impulses, or are in bed with the “wrong” people, or are comfortable being useful idiots for the “bad guys.”

Of course, when progressives mobilize scientific data or arguments in support of their preferred causes or to undermine or demean rivals, this is not weaponization. It’s just championing “the science.” But when the “wrong” actors mobilize findings in support of the “wrong” causes – then, even factually correct findings and arguments can get classified as “misinformation” and deemed worthy of censorship. “Weaponization,” in practice, seems to occur exclusively when non-progressives mobilize research in the service of ends incompatible with mainstream symbolic capitalists’ preferences.

For it’s part, We Have Never Been Woke is not particularly amenable to “weaponization.” In fact, as I demonstrated in a previous post, the most consistent criticism of the book to date has come from the political “right” – antiwokes and conservatives – often expressing frustration that the book takes for granted and argues within many left-aligned frameworks, doesn’t adjudicate whether those frameworks are “good” or “bad” or “true” or “false,” but does analyze right-aligned symbolic capitalists symmetrically with their left-wing peers. None of these decisions seemed especially beloved among right-aligned readers, but I think they were important choices for helping the book’s primary audience receive and process the content in the spirit intended.

Many people across the political spectrum began the book expecting it to be a culture war tract, and instead discovered a 100 year look at the history and political economy of the knowledge professions. Many (especially folks on the left) were delighted to discover the book was very different than they expected. Others (especially folks on the right) were deeply frustrated. Across the board, the book has been difficult for readers to easily mobilize into their moral and political struggles – and my own interventions over the course of the launch have made this harder still.

Of course, there’s only so much influence you can exert as an author. As We Have Never Been Woke repeatedly emphasizes with respect to others’ ideas, a perennial joy and terror of producing impactful work is that after a certain point it ceases to be truly “yours.” It gets interpreted and used in lots of ways you could not have anticipated, may not desire, and cannot readily control in any event.

I produced a fair-minded and rigorous work of scholarship that sits orthogonally to the culture wars: it explicitly rejects the idea that pointing out “hypocrisy” is valuable; it rejects interpreting others’ actions and behaviors in terms of deficits, pathologies or cynicism; it analyzes stakeholders across the political and ideological spectrum in a symmetrical fashion. So far, this strategy has paid off – the book has not become an object of culture war struggle. I anticipate this will be the case for the foreseeable future. However, this is ultimately out of my hands – everyone else gets a vote too, and I can’t overrule all of you.

Authors have little control over the circumstances of the release of their books. All we can control is what we, ourselves, say and do with the book – the rest is up to readers. And as it relates to my own words and behaviors, with a Democrat in the White House, I worked to engage on these topics in a non “culture war” oriented way. This is exactly what I’ll do when Trump takes office too.

The idea that I should instead curb, redirect or censor my critiques because I might otherwise hurt the #Resistance or empower the “wrong” people – this is a common but deeply misguided impulse.

If the Sky Is Blue, It’s Blue

Many Americans perceive that mainstream symbolic capitalists look down on them and don’t trust their judgements. They view us as disdainful or outright hostile towards their culture, values, and priorities. They think our institutions don’t reflect or well-represent people like them. They believe our institutions are increasingly dysfunctional and, despite lots of talk about social justice and shared prosperity, we’re not “delivering the goods” as well as we should be.

Critically, these perceptions aren’t products of misinformation or propaganda; they’re accurate observations based on empirical realities.

As We Have Never Been Woke illustrates at length, our institutions are not representative of the rest of U.S. society and culture, and in many respects, they’ve grown less representative over time.

Moreover, the world we actually inhabit is, in fact, very far from the world we promised we’d all be living in if people like us were given more power over society. Symbolic capitalists got the increased affluence and influence we asked for, but we didn’t hold up our end of the bargain.

Finally, people aren't wrong to think that mainstream symbolic capitalists mistrust them, are not fully honest with them, look down on them, are disdainful towards their values and priorities, and culture, and so on. It's actually true. We model that contempt all the time, very prominently and often proudly. And the message has been received. And it hasn’t gone down smoothly (understandably!).

The unfortunate (but not unfounded) perceptions normies have about “us” are highly consequential. Research in the U.S. and around the world routinely confirms that when people feel like they don’t have a voice or a stake in institutions – and especially when they feel like the people who run those institutions are actively hostile towards people like them – the natural impulse is to try to dismantle, defund, delegitimize, marginalize and otherwise resist these institutions and their outputs. It doesn’t matter what the institution is: when people come to view an institution this way, they respond with mistrust and confrontation. And why wouldn’t they? It would be suicidal to collaborate with, support or even merely tolerate institutions that are oriented towards the destruction of yourselves, your communities, your culture, and so on. Opposition is a rational response.

In a democratic society, it's also perfectly reasonable to try to constrain, impose oversight over, and possibly restructure or eliminate public institutions that seem to have strayed from their proper purpose and seem unaccountable and unresponsive to the constituents they’re supposed to serve.

Indeed, as explored in a recent talk, I think one of the ways that the conversations around autonomy, academic freedom, press freedom, and so on often go awry is that symbolic capitalists are too intensely focused on our rights, our freedoms and our privileges (which are currently under threat for reasons we decline to understand). The traditional social contract goes something like this: rights come with duties, freedoms with responsibilities, privileges with obligations. This social contract is quite explicit in documents like the like the AAUP’s “1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure” (which codified the academic freedom as understood in the U.S. today). However, it’s absent from most contemporary conversations about our professions — to our detriment.

Symbolic capitalists tend to focus narrowly on our privileges, freedoms and rights, because we like those. However, the extraordinary autonomy, discretion, prestige and pay we enjoy (relative to other workers) aren't afforded to us because we're amazing people who simply deserve better lives than everyone else in virtue of our intrinsic awesomeness. The freedoms are to help us fulfill our social duties. The privileges are to help us live up to our social obligations. The rights are to help us carry out our social responsibilities. And if people reasonably feel like we aren't holding up our end of the bargain -- we’re not conducting ourselves responsibly in our professional lives, we’re not living up to our obligations to people like them, and we’re not fulfilling the duties associated with our professions in an impartial way -- the natural and appropriate response is to come for our freedoms, rights and privileges. Again, this is all codified quite explicitly in many of the foundational documents of our professions.

And so, if we want to undermine constituents’ impulse to come for our rights, freedoms and privileges, then we need to first ensure that we are actually doing a good job living up to our obligations. If there are problems in our institutions -- and there are ! -- we need to show stakeholders that we recognize those issues, and we're both willing and capable of reforming ourselves. We need to persuade constituents that we're on the right track. And by “persuasion,” I mean engaging with people who don’t already agree with us, in a venue and format that will plausibly reach “those people,” and in a manner that they will find compelling. Shy of that, we should expect more of what we’re already seeing: outside forces being democratically empowered to make the changes that we have so far refused, often in ways that are detrimental for us, our institutions and our work.

Put simply, when growing numbers of citizens are mistrustful of our institutions and are increasingly willing to support “populists” like Trump as a bulwark against us – circling the wagons is exactly the wrong response. It would be far more effective to instead engage with the people we've been alienating and find ways to ameliorate their concerns.

Of course, this requires an acknowledgement that real problems exist. Unfortunately, the impulse among mainstream symbolic capitalists today is to instead reflexively defend institutions from any criticism or challenge— even when they’re clearly failing. These tendencies grew especially pronounced in the age of Trump.

Indeed, if the GOP says the sky is blue these days, large numbers of symbolic capitalists would immediately take to mainstream media outlets, academic journals and social media to declare the claim as misinformation.

Many would stress, for instance, that the air doesn’t really have a color, and then tell a naïve story about how the blue appearance of the sky is from light reflecting off the water and hitting the atmosphere. Others would provide more accurate and sophisticated accounts that better fit with modern science, perhaps evoking “Rayleigh Scattering” and adjacent concepts.

Still others will insist “the sky is blue” is a gross generalization – it doesn’t hold true at sunset, at sunrise, at night, and under various weather conditions. Sometimes the sky is orange. Sometimes it’s grey. Sometimes it’s black. Heck, sometimes it’s green. To just pick one color (blue) and declare it as the essence of the sky is needlessly exclusionary. But, the essay may continue, we shouldn’t be surprised that the “sky is blue” crowd adopts such a parochial understanding of the natural world. The GOP and its voters adopt a similarly narrow understanding of the social world — for instance, associating whiteness and Christianity with being a “true American.” Their narrow vision of the sky as blue is downstream from their broader closed-mindedness and simplicity.

Aurora Borealis

Meanwhile, other essays might argue that our perception the sky is blue is merely a product of how humans’ rods and cones process light, and how our brains process visual stimuli. As far as we can tell, the sky likely looks importantly different to non-human animals. Indeed, even among humans we can’t be positive that I, Musa al-Gharbi, am perceiving the exact same color as you, the reader, when we look at the sky at the same time from the same location (even if we call the color by the same name and point to the same section of a color wheel to identify it). It’s impossible, in fact, to make any strong claim about the actual color of the sky -- there’s no objective truth about this matter that’s directly available to us as finite, embodied beings.

Ad infinitum we’d see “actually, the sky is not blue” takes along these lines. Most of these essays wouldn’t be “wrong,” per se. But they’d also be cases of mainstream symbolic capitalists bending over backwards to avoid acknowledging what is right in front of everyone’s face, while pretending that anyone who does recognize the sky as blue must be stupid or evil.

Pedantry of this sort doesn’t impress anyone or lead anyone to trust us more. It predictably and understandably causes everyone to like us less. And, practically speaking, it’s dangerous. It drives more people into the arms of the very political actors we say we want to #Resist.

Indeed, if people are upset about a real problem that they want to see addressed, and they have two parties responding to their complaints, and the options are:

1. “Don’t believe your lying eyes. Our institutions are awesome, actually. The only reason anyone could perceive them to be otherwise would be if they’re ignorant, stupid, racist, sexist, and so on…” or,

2. “You’re right, there are real problems. And you can’t trust the people within these systems to reform themselves. They are incapable of recognizing their problems and are unwilling to compromise. We need to burn these institutions down and reboot them, or else aggressively intervene into these institutions, and set up more robust oversight and safeguards.”

Guess which side is going to win that argument? Option 2, all day every day. The first response, in fact, neatly confirms the narrative of the second. It’s a really terrible answer!

If we want to steer people away from “burn it all down,” then we need to give them something better than “nothing to see here.” Just as we shouldn’t refrain from calling the sky blue just because Republicans say the same, we should not decline to acknowledge problems in the symbolic economy because some Republicans are also taking note of those problems.

It is a mistake to grant one’s political opponents such control over you that you’d deny basic realities, defend things that shouldn't be defended, or strike absurd and off-putting positions just for the sake of #Resistance. If a Republican says the sky is blue, and it’s blue, then I’ll say “yeah, it’s blue alright.”

I’d recommend others do the same.

No Time Like the Present

According to some interlocutors, the arguments of We Have Never Been Woke are important, but this is not the ideal moment to engage on these issues. It’d be much better to table this discussion until after “we” deal with Trump.

The problem is, if mainstream symbolic capitalists want to understand and address the disaffection that empowers leaders like Trump, then we really need to confront issues within our institutions, communities, and professions instead of denying or defending them. Even now. Perhaps especially now. Anything less helps push “after Trump” ever-further into the horizon.

Moreover, it’s just silly to assume that we would plausibly return to this conversation “after Trump.” Trump is the only reason we’re currently having this conversation at all. From 2010- 2016, Democrats were seeing consistent losses in every midterm and general election among the very groups that were supposed to guarantee them an “emerging Democratic majority.” They saw historic losses in the 2012 and 2014 midterms. However, the party and its supporters largely wrote off these losses, because Democrats won the White House in 2012, and seemed poised for another victory in 2016 – so everyone remained convinced they were on the “right side of history.”

After a wrenching defeat in 2016, some in the #Resistance liberal crowd acknowledged that there might be some problems in the party, various institutions, and so on – but most insisted that conversations about these problems should be tabled until the “fascist” is out of the White House. We should dedicate all our efforts to #Resistance they said. To the extent that they analyzed what went wrong in 2016, most focused on pathologizing the voters and engaging in conspiratorial ideation rather than confronting any defects with their preferred party, candidate, messaging, strategy, and so on.

In 2020, Trump was narrowly pushed out of office (almost exclusively due to shifts among white men, even as most other populations went the opposite direction). This was not followed by a big wave of self-reflection. It’s hard enough to get Democrats to take a hard look in the mirror when they lose. When they win, it’s basically impossible.

Indeed, rather than trying to understand and address the problems that led Trump to be compelling to begin with, mainstream symbolic capitalists felt more self-assured in our rightness after 2020. We set out to humiliate, punish, and purge Trump, his allies and his supporters with even more ferocity. And so, four years later, little was changed or learned, and Trump was voted back into the White House once more. And here we are again, with many trying to table the same conversation that is long overdue.

Others are now giving my arguments a deeper look because they’re eager to understand why Trump won. In a world where Democrats had eked out a victory in 2024, many of these folks would be less receptive to what I have to say, not more. The narrative would be, “Obama won in 2008-2012. Hillary lost, sure, but then Biden and Harris won the next two cycles. We’re talking two decades where the GOP occupied the White House for only four years. 2016 was an aberration that people made far to much of – symbolic capitalists and their preferred political party are on the ‘right side of history,’ and it’s about time we started acting like it rather than making a bunch of concessions to the folks destined to get left in the dust.”

Of course, to the extent that they are correct, the arguments and findings of my book would’ve been just as true in a world where Harris won as they are in the world where Trump won. The book was completed and published before the election took place, after all. However, despite the book’s content or truth value being meaningfully unaffected by the electoral outcome, its perceived relevance has shifted dramatically because of how things shook out. Most symbolic capitalists would have cared much less about my arguments and findings if their preferred candidate had won. And the next time their preferred candidate wins, many will be right back to arguing that the Trump years were just a phase or a fluke, and the “emerging Democratic majority” is back on track. There is a limited window to get people to learn anything from the last three cycles. The time is now.

Delaying this conversation until after Trump is out of office (again) is a terrible idea. In practice, it’s another way of saying, “let’s not have this conversation at all” or “let’s try to run business as usual indefinitely.” That’s a losing proposition. It's precisely the mentality that led us (back) to this moment. It’s time to let it go.