America's elites need to do a better job of making themselves useful. That is the lesson of Musa al Gharbi. new book“We Never Awakened: The Cultural Contradictions of the New Elite.” This is primarily a criticism of the American left, but it also has implications for the right.
This book is an insightful history and analysis of today's performative politics. Its main focus is on the left, which currently controls the Democratic Party, but it also focuses on a group identity that appears on both the left and the right: educated professionals with unique abilities. .
The set of political positions and communication movements called “wakeness” is often alien to the people it claims to represent. Most black Americans do not want to defund the police, and virtually no Hispanics identify themselves as “Latino.” “No one who is truly vulnerable, marginalized, underprivileged or poor would think or speak like that,” Al Gharbi wrote.
clearly awake Contributed to Trump's reelection. Al Gharbi said this type of norm predominates among “symbolic capitalists” – educated knowledge workers who create and interpret data, including doctors, lawyers, educators, journalists, financiers, etc. , indicating that they tend to be highly paid professionals. They tend to deploy such discourse as a form of “virtue signaling” and status competition among themselves, with little benefit to the disadvantaged communities they purport to represent. There is no.
The profession's high pay and prestige “has been justified by the claim that we serve the public good, especially the most vulnerable, marginalized, and disadvantaged in society.” This is because there is a common concern that there is a reward for identifying oneself as an ally of those groups within the class. It is a way of showing that one is worthy of a privileged position.
Mr. Al Gharbi is a sociologist, not a political philosopher. Because his task is descriptive rather than normative, he never names the most serious cultural contradictions in the phenomena he describes. The intellectual class justifies its privileges by the results it brings, but this class increasingly values symbolism rather than results.
Al Gharbi is concerned about inequality, but inequality is inevitable in a capitalist economy. An interesting question is under what circumstances this is justified. Here the philosopher John Rawls says: key insights: Inequality is justified for everyone in society if it works to the benefit of the least advantaged. This is one of the important reasons that justifies capitalism. Almost eradicated world poverty.
The emergence of a professional class and their assertion of power and privilege benefited everyone. Thanks to their expertise, the living standards of the poorest people have also increased. The medical profession is the most obvious example. Healthcare is a path to wealth, but it has also extended the lives of everyone, including the poorest people in the poorest countries. Al Gharbi's book never raises Rawlsian questions. (other places He notes that people from societies with weak occupational cultures often flee to the United States. ) He persistently emphasizes the “utterly elitist, parochial” and self-serving nature of the symbolic capitalists' claims.
But it's hard to separate the benefits and privileges of having such a class. If people are required to defer income for higher education, they should be compensated for it. If it's okay for businessmen to like money, then there should be no problem for symbolic capitalists, but the latter don't like to talk about money. The real question is whether they are worth what they are paid.
They are worth it, but only if they do their job. Herein lies the real problem with awakening. It's hurting the ability of professional-class institutions to do the work they're paid to do.
All professions are characterized by instrumental rationality and result-giving. Medicine reduces morbidity and mortality. Science and technology create the ability to control natural processes. Competent finance and business management made America a wealthy nation.
But awakening is not about results. It's a collection of performative gestures that dull useful skills. Universities have become left-wing monocultures. Mainstream journalists tend to report news in ways that conform to progressive precedents. Even science and medicine are now self-censoring to prevent the dissemination of facts that contradict the dominant left-wing narrative. A major scientific magazine publisher announced It said the decision to publish would be based on whether the editors believed the research had the potential to harm disadvantaged people.
The performative virtue signaling identified by al-Gharbi is not just a left-wing phenomenon; the right has its own kind of subversive symbolism. He said anti-wokeness “acts as if by denouncing, ridiculing, and ridiculing wokeness, it is somehow circumventing the need for further action to pursue the social justice goals it ostensibly supports.” It has been observed that there are many entrepreneurs.
Even more pernicious, today's right-wing has a growing number of people on the right who are openly trying to make tribal claims, such as denying that medically necessary abortion exists, even though competent analysis has shown them to be nonsense. There are propositions that we are required to support and even persuade ourselves. Vaccine skepticism appears to be the next frontier of anti-wokeness. Climate change denial is the most destructive example. Can you imagine what the world would be like if we had enacted a carbon tax in the 1990s?
And then there is the right wing humming factory of lies emanating from Donald Trump and Fox News. CNN Poll 2023 Found 69% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters believe President Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 presidential election. Awakening is self-righteous and infuriating, but it offers nothing like the level of destruction and misery that these delusions have produced and will produce. .
The ideals of professional integrity and efficiency should unite symbolic capitalists of the left and right. Because fanatics on both sides are putting our mission at risk.
The promises of symbolic capitalists can only be realized if they work in political alliance with the working class. Our comparative advantage is that we can truly improve lives. The Awakening created an opportunity for the Republican Party because it drove working-class voters away from the Democratic Party.
But if Republicans only offer their own performative gestures, that chance will be ruined. Their current plan is to reduce regulations on pollution and fraud, along with tax cuts, indiscriminate tariffs, and immigration restrictions. Economists will say this won't raise wages, but economists are becoming increasingly marginalized within the Republican Party.
To borrow Marxist terminology, a reality-based community is a class in itself. It must be a class itself.
andrew koppelmanJohn Paul Stevens, professor of law at Northwestern University, said:Burning down the house: How a libertarian philosophy was destroyed by delusion and greed”
