Why Didn't Blue Cities Going Woke Help the Marginalized?

[00:00:12] Welcome to the Blue City Blues Podcast. I'm David Hyde with Sandeep Kaushik. Sandeep, how's the weather in your part of Seattle? It's gray and gray and kind of dim. It's very... It's like that here. Yeah. It's so funny. It's like that every day. This week, a very special guest, sociologist Musa Al-Gharbi, a professor at Stony Brook University and a fellow at Columbia University on the Upper West Side of Manhattan,

[00:00:39] and the author of a new book, We've Never Been Woke, The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Musa, thank you so much for speaking with us. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. So this podcast is focused on blue cities, what we're calling the urban archipelago, because blue cities have a lot of shared problems, essentially,

[00:00:58] on affordability, homelessness, fentanyl crisis, but also broadly a shared commitment to woke ideas about identity and equity and social justice, which is also the subject of your book. So just to set the stage, I'm wondering if you could start out by telling us a little bit about how you think woke in 2024 is different from what folks,

[00:01:25] Gen Xers my age, remember as political correctness, what was called political correctness back in the 1980s. When I first heard the term, I was kind of a political activist living in Portland, Oregon, and it was sort of a directive. Don't buy Coors beer. It's not PC because Coors is giving to right-wing think tanks or whatever. But it was also used, ironically, the left kind of poking fun at itself for being too rigid until the right took hold of it and used it as sort of an epithet.

[00:01:51] But my question is, because you talk about this in the books, is how does the rise of 80s political correctness compare to what we now understand as woke in 2024? Yeah, there's a lot of overlap. One thing that's different is just that right now we're in a kind of different stage from wokeness. So, for instance, one of the things I highlight in the book is that when people originally started using politically correct in the 50s,

[00:02:17] and then it became really popular in the 80s, but they meant it unironically. Like, my moral and political views are correct. And then eventually there was a faction within the left that, as you noted, started using it ironically in a way to refer to a type of politics that they viewed as sanctimonious, purely symbolic kind of thing.

[00:02:40] And then eventually this dispute within the left got picked up by right-aligned political actors who used the term as political correctness as a kind of a cudgel for everything they didn't like. Anything that was, you know, to the left of them was politically correct. And then it got to a point where to be politically incorrect even took on a positive valence. You had people like Bill Maher who called his show politically incorrect, for instance, and so on. And so wokeness is kind of playing out like that now.

[00:03:09] We're towards the tail end of that cycle where almost no one today would self-identify proudly as woke, would say I'm woke in an unironic way. And in fact, there's some interesting surveys that were done where they asked Americans, like, what do you think about the term woke? And it turned out that most Americans, you know, had more or less positive-ish feelings about the term.

[00:03:37] But then they were like, okay, if someone called you woke, would you understand that to be a compliment or an insult? And overwhelmingly Americans were like, if someone called me woke, it would be an insult, kind of reflecting the fact that no one uses the term today as something other than a cudgel.

[00:03:53] When your book came out, I rushed out to buy it, right, because I really wanted to mine it for insights into, I think, what has become the dominant sort of cultural mode of discourse, right, in blue city America, in places like Seattle, where David and I live.

[00:04:13] And where there's been a really quite radical transformation of how we kind of talk and do and conduct and think about our politics and governance over the last 10 years. And what I first started picking up in the 2014-2015 era as a kind of, you know, a very academic bubble kind of counterculture, right, where David and I both are graduates of Reed College, a small, very progressive liberal arts college in Portland.

[00:04:40] And we were in these alumni groups and there was all this sort of conversation about trigger warnings and, you know, what have you, safe spaces. And I thought, wow, that's really weird. To David's point, this is really a comeback to stuff we were talking about in the 80s, you know, versions of it. But it's really limited. And then a couple of years later, it was everywhere in Seattle and people, you know, running the government were sort of talking in this language and about these concepts. And I was very caught off guard by that.

[00:05:09] And so your book really did not disappoint. It's been super interesting in that regard. Thanks for coming on. I think my first question really is, your book is about what you call the quote unquote symbolic capitalists, right? Which is this new elite. Explain the symbolic capitalist concept to us a little bit. Yeah, sure. So the we and we have never been woke is that constellation of elites that I call symbolic capitalists.

[00:05:35] So those are people who work in fields like education or finance or media or consulting. Basically, people who make a living by manipulating and collecting and so on data and symbols and rhetoric and ideas. And this is contrasted with people who make a living by providing physical goods and services to people. Basically, the term symbolic capital is from a different sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu.

[00:06:04] And basically, on Bourdieu's reading, symbolic capital were the resources that elites draw on to help convince people that inequalities are normal or to convince other people to defer to what elites want to do and so on. And I call this elite formation symbolic capitalists because basically the way we make a living, what we're defined by, is basically what we know, who we know, and how we're known.

[00:06:31] That is, we make a living basically by cultivating and leveraging what Bourdieu called symbolic capital. Right. Mm-hmm. Right. And then you take that concept of this sort of symbolic capitalist elite, right, that has emerged and sort of grown in its influence and reach, right?

[00:06:53] And just to kind of, for our listeners to give a kind of quick hit of the thesis of your book, what you're really saying is that there have been a series of, over the last century, great awokenings or awokenings, right, that have happened. And you cite four of them over the last century. The last one being what we've been recently talking about now, what happened in the 2010s in America.

[00:07:17] And what you say is that, what you argue is that those awokenings are really a function and they happen because a structural problem develops where we are producing more symbolic capitalists than can be absorbed into the system, into jobs of the kind of status and prestige that folks aspire to, you know, in this sort of class of people.

[00:07:41] And that when that happens, those folks respond by seeing themselves as really part of the socially and economically marginalized. And they adopt woke critiques to express their disaffection and to sort of engage in intra-elite power play. Yeah, absolutely. So one of the big puzzles the book wants to explore is like, so the people who work in symbolic professions, a lot of these professions were defined from the beginning in terms of altruism and serving the common good.

[00:08:09] So like, as an academic, academics are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads and to speak the truth without regards to anyone's political or economic interests. Or journalists are supposed to speak truth to power and be a voice for a voiceless and so on. So, you know, a lot of our professions are defined this way in terms of altruism and the common good.

[00:08:27] And so what you might think is that as people like us have more influence over society, as more wealth is concentrated in our hands and so on, you might expect that inequalities would be shrinking, that a lot of longstanding social problems would be getting fixed, that there would be bigger trust in institutions because of all the great work that we're doing for everyone. And instead, you see the opposite. You see growing inequality, increasing institutional dysfunction, reduced trust in institutions and so on. Okay. And so that's the core puzzle the book wants to address.

[00:08:57] But the fact that a lot of us, even during ordinary times, define ourselves in terms of altruism and the common good and helping the least among us and so on, helps explain part of the puzzle of why it is that these struggles over power and status end up being expressed in terms of the language of, you know, helping the dispossessed and helping the least among us and so on.

[00:09:20] Because from the beginning, the autonomy that we enjoy, the extraordinary pay we enjoy compared to other workers, the prestige that we enjoy compared to other workers, we've always premised that on the fact that you should give us these things, not for our own sake, but because if you give us these things, it'll be to the benefit of everyone in society, including and especially the marginalized and the disadvantaged. I thought one of the most interesting points you make in the book, when you talk about the current great, the current awakening that happened, right?

[00:09:50] And you trace it back to Occupy Wall Street that begins around 2011. And the point you make about the argument of Occupy Wall Street is that, as you say, the real blame here is the 1%, right? The billionaire class, those people who are really at the very sort of peak apex of the economic ladder, there to blame for all of our problems.

[00:10:19] And everybody else is part of the 99%. We're all oppressed and marginalized by this tiny code of billionaires.

[00:10:27] And I was really struck by the argument you're making there, which is that that's a convenient way of absolving what we might call a new gentry class or the 9.9% that some other people have characterized it from any culpability in the marginalization of the poor and the people of color.

[00:10:50] And so just quickly address that and why you see that as the origin of the phenomena that we've been talking about over the last decades. And I'm going to come back to this because this is especially relevant, I think, to the conversation we're having in blue cities. But yeah, go from there. Yeah, absolutely. So if you look at the demographics of who took part in Occupy, it's the same demographics as the people who took part in Black Lives Matter and the Me Too and the March for Science and all of that.

[00:11:19] It's the same wave of activism. It's highly educated, relatively affluent, urban and suburban white people basically have been driving most of the movement. In terms of the structure of the argument and demands, they were defined. The Occupy movement was defined by these rituals like the progressive stack, which were these bureaucratic rules about who could talk and in what order. And these aren't like working class people don't organize themselves to achieve these kinds of.

[00:11:48] They're not waving their hands. Like, yeah, I'm waving my hands. Rules and bureaucratic. Like, this is what we like to do. We're those people. We like these rules and norms and making things complicated and convoluted. And then even the demands. There was like this resistance to making any kind of concrete political demands, which is, again, not how normal people organize for politics. But to the point about how that in some ways that we are the 99 percent obscures who actually this is a really important point.

[00:12:18] So one of the things I highlight in the book is that if you want to understand how a lot of social problems persist and who benefits from them and how and so on, you don't get as much mileage as you might hope looking at just the 1 percent. So look at wealth in America, for instance. So the top 1 percent control 27 percent of America's wealth. That's a radically disproportionate share. It's also nowhere near a majority. So if you just look at the top 1 percent, you miss most wealth in America.

[00:12:44] Okay, what if you zoom out to the top 20 percent? Well, then you can account for 72 percent of America's wealth, which is another way of saying 80 percent of Americans, the vast majority of Americans, have to make do with 28 percent of the country's wealth. Like from the second percentile to the 20th percentile, that other 19 percent has twice as much wealth as the top 1 percent.

[00:13:08] But when we want to talk about these things, we only focus on the 1 percent, the 1 percent, the 1 percent and ignore this next block that has twice as much wealth cumulatively. And then even if you look at the millionaires and the billionaires, they're increasingly drawn from our professions. People like Zuckerberg and so on, Rupert Murdoch, all of these hated billionaires. Well, how did they make their money? Mostly by manipulating symbols and data and stuff, not providing physical goods and services to people.

[00:13:35] And then finally, I'll say one of the things I highlight in the third chapter of the book is that even if you want to understand how the millionaires and the billionaires do the things they do, it's mostly with us and through us. And almost everything that we hate about what millionaires and multinational corporations do and so on, they couldn't do it without us. It's us that make the magic happen. We're the ones who actually do the things on behalf of the rich and the powerful.

[00:14:01] And so to the extent that we just focus on them and absolve ourselves, again, we just really miss how a lot of stuff happens and who benefits from it and how and so on and so forth. It's a very convenient narrative to just focus on the millionaires and the billionaires. I worked at a local NPR station here as a politics reporter. I worked there for about 20 years up until just last year.

[00:14:23] And we were definitely symbolic capitalists at the heart of blue cities, I would say, in terms of, you know, NPR stations have 10 times the audience of the New York Times or something like that. So it's a pretty influential network in terms of shaping or advocating for certain kinds of things. And after 2020, as everywhere, there was a major focus on diversifying sources, which was long overdue. We had been doing it, but it was great to get the nudge to do it even more so.

[00:14:48] But in practice, we most often heard from folks, and Sandeep was a big critic of this as a listener, who espoused the same mostly white progressive views that, you know, most of the people at the station held, including myself. Yeah. So whether it was immigration or policing, viewpoint diversity was definitely not a part of our official mandate, either by design or neglect. It just wasn't. And I think a lot of my former co-workers would sort of say, well, why is that a problem?

[00:15:17] Or if we're going to be critical of that, aren't we just being anti-woke? And I'll bring up one other kind of anecdote from that, which was that as reporters, we were asked to track the racial and other kinds of identities of our sources. So we sent out a little form that would ask people to fill it out, or you could just ask them directly, you know, age and race, etc. But not class. We didn't ask about how much did this person make, you know? And several times I raised this, shouldn't we also find out about, like, we're doing it anyway.

[00:15:46] We hadn't done that before. This would be interesting to know. Like, are we only talking to the top 1% or 20% or whatever, right? And I was told several times, no, it's not feasible. We can't do it. It was a little murky as to why, but it basically just didn't happen. I don't know if that's the case at other NPR stations. But my question is, you know, taking those two things, we're not even going to look at class at all. When we look at race, we're not even really talking to people.

[00:16:12] Because as a reporter, I knew that, in fact, some of the most conservative, socially conservative people in Seattle happen to live in some of the more diverse neighborhoods of Seattle right now. They didn't reflect those white progressive views. So we're almost willfully ignoring the very people that we were claiming to want to, you know, represent in our programming. So a couple questions there.

[00:16:32] I mean, if you look at the national level data, it's definitely true that people who are black, who are Hispanic, who are religious minorities and so on, tend to be significantly more socially conservative, religious and so on. And especially as compared to highly educated white liberal people.

[00:16:48] And you can actually see this a little bit in the 2020, well, clearly in the 2024 election, where if you look at which sectors of America shifted most towards the GOP, not actually just in this cycle, but even over the last decade.

[00:17:02] Or it was religious people, less affluent people, less educated people, ethnic minorities, even as the privileged, quote, privileged people, white people, highly educated people, affluent people have trended consistently towards the Democratic Party over the last decade. And yeah. And so there's kind of there's a couple of problems that I try to tease out in the book there.

[00:17:25] So, for instance, one problem is that even just ethnically, a lot of times, like to stick with the example of African-Americans, black people, like the vast majority of Americans, of black Americans are American descendants of slaves. They're monoracial American descendants of slaves. But those that that subset, that ethnic subset is almost absent from knowledge economy hubs.

[00:17:52] Like I was on a panel recently that had four black people. Two of them were Afro-Caribbean. One was a recent African immigrant. And then there was me, who's half white. And so like a representative subset slice of black America, we absolutely were not. But we were definitely a representative panel of like the typical black symbolic capitalists.

[00:18:15] And this matters because a lot of these programs like affirmative action and so on were explicitly designed as a kind of reparations program for American descendants of slaves. And there's some of the people who have benefited least from these policies. And similarly, a lot of these opportunities to elevate the voices of black people and so on.

[00:18:36] Almost everyone that you see as a, quote, black voice in media, academia, and so on, is like demonstrably unrepresentative of mainstream black America, even just in ethnic terms, let alone talking about class. But then when you fold in the class dimension, an essay that haunts me a lot was this essay by Bertrand Cooper. It's called Who Gets to Create Black Culture?

[00:19:02] And his argument was that in a world where George Floyd had survived and he wanted to write for the Atlantic or the New York Times or he wanted to come on NPR, it would have never happened, never in a million years, because he didn't have a college degree. People like, in places like NPR and the New York Times and the Atlantic, they don't care about the perspective of people like George Floyd.

[00:19:27] The perspective of people like George Floyd is never included in most of their reporting and writing and research. In fact, as you said, we often look for voices that are going to tell us the kinds of things we want to hear. People who look different but think the same. And in fact, to take it a step further, we sometimes even punish people. We punish our colleagues sometimes when they have the indiscretion to interview normie black voters who present us with opinions we don't like.

[00:19:54] So as an example, during the period of heightened fervor around Black Lives Matter, a journalist, Lee Fang, went out on the street and just interviewed black people about Black Lives Matter. And it turns out, surprise, a lot of black people don't like Black Lives Matter, the organization, or even agree with the cause. Like a lot of people think Black Lives Matter is corrupt. They have questions about where the money went. A lot of other black people, and you can see this clearly in opinion polling, and it was also clear in the interviews,

[00:20:25] didn't support the idea of defunding the police or reducing, letting everyone out of prison and so on. A lot of black people have real concerns about public safety and public order and things like this. But in some cases, more policing. And for the indiscretion of interviewing normie black people and presenting us with evidence that a lot of normie black people didn't like Black Lives Matter, he was fired. He was fired from the intercept.

[00:20:53] They fired him for confronting us with the fact that a lot of minorities disagree with our preferred position. So not only do we not interview people like George Floyd, typically, but when the exceptions to the rule, if we do go out and interview people like George Floyd, maybe this is part of the reason we don't do it, you often get punished for forcing people to reckon with the fact that actually a lot of the people we purport to represent, they just don't share our values and our priorities and our modes of politics.

[00:21:22] Yeah, it's not at all clear to me that the NPR audience wants to really hear what normie black people think about cops or, you know, crime or any number of issues, right? As opposed to having, let's go out and find the right black person who will say exactly what we want them to say and platform them, right?

[00:21:45] This drove me crazy during the period of what we might call peak woke and that kind of 2021 period where, you know, I make my living, I used to be a journalist, I make my living doing political work in Seattle. And so we do a lot of polling. And our polling was really clear that the cohort of people that really wanted to defund the police were affluent, white, educated, white, polarized, white progressives, right?

[00:22:11] And while there was significant support during that period in other communities as well, communities of color, black communities, there was much lower levels of support, you know, discernibly lower levels of support for those sorts of ideas in those communities where they're the ones who are actually facing the bulk of the, and the brunt of crime or street disorder or issues like that. Yeah, or even things like abolishing prisons. Take that for an example.

[00:22:38] Like in a lot of progressive circles, especially among whites, there seems to be this idea that America's prisons are just full of nonviolent drug offenders and people who committed other petty crimes like this. And that the reason that we have such a large prison population is it's just people picked up for small crimes and racism, basically. And you just abolish the prisons and let these people go and they'll just reintegrate in an uncomplicated way into society.

[00:23:37] Okay. And so, for people who are in the most part of the time, being the majority of them are in prison for rapes, murders, assaults, things like this. And then even the ones who aren't, who are especially in prison for drug crimes are often in, not just for like petty possession, but for like having large quantities of drugs that ravage out neighborhoods, hollow out whole communities and so on.

[00:24:01] And so, for people in the symbolic professions who, when we say abolish the prisons, we misunderstand who's in prison. But two, we also know full well that when we abolish the prisons, the prisoners aren't going to be moving into our neighborhoods. They're going to be moving into poorer, blacker, browner neighborhoods. And this is something that poorer, blacker and browner people also understand.

[00:24:26] So when they hear abolish the prison, abolish the prisons, they understand that they're going to have a bunch of people who committed violence and drug trafficking moving into their communities. And so, understandably, they're less jazzed on it than white progressives who just think it's all a bunch of nonviolent drug offenders. And in any case, the nonviolent drug offenders aren't moving to their neighborhoods anyway. Right. And so this different exposure to risk is part of what leads to these, you know, systematic differences in opinion.

[00:24:56] Right. These aren't abstractions for normie black people living in poorer neighborhoods. Right. As they may be for, you know, they may be much more in the realm of ideas or, as you say, symbols for for. Yeah. Even things like property crime and some symbolic capitalist spaces. People will say things like, hey, look, if someone steals a bike or something, don't get the cops involved. Are you going to ruin someone's life? Give them a criminal record? Have them risk their health possibly in an interaction with law enforcement. It's just stuff. You can just replace it.

[00:25:24] But like that's a convenient position for elites to take because we can just buy more stuff. But like if you are less affluent and you lose your bike and you use that bike to get to work, that's a big problem for you. And in fact, you can't buy a new bike unless you work more and you have to have some way to get to work in order to race. Like and so this is like losing something like a bike really derails your life in a big way.

[00:25:51] In many cases, if you're less affluent, like I think a lot of people who are more elite just don't understand how devastating and disruptive. Property crime can be because we just for us, it's just stuff that we can replace. And it's it's it's it's not that simple if you're less affluent. And this is another example of how like this different exposures to risk just lead us into positions that are out of step with a lot of the people we want to represent and help.

[00:26:17] You mentioned Trump gaining ground in blue cities in 2024 and among diverse group of voters, you know, African-American voters, men. And I bring this back to my experience working as a politics reporter in 2016, the first time Trump won. And I was tasked with covering the convention and kind of how the sort of local lens through which that all went down.

[00:26:43] It was surprising to me when Trump won, as it was to a lot of people, just because I was looking at the New York Times needle and told me Hillary Clinton was going to win. But when he did win, I was kind of like, what the fuck? We got it wrong. Why did we get it so wrong? What were we doing wrong? I got to figure this out. And I remember many of my coworkers were kind of, why are you even talking about that? We know why Trump won. He won because here is anti-immigrant rhetoric. It's racist. So racists voted for him. That's why he won.

[00:27:11] This is about white anxiety, about losing power, and it's going to be a majority-minority society, and that's what's going on, which I think is actually not completely wrong. You know, there's elements of truth to all of that. Trump absolutely was racist, and there is something called white anxiety about whatever, all kinds of things. But it's insufficient. It's almost cartoonish in explaining what happened in that election.

[00:27:32] And there's just this bizarre lack of curiosity in some cases for folks, you know, I'm picking on my own former coworkers, but I think this was pretty broad, you know, after that 2016 vote, a kind of lack of interest in all of that. And what I'm wondering is not just what you think symbolic capitalists got wrong about Trump in 2016 and 2024, but why do we keep getting it so wrong?

[00:28:01] Yeah, so I'll say, you know, in 2016 also, and I wrote things about this right after the election, and actually in the lead-up to the election for that matter, 2016 was caused in large part the people who shifted the most, again, were actually non-white voters. White turnout was relatively stagnant. He got a smaller share of the white vote than Mitt Romney. He was able to win because of shifts among Asians and Hispanics and Black people that helped flip states like Ohio and Pennsylvania and Georgia and so on.

[00:28:28] But then even as it relates to white voters who shifted, the kind of white lash narrative didn't make a whole lot of sense, just even on its face. Because it doesn't make a, like if you couldn't continence the idea of a black president, it's not clear why you would have voted for that person not once but twice and then took out your racial grievance on a white lady with a white running fate.

[00:28:54] Like the people who flipped the election were basically people who voted for Obama in previous cycles and then Trump in the later ones. But again, that's not to say there aren't, there isn't any racial grievance among white people or anxiety about changing demographics among white people. There is, but as an explanation for why the election went the way it did, it was always a pretty, like on its face, a pretty weak explanation. Okay, so why does this keep happening? I think there are kind of two issues.

[00:29:20] One of them is that a lot of times people get locked into certain analytic frames really hard to the point where it becomes difficult to see counter evidence that's right in front of their face.

[00:29:32] So for instance, if you're convinced that Trump is a racist and he says racist stuff all the time, that the only reason that you could vote for him is because he's a racist, sometimes you can be presented with data that shows he had relatively stagnant turnout among whites and gained with people of color and so on and just have a hard time processing that information or even.

[00:29:52] And I'll add, actually, a thing that we also have a tough time reckoning with is the extent to which non-white people often have negative attitudes towards other non-white people. So to the extent that like immigration or anti-black affect or things like that played a role in the election. Well, guess what? You know who the most skeptical slice of the population is towards immigration in the U.S.? African-Americans. And actually Hispanics are not very far behind.

[00:30:19] Or anti-Asian hate crimes are often carried out by African-Americans. If you look at who subscribes to anti-Semitic attitudes or anti-Islam attitudes, a lot of black and Hispanic people view Islam as a false and dangerous religion. They're evangelical Christians and other forms of Christians. And if someone wants to have less Muslims in the country, they think that's great. But for a lot of us, we tend to think in these intersectional terms and we view all these causes as related and we want to liberate everyone at the same time. And so it's really tough for us.

[00:30:47] And we feel really deep discomfort blaming groups that we think of as good for anything that we think of as bad. And so if you have something like anti-immigrant politicians gaining because of sentiment among non-white voters, that's just a kind of thing that we have a tough time talking about. So we want to try to blame whites, even if whites aren't the ones driving it.

[00:31:10] And then the last thing I'll say is that part of the problem, too, is that when you look at contemporary journalists, almost all of us are on the blue line of charts. So almost all of us are Democrats. Almost all of us identify as liberal at a rate of like five to one or more. And in a context where almost all of us are on the blue line of charts, if we want to understand something that we think of as bad, we don't usually start by asking, well, how did we get this wrong? What did we do?

[00:31:40] What's weird about us? Why are our politicians, you know, not resonating with people? Instead, our default assumption is to blame the red line people, to ask, well, what's wrong with them? And we assume that it must be because of some deficit or pathology among the red line people, racism, sexism and so on. That explains it. And so after the Trump election, you did a lot of soul searching, asking, well, how did Democrats go wrong?

[00:32:07] But the modal response for symbolic capitalists wasn't to do that. It was to blame the voters, to find out what's wrong with the voters such that they didn't vote the way we wanted to. You know, which negative trait best explains why people would vote for Donald Trump is that they're more racist or sexist or authoritarian or so on and so forth. You know, whole literature around this. I've long said to people, because I work as a political consultant, that blaming the voters for not voting for you is generally a really bad idea if you want to try to be successful politically.

[00:32:36] It's not a good way to approach things. Nobody owes you their vote. You've got to go out there and figure out how to win them over to your side. And if you just dismiss them as racist or sexist or misogynist or whatever, you're, you know, transphobic, you're not going to be successful with those people. But and I will say just that going back to an earlier point you were making, I do think there's a pretty strong argument that you could make that probably the single most consequential act that led to Trump's re-election

[00:33:04] was when Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, started bussing tens of thousands of migrants to blue cities where they were then housed and fed in neighborhoods like the south side of Chicago or in all the poorer neighborhoods of New York City. And you suddenly saw scenes of longstanding black residents on the south side of Chicago saying, what's going on here? Why are these people getting all this free stuff?

[00:33:30] And, you know, we've been under, you know, and it caused an enormous uproar. And I think has completely transformed how the Democratic Party is talking about immigration and politics since then. Yeah, there's this great research, too, that shows white progressives are especially urban and suburban white progressives are basically the slice of America that's most supportive of accepting refugees, accepting undocumented immigrants, accepting large numbers of immigrants and so on.

[00:33:58] But we also overwhelmingly adopt a not in my backyard posture. So we think we should take large numbers of people from whoever wants to come here should come here, but they should live somewhere else. Like they should live in a neighborhood other than mine. You should live in a community other than mine. And you could see this when some of the Republican governors started dropping people off at Martha's Vineyard and places like that. They were promptly relocated to a place with more browns and poors.

[00:34:24] And, you know, a lot of the people who live in, as you said, these less white, less affluent neighborhoods both felt tension. Like there's kind of cultural tension that comes with assimilating people from different backgrounds and so on. Like that's always a process. It's, you know, it's never seamless, frictionless. But then on top of that, there was a kind of resentment where people were wondering, well, why are they getting so much benefits from the government while we're struggling to get by, while our communities are underinvested in and so on and so forth.

[00:34:53] Like it feels like our tax dollars should be more focused on Americans first and so on and so forth. And so, yeah, I think that this absolutely played a role. But to pull back the lens a little bit, because I was grappling with this throughout my reading of your book, which is symbolic capitalists, right? People, affluent, progressive, educated people, people like me or David or, you know, who live in blue states.

[00:35:22] You know, you're saying that they're mostly really sincere about their desires to help the poor and the marginalized. But they can't really escape the cage of their own kind of false consciousness. Or they have these huge blind spots that make it kind of impossible for them to see that they're not actually acting, you know, that they're acting, you know, essentially in their own interest as opposed to actually lifting up the marginalized.

[00:35:47] And so my question was, how do the symbolic capitalists or these folks escape from that cage of their own consciousness? And one of the obvious answers would be, well, you're anti-woke. But you address that in the book and you say, oh, it ain't so simple.

[00:36:04] People who are ostentatiously anti-woke are themselves using that language of anti-wokeness as a way to gain a certain kind of status within an intra-elite struggle for power or privilege. Yeah. So is it possible for those folks to escape that cage?

[00:36:26] And I do think you started, I read the piece you wrote just recently about Trump's election, you know, how you're going to respond now that Trump is elected and whether it's bad for you to be talking about this stuff or should you be a part of resistance? And I do think you start to bring an answer there, but I'm curious, Musa, how you address that.

[00:36:45] Are we all just trapped in the cage of our own, you know, kind of structural position, you know, in society or is there a way out? Well, OK, so first I want to just double click on this point about symmetry where, yeah, so it's everything that I say about left-leaning symbolic capitalists is just as true of anti-woke symbolic capitalists. It's just as true of conservative symbolic capitalists.

[00:37:10] I mean, you see this effort by Trump's defense secretary nominee to change the names of bases back to their Confederate names. So, like, this is a nice example of, like, what you might call the woke right. Like, people get annoyed at symbolic capitalists for focusing on changing the names of schools or military bases and things like that instead of addressing practical problems, but not because they think, oh, well, we should have all these bases named after Confederates.

[00:37:40] And I hate Rosa Parks, so how dare you name something after Rosa Parks? Like, that's not unpopular per se. It's just that, like, we all have bigger fish to fry. Why the F are you focused on this, right? Like, that's the problem. And so, like, to have people on the right that are also focused on these trivial things about renaming bases, but then striking the position also, like, their goal isn't to name them after Rosa Parks, but to name them after Confederates again.

[00:38:08] Like, that's just such a political loser. Like, there's no swing constituency in America who's like, oh, the Confederates, they just haven't had their due. So I'm really glad that instead of focusing on practical problems, they're worried about this symbolic crap. Like, it's a loser on every front, right? And so this point about symmetry I think is important to double-click on. Okay. What should we do instead of this? So as a spoiler for listeners, one thing the book doesn't do is, like, a lot of books end with, like, here's my 12 steps.

[00:38:37] Like, here's my policy solutions for this problem I've talked about. Or here's my 12 steps for effective. Like, and I don't do that in part because it felt like a non sequitur. Because, like, most of the book is, like, here's my 100-year look at the history and political economy of the knowledge professions. And then if I conclude by, like, here's 12 steps for effective social justice activism. Like, it just didn't, like, make sense as a flow. Here's how we beat Trump in 2024, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:39:07] But I think there are some lessons that people could take indirectly from the book. Like, one of them is I think it's really important for people to pay attention to the people you actually want to help. What do they want? What are their perspectives? What do they need? And the only way to find that isn't to find convenient spokespeople who tell you what you want.

[00:39:31] But to, like, actually exert some effort into either looking at your local, talking to stakeholders in your local community or consulting nationally representative data about the groups that you're trying to benefit and so on. And this is important because there's a lot of history in the U.S. and around the world of well-intentioned people causing harm to the very people they're trying to help. You know, by not sufficiently consulting the people they're trying to help.

[00:39:57] And in this case, what you've seen over the last decade is that we've alienated the people that we want to help so much so that they're empowering people like Donald Trump to chuck people like us because they've grown so alienated from us and our preferred political party. They're the ones driving the backlash. Another example would be to focus less on, like, cosmic stuff. For instance, ending racism. You're not going to end racism.

[00:40:21] It doesn't matter how passionate you are, how aggressive you are, how zealous you are, how, you know, there's no tactic that you could, like, you're not going to end racism. But what you can do is it's completely possible to help actual concrete people who face actual problems in actual context. You can go to a specific community and help actual people deal with practical problems.

[00:40:47] And, like, that should be the focus, I think, instead of focusing on these cosmic struggles over abstractions like racism to, like, ask, like, well, who around me needs help? How can I help them? Or who, you know, not even necessarily around me, but, like, who needs help? Practically speaking, how can I help them? And focus on that instead of, like, this kind of fighting abstractions, defeating sexism, defeating racism, and so on in the abstract. So there's this great report by Jacobin and YouGov called Common Sense Solidarity.

[00:41:16] And what they find is that it's not the case that working class voters hate LGBTQ people, hate racial minorities, want to see them suffer, don't care about their problems, and so on. That's just not true. What they do like, though, is they prefer when people focus on things like common values, shared goals, superordinate identities. So we're all, like, you're a black-eyed white for both Americans.

[00:41:45] Universalistic approaches to solving social problems. And, you know, and I think that's a better way to go, as Barbara Fields emphasized. Even things like race-targeted programs to help the poor. So, like, you want to help disadvantaged black people, and so you design a program that's for disadvantaged people if they happen to be black.

[00:42:06] Well, you know, the problem with that, according to a lot of voters, is that that kind of a program, what you end up doing in practice, is you have a bunch of other desperate poor people who are maybe white, who you're discriminating against on the basis of their race because they're not a member of the target group. Even though they need help, you're going to deny them aid. Like, to a lot of Americans, that seems unjust.

[00:42:30] And so, like, you can see this in the Common Sense Solidarity report and in a lot of other polling and surveys that most other Americans, what they would want, what they would prefer is a policy that's like, oh, well, you're desperate and vulnerable. I'm going to help you. I don't care about your gender, your sexuality, your race. You know, they prefer more universalistic-oriented policies and messaging.

[00:42:54] And I think it's also the case that in the event that we notice that there's some cause that we want to advance, but we notice the public is out of step with us, it's incumbent on us to actually try to persuade them. And persuade, as I said in that piece, what persuade means is it means engaging with people who don't already agree with us in the kinds of venues where those people are and talking to them in a manner that they will find persuasive.

[00:43:23] Which is, like, which is obvious, but, like, we almost never do this. Like, mainstream symbolic academics, mainstream media folks, and so on, we very rarely engage in a charitable and constructive way with people who don't already agree with us in a way that they will find persuasive and in the kind of spaces where they tend to gravitate. We just don't do that.

[00:43:45] And you have mentioned this on another podcast that you, earlier in your career, had a kind of cancellation experience where right-wingers sort of came after you and that you responded to that by actually teaching yourself or going out there and actually talking to right-wing folks on right-wing media and making the same arguments you'd always been making but talking about them in a different way. And it worked. Yeah. It worked in a couple levels.

[00:44:14] It worked in the sense of, like, if you want to convince people not to invade Iran, it doesn't do any good to, like, write somewhere in Al Jazeera, oh, don't bomb Iran, and we all go, oh, yeah, we're so smart, like, to other people who agree with you. You have to go to the people who want to bomb Iran and, again, talk to them in a way that they will find compelling about why they shouldn't do that. So engaging more with people who didn't agree with me, one, it helped move the meter on this.

[00:44:44] Like, it helped move the meter more. I had the secretary of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Martin Dempsey, cite one of my novel statistics about why airstrikes in Syria would be unlikely to achieve, you know, what people would hope. That's a kind of thing that would never have happened in a world where I was just preaching to the choir. So just for practical ways about, like, practically achieving your goals, engaging across difference helps.

[00:45:10] But more than that, my own understanding of a lot of issues changed. If I, going through the work of having to understand how other people see this issue, going through the work of having to talk to people who don't agree with me, engaging with their objections and their thoughts and so on, deepen my own understanding of a lot of issues, cause me to see a lot of things that I had been taking for granted. If you don't try to do that exercise, it can be easy to think, well, you know, why the hell is it the case that these people disagree with me?

[00:45:40] There must be something wrong with them. They must be crazy. They must be racist. They must have these kind of, but if you go through and really think hard about that question, if you ask it from a place of curiosity, of genuine curiosity, well, why is it that they, that these people are voting this way? Or why is it that people have this other view? You know, you'd be shocked by how much you can learn by asking that question in sincerity with genuine curiosity and trying to empirically find the answer to that question. Musa Al-Gharbi, thank you so much for joining us.

[00:46:10] It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. That's it for another edition of Blue City Blues. I'm David Hyde. He's Sandeep Kaushik. Thanks everybody so much for listening.