In the last post in this series, we looked at Musa al-Gharbi’s description in We Have Never Been Woke of what causes Awokenings to rise and eventually fall, what are the long term consequences of these movements?
Given that Awokenings consist of wealthy and elite members of the symbolic capitalist class rising in support of antiracism, feminism, economic equality, and other social justice related causes, it’s natural to ask if the outcome is an improvement for women, racial minorities, or the poor. Unfortunately, al-Gharbi doesn’t see much cause for celebration regarding results:
Despite their intense focus on social justice issues, Great Awokenings have rarely generated positive outcomes for the genuinely needy or vulnerable.
That is not to say the situation for such communities has not improved. Great progress has been made for all of these communities. It’s just that Awokenings as such seem to do nothing to contribute to those improvements – and often end up being counterproductive. For example,
With respect to racial equality, for instance, political scientist Robert Putnam shows that gains for African Americans began around 1860 – that is, before any of the Great Awokenings, and indeed, before the Civil War…After the war, Black gains proceeded apace through the 1960s. Gaps between Blacks and whites continued to close… There was no apparent impact from the first Great Awokening on any of these trends—for better or worse. Likewise, the civil rights movement notched most of its successes before the second Great Awokening began—and stalled out thereafter. That is, the second Great Awokening was not responsible for the civil rights movement and its victories. It may have derailed them.
The same is true for women:
At the end of the nineteenth century, women in the United States began making significant gains in terms of rights and protections, and gaps between men and women on a range of dimensions began to close. These patterns did not accelerate as a result of the second Great Awokening, as many perhaps assume. Instead, they slowed beginning in the mid-1960s. And on many measures, women have been losing ground relative to men since the 1990s (i.e., the third Great Awokening).
Overall, the first Great Awokening seemed to have no real impact for better or worse, and “the century from 1860 to 1960 was defined by steady and broad based gains in socioeconomic equality, civil rights, trust in social institutions, religious attendance, union membership, and other forms of civic participation.” These gains began well before the first Great Awokening and were not caused by it, nor did they accelerate during or in the aftermath of that Awokening.
The subsequent Awokenings, however, were followed by progress either stalling out or worsening along the very measures the woke seemed to be dedicated to improving. Thus, al-Gharbi says, “There have been shocking reversals across all of these dimensions since” the second Awokening, and the symbolic elite taking the reins of social institutions “has been accompanied by stark declines in equality, social cohesion, and civic participation. The first Great Awokening did little to enhance the pre-1960 ‘upswing,’ and subsequent Awokenings seem to have done even less to halt or reverse the post 1960s declines.”
Public opinion has shifted in a much more tolerant direction and away from racism or sexism. Nonetheless, al-Gharbi says, there’s no evidence that any of the Awokenings did anything to create this increase in tolerance and acceptance, or to accelerate it:
There is no meaningful relationship between Awokenings and material gains for marginalized and disadvantaged populations, nor is there a meaningful connection between Awokenings and durable changes among the general public. If anything, there has been an inverse relationship between Awokenings and material “progress” from the second Awokening forward.
But this doesn’t mean Awokenings don’t have long-lasting effects in other domains. Because elites use Awokenings to raise their own status and take the reins of power in institutions, Awokenings create new rounds of institutional capture by the woke and the elites, and the effects of this are long lasting:
Although Awokenings do not seem to be responsible for generating major transformation in society writ large, they often do produce significant and durable changes within symbolic capitalist institutions…Yet, rather than enhancing the position of those who are significantly disadvantaged in society, these opportunities primarily benefit elites from the target populations.
Awokenings also provide opportunities for entrenched bureaucracies to expand their own power and influence:
Corporate HR departments and their ever-expanding rules and administrative processes began proliferating after the second Great Awokening. They have leveraged every subsequent Awokening to expand their institutional influence…
The second Awokening likewise corresponded with the birth and proliferation of administrators to curate and managed diversity at postsecondary institutions, elite K-12 schools, and increasingly the private and nonprofit sectors. These positions have also seen major expansions in the aftermath of each Awokening. Their ranks have swelled to the point that, today, many colleges and universities have nearly as many noninstructional staff as they have undergraduate students, and in some cases more.
But just as social justice activism as practiced by the woke seems to have little to do with actually bringing about the ostensible aims of social justice, these new expansions in administrative power also seem to be somewhere between ineffectual and actively counterproductive to their supposed purpose:
Nonetheless, it is unclear what (if any) good is being accomplished by this ever-expanding constellation of social justice sinecures beyond providing practitioners with gainful employment. Many of the programs associated with these DEI roles (such as diversity training) are demonstrably ineffective with respect to their stated goals. The proliferation of diversity bureaucrats has corresponded with a significant increase in social inequality and decreases in social solidarity, as highlighted in the previous section…
However, as a function of perverse incentive structures within these fields, unfortunate social trends may be good for business. A lack of progress or worsening conditions are not typically interpreted as evidence that DEI-oriented positions and programs are unnecessary or unhelpful. Rather, they often serve as a pretext to demand still more institutional power and resources for DEI professionals.
As discussed previously, symbolic capitalists frequently use regulatory capture to erect strong barriers to entry into their professions, both increasing their economic power and serving as a buffer to keep people from insufficiently elite backgrounds from joining their ranks. These barriers, too, tend to ramp up during Awokenings, and this creates a ratchet effect where more and more people are shut out of upward mobility – in the name of social justice.
This institutional capture among elites also allows entrenched elites to use tools established in the name of social justice to protect their own position and keep would-be rivals in their place:
Under the auspices of promoting social justice, many symbolic capitalist spaces have become “hotbeds of craven snitches” where elites weaponize resources established to protect and support those who are genuinely marginalized, disadvantaged, vulnerable, or victimized in order to settle personal vendettas, gain the upper hand in institutional power struggles, or purge political and ideological opponents…
Defenders of what has come to be referred to as “cancel culture” often attempt to portray the phenomenon as folks from less advantaged backgrounds holding the “privileged” to account. In fact, the people engaged in these practices are typically themselves elites or aspiring elites. Again, symbolic capitalists tend to be among the most sensitive and most easily offended sectors of U.S. society.
The end result is that cancel culture most often results in either elites keeping down members of the working class, on rarer occasions, elites using these tools to displace someone even more elite than themselves:
It is elites who are raised from a young age to understand and learn how administrative systems and processes work, allowing them to know which levers to pull to get people fired or disciplined, even on false or exaggerated charges, while minimizing repercussions or blowback for themselves. It is elites who feel comfortable folding authorities and third parties into their personal disputes, believing that these institutions, processes, and professionals exist to serve their interests (not wrongly), and that the system will typically work to their advantage (not wrongly). It is people from elite backgrounds who simply expect institutions and their representatives to accommodate their personal preferences, priorities, and perspectives—and who will demand to “speak to the manager” when they don’t, and who know how to “speak to the manager” to get what they want. These kinds of knowledge, dispositions, and behaviors toward institutions are part of the “hidden curriculum” of elite childhoods, elite education, and elite culture. Consequently, while there are many cases of elites “canceling” working class people, there are not many cases of non-elites successfully cancelling elites. Even in cases of “punching up,” what is characterized as “holding the privileged to account” is generally an instance in which some faction of elites has managed to purge or inflict damage on someone even better positioned than themselves. Much like cricket or lacrosse in the United States, cancellation is primarily an elite sport.
Another long term effect of Awokenings is a loss of trust in institutions by the majority of people. As al-Gharbi extensively documents, the views, goals, and priorities of woke elites tends to be wildly out of step with the very people the woke claim to be seeking to uplift, as well as the views of non-elites more generally. This actually tends to produce a backlash against the views of the woke. The woke tend to explain away this backlash as the “distress of the privileged” – they say the backlash is driven by the rage of racist, sexist white men who are resentful about the improving situation of women and racial minorities created through woke activism. However, al-Gharbi points out this self-serving explanation simply doesn’t match reality:
But what this means with respect to interpreting the culture wars is that, when Americans shift right in the aftermath of Awokenings, they are generally not reacting against material changes that benefit marginalized populations at the expense of the majority group. Those have been few and far between and don’t cleanly correlate well with Awokenings in any case. The “backlash” instead seems to be about growing alienation among “normies” from elite culture and elite institutions, whose outputs shift far more during Awokenings than any laws or relative material circumstances between groups.
The woke recognize how the values they espouse are out of step with those of most ordinary Americans – but openly interpret this as a simply being a result of their own intellectual and moral superiority:
Symbolic capitalists broadly recognize that our political views and sensibilities are different from those of most other Americans. Our preferred narrative to explain these gaps is to appeal to our “superior” knowledge, intelligence, and credentials.
The “normies” don’t fail to notice the highly condescending attitude the elites harbor toward them, and this creates significant resentment:
Moreover, mainstream symbolic capitalists tend to interpret deviance from, or resistance to, our own preferences and priorities in terms of pathologies (racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, authoritarianism, reactionary closed-mindedness, ideological zealotry, and dogmatism) or deficits (lack of information or education; lack of cognitive sophistication or capability; lack of imagination, empathy, or perspective). This is not hyperbole; it is quite literally the case.
Entire lines of scholarly research and journalistic reporting are oriented around determining which pathology or deficit best explains why people deviate from the preferred positions of symbolic capitalists. Huge industries have sprung up trying to exploit big data, predictive modeling, and advances in the cognitive and behavioral sciences in order to “nudge” people into behaving in ways that symbolic capitalists think they “should.” Government and non-profit programs are full of restrictions and requirements that convey that others cannot be trusted to make responsible decisions on their own. Inconvenient social movements are typically explained in terms of some noxious counterelite (e.g., Trump, the Koch brothers, Fox News) “brainwashing” and “duping” an easily manipulated public into pursuing the “wrong” ends.
This distrust also impacts scientific institutions, particularly as scientists explicitly use their mantle as scientists to support political activism:
In the aftermath of the second and third Great Awokenings, we see significant drops in public trust in scientists.
And woke elites also created a loss of trust in institutions by expressing outright antagonism towards the values of “normies”:
Within the new elite class, people gained status through delegitimizing and denigration institutions, traditions, values, and ways of life associated with the middle class…
Again, symbolic capitalists are generally much further to the left on “culture” issues than most Americans – and Awokenings drive them to stake out positions that are even further out of touch with the rest of their countrymen.
Woke elites will tend to denigrate the institutions valued by the normies, even as they themselves continue to take advantage of those very institutions. One example al-Gharbi gives is the traditional family:
Indeed, although symbolic capitalists are the Americans most likely to disparage “traditional families,” they are also among the most likely to have hailed from “traditional families” themselves, and to establish “traditional families” of their own. And not for nothing: family structure, sequencing, and stability can make a huge socioeconomic difference in one’s own life trajectory and earning prospects—and for those of one’s children as well…
In light of these realities, it’s striking that symbolic capitalists so regularly and conspicuously denigrate to others the very strategies they use to ensure their own socioeconomic prosperity—and typically in the name of social justice, no less!
Awokenings, then, appear to do little to accomplish any of the goals ostensibly desired by the woke, and often actually cause progress along those lines to flatline or reverse, while also disrupting social cohesion, undermining public trust in institutions, and allowing elites to further entrench themselves in institutions and create new barriers to upward mobility for non-elites.
A striking demonstration of this can be seen in situations where progressive elites have the most institutional control. You might assume that in these places, the goals and values professed by such people would be the most prominently realized. But this is not the case. Speaking of areas thoroughly under the long-running control of progressives, al-Gharbi writes,
Now, given the current concentrations of financial and cultural capital into these areas – which are controlled by Democrats to an extent that it approaches one-party rule – it is actually well within the power of mainstream symbolic capitalists and their copartisans to significantly upend the distribution of wealth and opportunity in the United States purely through how they allocate their own resources, manage the organizations and institutions they are embedded in, and leverage large city and state governments that Democrats firmly control. And yet, the regions symbolic capitalists dominate also happen to be the most unequal places in the United States – with an ever-growing share of denizens classifying as either extremely well off or impoverished.
Strongholds of progressive control, al-Gharbi writes, are places marked by the highest levels of both poverty and income inequality, and are among the most racially segregated places in the country. He cites California and New York City as examples of places that are rich, highly educated, full of millionaires, and have both been a “Democratic bastion for decades,” yet they have the highest poverty rates in the nation and highest levels of both income inequality generally and racial inequality specifically. New York also has the “ignoble honor of possessing the most racially and ethnically segregated school system in the United States.” Thus, areas where the woke have the most control, and can implement their preferred policies freely and unchallenged, tend to produce results that are the worst by the standards of the woke themselves:
As New York Times economic analyst Binyamin Appelbaum put it, “Blue states are the problem: Blue states are where the housing crisis is located. Blue states are where the disparities in education funding are the most dramatic. Blue states are the places where tens of thousands of homeless people are living on the streets. Blue states are the places where economic inequality is increasing most quickly in this country.” Despite Democrats describing Republican efforts to restrict the ballot as “Jim Crow 2.0,” blue northeastern states also happen to have some of the heaviest voting restrictions in the country.
Another consequence of Awokenings is the rise of what al-Gharbi and others have described as “victimhood culture.” We’ll look at what victimhood culture is, and how it interacts with the ideas of the woke, in the next post.
READER COMMENTS
nobody.really
Aug 17 2025 at 1:12am
1: For example, symbolic capitalists say that measles is a highly contagious, lethal disease, and that parents/guardians who fail to secure innoculations not only put their own child at risk, they create externality risks for other proximate kids. Many normies disagree, and object to the condescending attitudes of these symbolic capitalists. This is not hyperbole; it is quite literally the case. Am I understanding the author correctly? And what conclusions should I draw from this dynamic?
2: I share the author’s view (based on my reading of Putnam’s The Upswing) that many legislative and symbolic victories occur at the high-water point of a movement. But does that mean that these victories cause the stagnation of the movements? Or does this just reflect normal strategic behavior? After all, mountain climbers don’t tend to plant a flag with every step they take; they plant a flag when they think they’ve reached the highest point they can. But planting a flag does not cause climbers to be incapable of climbing higher; rather, the inability to climb higher triggers the flag-planting.
More generally, I often hear the argument that some intervetion at a point in time had no bearing on growth, as demonstrated by the fact that the graph of growth follows a fairly straight line both before and after the intervention. I also recall watching firey rocket launches, followed by later ignition by booster rockets. The rocket seems to follow a straight-line trajectory; should I therefore conclude that the booster rockets were inconsequential?
Kevin Corcoran
Aug 17 2025 at 1:15pm
I don’t think this is a good comparision, largely because this isn’t an issue where there is broad disagreement between symbolic capitalists and normies. The idea that measles is contagious, dangerous, and that vaccination against it is good for personal and social benefit, is the “normie” position. Being blasé about measles as a disease, and skeptical of the measles vaccination, isn’t a widely held opinion among “normies” while universally shunned by the woke – it’s a fringe position, found both among the normies and among symbolic capitalists as well. It’s easy to mistake the volume (in the sense of quantity) of these skeptics by, well, the volume (in the sense of loudness) of these skeptics. There are a lot of cases where symbolic capitalists overwhelmingly think A, and “normies” overwhelmingly think not-A, but measles vaccination is not one of them. Even if normies are somewhat more likely, all else equal, to be vaccine skeptics than symbolic capitalist, it’s still not a good example of the dynamic al-Gharbi describes.
This isn’t quite what al-Gharbi is claiming. The argument isn’t that the big victories came about at the high-water point of an Awokening, his argument is that Awokenings come about after the big victories already occurred, and as Awokenings strengthen, those victories or gains are actually reversed or lost to some extent.
This reminds me of a Scott Alexander post making a similar argument. He gave the example of a graph showing the decreasing size in transistors over time, then picks out a date associated with the development of laser photolithography, which helped decrease transistor size because [insert reasons I don’t fully understand here], and then suggests that since the decrease in transistors size was constant before and after that line, the argument would seem to imply that laser photolithography didn’t contribute to the process. It’s a good argument, but there are a few reasons why I don’t think it (or the rocket example) work in cases like this.
In the case of transistor size, the invention of laser photolithography was part of the general process of developing new technologies, itself informed by past development of technologies. That is, that step was relevantly similar to the steps that occurred both before and after 1980. Similarly, with your rocket example, the rocket gained in altitude because of step one (fire a rocket with lots of thrust) followed by step two (now fire a booster rocket to provide even more thrust.) Step one and two, like the various steps in microchip development, are relevantly similar to each other. But that doesn’t hold up as well regarding many of these other claims.
One difference is that to make the analogy more exact, let’s say the rocket begins to take off at step one and the same way as before. But then at step two, rather than taking another relevantly similar step (booster rocket!) the people on the ground start chanting “wingardium leviosa!” repeatedly. And, at this point, not only does the rocket stop gaining altitude, it starts to lose altitude and settles into a slow-decaying orbit. Despite this, the people on the ground insist that were it not for the chants of “wingardium leviosa”, the rocket never would have taken off in the first place and would still be on the launch pad.
In this case, we have good reasons to not apply the argument like you or Scott Alexander suggest. For example, are there good explanations for why chanting “wingardium leviosa” would fail to increase altitude – or, are there explanations for why Awokenings and policies associated with them might cause progress to stall or reverse? I think so, and al-Gharbi thinks so too. For example, he argues that the policies recommended by the woke tend to bring about results that are actually harmful for vulnerable populations for various reasons. So he’s not merely making a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument. He’s offering causal mechanisms that explain what we observe.
One parallel example that comes to mind (not described in al-Gharbi’s book, to be clear) is a graph in Amity Shlaes book “Great Society: A New History.” In her Appendix of Graphic data (on page 441 of my Kindle edition) she displays a graph showing the decrease in the poverty rate in the United States, in the decades leading up to LBJ’s Great Society programs. Poverty had been steadily decreasing for decades, and LBJ promised that his Great Society programs would eliminate what poverty remained. But many were skeptical that these programs would succeed, and made arguments that various anti-poverty programs would be ineffective or backfire for various reasons (minimum wages decreasing employment by increasing the cost of labor, welfare programs reducing incentives to find jobs, etc.) And, after these programs went into effect, the decrease that had been proceeding apace for decades stalled out, and has been basically flat afterwards at around 10%, with minor, short term rises and dips. This is what welfare-state skeptics predicted would happen. Now, one could certainly tell an internally consistent story where the timing of this is just a coincidence, that the intervention at that point in the graph had nothing to do with how things changed afterwards, and that the predictions of skeptics were actually met for totally unrelated reasons. But that seems like someone going to a rhetorical forge to melt Occam’s Razor into oblivion.
Comments are closed.