We Have Never Been Woke Part 5: The Cause of Awokenings

As I mentioned in my last post, Musa al-Gharbi argues that the post-2011 Awokening – that is, the rise of social justice activism and the escalating adoption of social justice ideology among the symbolic capitalist class – was not an unprecedented event. He argues that Awokenings have occurred before and have taken largely similar form. This shouldn’t be overstated – each Awokening was not identical to another, but as Mark Twain might say, they all rhymed.

The first wave Awokening, al-Gharbi says, “peaked toward the 1920s and crested through the early 1930s.” This first Awokening saw symbolic capitalists “campaigning for civil rights” while others “aligned themselves with feminists” and “the first gay rights advocacy organizations were also formed at this time.” In addition, there was an increase in support for socialism and protests against military action. There was a second wave Awokening movement from the mid 1960s to the early 1970, with a third wave from the late 1980s to the early 1990s, with the fourth Great Awokening rising in 2011. The content of each of these Awokenings was very similar – a spike in concern among the symbolic capitalist class regarding racism, economic inequality, poverty, the rights of sexual minorities, and against the establishment.

But what motivated the symbolic capitalists – the elites of the established order – to rise up at these times in protest against the established order? Musa al-Gharbi’s answer is that Awokenings come about as a result of what he calls “elite overproduction.” As he describes it,

Elite overproduction occurs when a society produces too many people who feel entitled to high status and high incomes relative to the capacity of that society to actually absorb elite aspirants into the power structure. Under these circumstances, growing numbers of frustrated erstwhile elites grow bitter toward the prevailing order and try to form alliances with genuinely marginalized populations in order to depose existing elites and install themselves in their stead.

This is also why, as I alluded to in my previous post, it takes a specific kind of “hard times” to produce an Awokening. When times are hard for the people at the bottom but good for symbolic capitalists, the latter have no real reason to rock the boat. When times are hard for the professional class but relatively good for ordinary people, the general public will tend to “care even less about elite problems that they otherwise would.” And because during these time the majority of the population feels things are going well, “concern about social justice issues tends to recede into the background” and this has the effect of “constraining the ability of frustrated elites and elite aspirants to leverage social justice discourse in service of their own ends.” But there is a particular combination of events where things change:

However, there are occasional moments when the trajectories between elites and nonelites are partially collapsed—when things have been bad and getting worse for ordinary folks for a while and are suddenly fraught for symbolic capitalists too. These are moments when Awokenings tend to occur.

When things have been bad for ordinary folks, social justice concerns begin to rise among the population in general:

Narratives indicting the prevailing order and the people at its helm are already taking off. Perennial campaigns, such as women’s rights movements or racial justice movements, which generally fall into abeyance patterns during times of prosperity, begin gaining new traction among a broader swath of society.

When the professional class also feels the stress, these rising movements become opportunities for them to challenge the system they believe has failed to provide them with the status and security they feel they deserve. The scorned elites or elite-aspirants also experience “frustration toward those who are enjoying success and apparent security.” Those elites, they say, are corrupt and need to be replaced by better people – people like us. This frustrated branch of the professional class begins to form an alliance with existing social justice movements. But in short order, their membership in the alliance quickly becomes their attempt to control it:

However, these newly mobilized symbolic capitalists are rarely content to be mere foot soldiers or subordinates in social movements. They’re elite aspirants, after all. And in virtue of their ostensibly superior knowledge and skills, they often see themselves as uniquely well suited to determine the ideal aims and tactics of movements.

This, in turn, leads the social justice movements in directions that have little to do with the actual well-being of those such movements are supposed to help:

And as symbolic capitalists become conspicuous faces and voices of social movements, they generally define and pursue the cause in ways that flatter their own sensibilities and serve their personal interests. This is commonly to the detriment of the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society because the preferences and priorities of symbolic capitalists tend to be demonstrably out of sync with those of the people they are ostensibly speaking for and advocating on behalf of.

One example al-Gharbi gives is how, in the most recent Awokening, social justice activists would pour tremendous time, energy, and resources into removing the names of disfavored historical figures from schools and renaming those schools after the “right” people, as preferred by symbolic capitalists. Yet, as al-Gharbi points out, “if nonwhites who live in the affected communities had been consulted about their top concerns, it would have been clear that the name of the local school would not rank anywhere near the top of their priorities.” Their primary concerns were much more pedestrian issues like whether or not they’d be able to afford groceries to feed their children. However, “rather than addressing those concerns, or even bothering to find out what those concerns are, mainstream symbolic capitalists focus on securing symbolic victories” rather than focusing on issues that actually mattered to the “normies.”

This dynamic also shows something that is not commonly understood about Awokenings. It’s often spoken as if Awokenings come about as grassroots movements – those at the bottom, frustrated about their difficulties, spontaneously organizing and rising against the system. But al-Gharbi argues that the Awokenings and the social movements that rise during them are fundamentally movements of elites (or elite-aspirants) who wish to become even more elite, not of the masses. For example, one of the first movements to rise in prominence during the most recent Awokening was Occupy Wall Street. One might look back at this movement and imagine it was a movement of the poor rising in frustration against their poverty. However,

Contrary to depictions of Occupy as a broad-based movement, symbolic capitalists were its primary base. For instance, despite the diversity of the city, participants of Occupy demonstrations in New York were overwhelmingly non-Hispanic white. They were nearly uniformly liberal in their political orientations. They were also relatively affluent: roughly three-quarters (72 percent) of participants came from households above the 2011 New York City median.

The Occupy movement was a movement of highly educated professionals frustrated that they hadn’t been able to secure the high prestige, high paying jobs they expected and felt they were entitled to. Similar demographics were found in the post 2016 #Resistance movement, an umbrella term describing “the March for Science, the Women’s March, and the March for Racial Justice” among others. Looking at the makeup of these movements and their attendees, we find they were “overwhelmingly concentrated in knowledge economy hubs, just like Occupy protests were. The average adult age of the demonstrators was thirty-eight to forty-nine years old. Far from being a project of passionate young people, the #Resistance movement comprised primarily of midcareer professionals associated with the symbolic economy. The Occupy crowd, but half a decade later.”

Just like Occupy transitioned to the #Resistance, frustrated elites began a long march through social justice causes:

As the initial (Occupy) movement fizzled out, roughly the same constituencies began mobilizing alternative modes of social justice discourse, largely toward the same ends. Many who spent 2011 shouting “We are the 99 percent” spent 2013 proudly declaring that “Black Lives Matter,” identified as part of the #Resistance under Trump, began telling #MeToo stories in 2017, and became “trust the science” stans from 2018 through the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s all been part of the same wave of activism among mainstream symbolic capitalists.

Occupy in particular served one other key purpose for these frustrated elites with its branding. Casting the struggle in terms of the 99 percent vs the 1 percent allowed these elites to act as though what would be beneficial for them was really about what would be good for the poor or needy, as though merely being in the ninety-seventh percentile of wealth made you basically the same as someone living at the edge of poverty. As al-Gharbi puts it, “Rather than advocating for concrete policies that could tangibly assist the marginalized or disadvantaged in society, or developing some actionable platform that could help promote broad-based prosperity, the movement was primarily focused on villainizing those above symbolic capitalists on the socioeconomic ladder.”

Symbolic capitalists, while well off, are not the superelite of society. Symbolic capitalists usually hold the wealthiest members of society in low regard, and have “consistently condemned superelites as selfish, short-sighted, and insufficiently deferential to people like ourselves.” Citing the work of Max Weber, al-Gharbi describes this disdain:

As sociologist Max Weber emphasized, elites who hold social status in society on the basis of attributes like their knowledge, skills, or institutional rank tend to be resentful and disdainful toward those who enjoy a high social position primarily on the basis of their business success and accumulated wealth. It has always been our strong conviction that society would be vastly improved if people listened to and admired millionaires and billionaires less and valued the perspectives of intellectuals more. These sentiments are heightened, Weber argued, when symbolic capitalists find their own status or socioeconomic position threatened or particularly precarious. During these periods, we become much more likely to rail aggressively against capitalism and the superrich—often cloaking our struggles for wealth, status, and power as social justice advocacy—although our passion for revolution tends to rapidly fade once our own objectives are met…

Highly educated and wealthy activists used the framing of Occupy to portray themselves as on par with the “little guys,” just as much under the thumb of the superrich as the poor. However, one must not overestimate the power of these superelites compared to symbolic capitalists. As al-Gharbi goes on to describe, for all the railing against the 1% that the professional class uses, the symbolic professions are hardly helpless against the power of the extremely rich:

We shape the system in accordance with our own tastes and desires, independent of, and sometimes in conflict with, the preferences and priorities of superelites…What’s more, even when superelites try to outright dominate us, they often lose.

He gives the example of a struggle for power between the symbolic capitalists who operated the Ford Foundation, and the will of the actual Ford family. During the second Great Awokening, the symbolic capitalists began to use the Ford Foundation as a vessel for their own social justice activism, turning it away from its original “mission of supporting hospitals, museums, and basic science” as initially intended. Henry Ford II tried to assert his control over the situation, only to be pushed out of the organization bearing his family name by the symbolic capitalists nominally under his control. As al-Gharbi sums it up, “The Fords went to war with symbolic capitalists in their own family foundation. The symbolic capitalists won.”

So why do Awokenings end? Recall how al-Gharbi said “our passion for revolution tends to rapidly fade once our own objectives are met.” Awokenings are caused when enough frustrated elites fail to achieve the status and security they expect. This also means as the situation for these frustrated elites improves, and they find themselves gaining the highly prestigious and financially secure positions they expected, their motivation for activism fades away. And so, too, does the Awokening.

For example, the first Awokening al-Gharbi identifies occurred in the late 1920s to the early 1930s. As described in the previous post, the years leading up to this first Awokening saw the rise of technocratic power in both state and corporate entities and the establishment of symbolic capitalists in these powerful and high status positions. These new elites took steps to ensure their positions were safe:

As the symbolic professions were being consolidated, and their positions elevated, educational and certification requirements were increasingly used as barriers to lock out minorities, immigrants, and the poor.

But there came a disruption:

Then, the Great Depression hit. Suddenly, many who had taken for granted a position among the elite, who had felt more or less entitled to a secure, respected, and well-paying professional job, found themselves facing deeply uncertain futures—especially because layered on top of the economic insecurity were profound geopolitical concerns… Consequently, rather than enjoying the secure and comfortable lives they had imagined for themselves, aspiring elites were facing the prospects of downward social mobility (as a result of the Depression) and possible deployment into a war.

The anxiety, frustration, and looming socioeconomic humiliation of elite aspirants quickly curdled into rage against existing elites and the society that failed them. As one college magazine editorial bluntly put it, “Educated for jobs that do not materialize, students will grow resentful towards the existing order and will use the learning they have acquired to overthrow it.”

The result was the first Great Awokening. But FDR’s programs in particular were very beneficial to these insecure elites – it provided them with new positions of power among the multitude of agencies and bureaucracies FDR created, securing their situation. And despite the continued hardship the Depression continued to inflict on the normies, this improvement in the situation of the elites was, it turns out, enough to cause the first Awokening to fizzle out:

Contrary to their radical rhetoric, they wanted relatively high-status jobs and socioeconomically comfortable lives far more than they wanted to actually overthrow the existing order. And the Roosevelt administration provided what they wanted.

By the time FDR stood for reelection for the first time, the New Deal was well underway. Major expansions of the government bureaucracy provided elite workers with stable, respected, and well-paying positions…

Civil rights and feminism did not consume their efforts or attention much. Socialism and communism no longer held much purchase with them. The “radicals” of the 1930s became the establishment that protestors would later rebel against in the 1960s and 1970s.

The same occurred with each subsequent Awokening. As circumstances got better for the professional elites, their commitment to social justice activism and woke ideology took a backseat or disappeared altogether, and the Awokenings withered away – regardless of whether or not things actually got any better for the communities these social justice activists were ostensibly trying to support.

Still, this leads to another important question – what, if anything, are the long-term consequences of Awokenings? Do they actually create long lasting impacts, and if so, are the results beneficial or deleterious? That will be reviewed in the next post.