Podcast #255: We Have Never Been Woke
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with scholar Musa al-Gharbi, whose acclaimed new book analyses the rise of progressive ideological orthodoxy as a means for elites to signal status and accumulate ‘cultural capital.’
Jonathan Kay: In this week’s episode, I’ll be talking to scholar Musa al-Gharbi, author of the acclaimed new book, We Have Never Been Woke: the Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, published this month by Princeton University Press.
Musa al-Gharbi
[00:00:43] Now, as some of you know, I don’t tend to use the word “woke” a lot because it’s become a term of abuse that gets thrown around a lot in culture-war sloganeering. But, this isn’t that kind of book, notwithstanding the title, and Musa al-Gharbi certainly isn’t that kind of author. Rather, what he offers is more of a deconstruction of the whole idea of wokeness, which he presents more as a set of status-seeking strategies from an elite socioeconomic class facing financial and career frustrations.
[00:01:13] Moreover, he points out that conservatives use their own kind of intellectual and status-seeking tricks, which are analogous to what we call wokeness. So, Musa al-Gharbi fires on both sides to the extent this is any kind of culture-war book. Now, we’re going to be talking about scholars like Pierre Bourdieu and Chomsky and Foucault, and I know a lot of it is going to sound very abstract and academic, which, to be fair, his book kind of is.
[00:01:39] But, I’ll reassure you here that we spend a lot of our time in the next hour talking about down-to-earth case studies that signify what his arguments actually mean on the ground. We also talk about Musa’s own fascinating backstory, which begins with a military family in Arizona, has the author going through a stint as a shoe salesman, and involves a right-wing cancel campaign orchestrated against Musa by Fox News. That, and a whole lot more, in my interview with Musa al-Gharbi, coming up next.
[00:02:03] So, first question, I’ve had a lot of people on this podcast who were liberals who got mugged by the progressive Left. But your story is very different. You got mugged by the Fox News Right. You deal with it glancingly in your book.
[00:02:25] That section of your book actually left me interested in more detail.
[00:02:29] Musa al-Gharbi: Back in 2014, I guess it was, about 10 years ago now, most of my work that I had been doing was at that time on foreign policy and Middle East politics. When I started my academic career, I wanted to be a philosopher, and I had a twin brother who was killed in Afghanistan.
[00:02:45] And in the aftermath of that, I switched my focus from focusing on things like metaphysics, which is like, what is the structure and nature of reality…questions about what is the meaning of life… to focus more on applied social epistemology. So like, what do we know in virtue of what? But with a particular focus on national security foreign policy questions with the hope of trying to help other families avoid the kind of tragedy that my own family was working through.
[00:03:10] And so I was working a lot on Middle East politics, international affairs. I was teaching at the University of Arizona as an adjunct in the political science department, where I would teach classes on national security policy and international organisations and things like this. And I helped manage an academic consortium that brought together veterans who were students…
[00:03:29] …and students from war-affected regions to study the Middle East conflict together. While I was doing all of that, in addition to my nerdy academic work, I was also doing public writing. My public writing then was a lot different than it is today. At some point in 2014, I published an article in the journal Middle East Policy.
[00:03:50] It was very exciting. It’s the number-one cited journal at that time for contemporary Middle East affairs. But then there’s this cottage industry that was really popular at that time, less so today, but in 2014, if you were someone who was from the Middle East, or someone who used to be a Muslim but isn’t anymore, there was a cottage industry at that time where you could go on right-leaning media and be like, “Muslims are horrible, I would know.”
[00:04:17] So someone who’s affiliated with that little industry at that time read my article, didn’t like it, and trolled me on Twitter about it. And I don’t engage this way anymore. But at the time, I basically destroyed this guy as it became clear that he was ignorant on the substance of the empirical questions of what was actually happening in Syria.
[00:04:38] Where are things going? Where are the statistics? And as it became clear he didn’t know much about that, he tried to shift the conversation to things like principles about liberty and justice. And I was like, “[that’s] great, I’m a philosopher. Let’s do that.” [I] really twisted the knife and engaged in a way that was not a way that I engage today.
[00:04:55] At the time, I was a columnist for Al Jazeera America, but he was a popular contributor to Fox News, which is to say he had a much bigger platform. He responded to me spiking the ball in this way by trying to launch a smear campaign to get me fired from the University of Arizona. It started in smaller right-leaning outlets such as the Washington Free Beacon, but then got picked up by Fox News.
[00:05:16] And so on Election Day 2014, until it came out that the Republicans had won the Senate, at which time that became the news, I was the news. I was what they used to help fill the airtime. If you went to foxnews.com, the first thing you would have seen is my face. They talked about me on air a couple of times.
Fox News
[00:05:34] And it was a disaster for every department and institution I was affiliated with at the University of Arizona, which got flooded with death threats and hate mail. And there were reporters who were trying to crash my classes to catch me in the act of corrupting the youth.
[00:05:48] Jonathan Kay: To be clear, did they expect they were going to catch you on camera recruiting for ISIS or something? I mean, some of these things are so hyperbolic… But to be fair, there are people, you’re not one of them, but there are people who present as respectable intellectual academics and often do have some very unsettling ideological commitments, including in the area of Islamism.
[00:06:11] So some of these culture warriors come by it honestly, but they also sometimes just choose the wrong target.
[00:06:16] Musa al-Gharbi: They took bits and pieces of things that I wrote in different outlets, took them way out of context. And if you were presented with those bits and pieces and didn’t read the actual essays, in some cases, the thing I was arguing in the essay was the literal opposite of what was portrayed.
[00:06:30] And so, if you just think, “Oh, this is a trustworthy person [or news] outlet, and they aren’t wilfully taking bits and pieces out of context and distorting them to portray the opposite of what the author…”— if you don’t start by assuming that kind of bad faith, I could see how you could read their articles and go, “Well, what’s up with this guy?”
[00:06:50] But the reality is, again, I’m from a military family in a military community. And the only reason I was doing any of this work is because I personally know loss from war. I’m not some anti-American radical leftist. I never have been. And here’s one way that my work changed a lot after this.
[00:07:07] In the short term, this was a disaster for me. It was a disaster for the departments and institutions I was affiliated with. It was really terrible. I felt a lot of guilt.
[00:07:14] Jonathan Kay: You felt guilt?
[00:07:16] Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, of course. Because my desire to get into these—in retrospect, vain—internet struggles…
[00:07:22] Jonathan Kay: You’re hard on yourself, aren’t you? A lot of people I know would just wallow in self-pity for the next 20 years. I mean, for me, the litmus test is always when people in real life, not social-media avatars, recognsze you—like when you went to McDonald’s or the coffee shop, were people like, “Hey, there’s the Fox News guy”?
[00:07:41] Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. Yeah. And, and you know, again, it’s a military town, too. I used to sell shoes. Some of my former customers who knew me very well recognised me immediately and were shocked and appalled and disheartened. But in the aftermath of that, as I was thinking, “Okay, so I’m clearly not the person I was portrayed as being,” I was wondering, well, why is it that so many people were so willing to see that kind of narrative of me?
[00:08:09] Why did this narrative of me, that was spun of me, seem compelling to so many people? I realised two things. I realised one of the problems is that people like me don’t really engage with the kind of audience… Fox News’ typical audience… much at all. And when we do, it’s typically in this sneering, mocking, adversarial way.
[00:08:30] Before this, I hadn’t even tried to ever write for right-leaning media because I had just assumed that, well, I’m a black Muslim intellectual. Who would want to hear what I have to say? Oh, probably someone on the Left. So I didn’t even bother trying to write for right-leaning outlets, but I responded to getting attacked by Fox News by trying to engage more with people across the aisle.
[00:08:50] And so I started taking the same essays that I would normally publish somewhere like Al Jazeera. I didn’t change anything about the arguments, which is to say I didn’t refrain from saying anything that I would say in Al Jazeera. I didn’t say anything that I didn’t believe, but I just changed the framing and stuff—to speak to other people’s values, concerns, and maps of meaning.
[00:09:09] And not only were right-leaning outlets willing to publish my work, but I found that people on the right were excited to actually engage, to be able to talk to a black Muslim intellectual who wasn’t in their space to villainise them or demean them or whatever. And in the process of thinking through how would I make this same argument to people who didn’t already share X set of priors and beliefs, I started to recognise blind spots and limitations in how I was thinking about a lot of issues.
[00:09:50] …And I started to realise both that exercise and also engaging with the readers in right-leaning media, responding to their questions and emails and concerns, actually deepened my own understanding of things a lot, and it completely changed my understanding, and it actually led me to reevaluate…
[00:10:09] …the work that I was previously doing for outlets like Al Jazeera… I came to realise that a lot of the work that I was doing before wasn’t particularly valuable. So, for instance, if the US is considering bombing Syria, it doesn’t do a lot of good to go write in an outlet like Al Jazeera, “Don’t bomb Syria. Here’s why.” What you need to do, if you actually want to make any movement on preventing that eventuality, is go to the people who actually do think it’s a good idea to bomb Syria and talk to them about why it’s not in a way that they find compelling and accessible.
[00:10:43] If you’re just cheerleading with people who already agree with you, you’re not really doing much. And so now for most of the public work that I do, no matter where I’m writing, what I try to do is I try to write something that I think that audience needs to hear, but doesn’t necessarily want to hear.
[00:11:00] If I’m writing in left-leaning outlets, the things I have to say are generally uncomfortable for the Left. If I’m writing in right-leaning outlets, the things that I have to say are often uncomfortable for the Right.
[00:11:13] Jonathan Kay: It’s really interesting what you’re saying because, as some of my regular listeners know, for a brief period, for about two years, I was editor of a left-wing magazine here in Canada.
[00:11:23] One of the first things I did there is… I actually didn’t change the editorial policy that much. We still had a lot of highly progressive writers. But one thing I did do is I’d look at drafts and I’d say, “I don’t necessarily agree with this argument, but let’s publish it. But what I want you to do is change the language…
[00:11:39] …so that it at least appears like you’re making a good-faith effort to argue with people who don’t agree with you… because right now, there’s a lot of coded language, which essentially means: Everyone believes X. Here’s a formulaic recitation of the arguments in favour of X to prove that I’m a fervent believer in X… The End.” And I said, get rid of the jargon, because there’s a lot of jargon there that’s intentionally opaque.
[00:12:03] The fact that most people don’t understand it is [seen as] a feature, not a bug, because it shows you’re part of the shamanistic class that agrees with that stuff and understands it. And I said, look, I want you to write in the language of actual good-faith persuasion. And I say that to conservatives, too.
[00:12:17] Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, there’s this great debate between Chomsky and Foucault, and at one point in that debate…
[00:12:21] Jonathan Kay: Wait, wait, wait… There’s this great debate between Chomsky and Foucault… Make sure we’re talking to the ordinary people out there! [Laughter]
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