Populism as Symptom Not Cause

A reply to Tomislav Kardum’s “Populism’s Self-Defeating Trap.”

Kardum’s essay is strongest where it identifies the “populist trap”: the moral absolutism that enables victory becomes ungovernable once trade-offs must be made. That insight is real. Anti-elite mobilisation cannot substitute for institutional construction.

But I wonder whether the problem is not uniquely populist.

Populism thrives where legitimacy has thinned. Citizens do not revolt against trade-offs. They revolt against trade-offs that appear permanently asymmetric, opaque, or insulated from accountability. When voters believe that institutions no longer absorb costs equitably—or that elites no longer acknowledge burdens openly—anti-elite rhetoric becomes attractive.

In that sense, populism may be less a structural impossibility than a transitional phase. It is what emerges when existing elites lose the moral language necessary to defend the trade-offs they administer.

The deeper question, then, is not whether populists can govern. It is whether modern liberal systems have preserved the habits of legitimacy required for anyone to govern.

If populists fail because they cannot move from denunciation to burden-bearing responsibility, the prior failure may be that establishment elites stopped speaking in terms of responsibility at all.

Until that problem is addressed, new populisms will continue to arise—not because they are structurally doomed, but because the systems they oppose have become structurally brittle.

—Allen Zeesman

Musa Al-Gharbi’s Symbolic Capitalists

A reply to Sarah Wooten’s “Capitalism’s Paradox.”

Sarah Wooten’s essay, “Capitalism’s Paradox” offers a clear and convincing account of a dynamic that increasingly defines advanced societies: abundance produces not only comfort, but moral anxiety, and that anxiety often expresses itself less in structural reform than in symbolic denunciation. Musa Al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite provides a near-textbook illustration of the paradox Wooten describes.

The central claim of “Capitalism’s Paradox” is not that capitalism is beyond criticism, but that its critics are often among its greatest beneficiaries—and that in prosperous societies moral performance can supplant material reform. Once basic needs are met and large-scale deprivation declines, the evaluative focus shifts. The question is no longer primarily whether the system works, but whether it is morally pure. In this environment, critique becomes not merely argument but identity.

Al-Gharbi’s analysis of those he calls the “symbolic capitalists” maps almost perfectly onto this terrain. He argues that a rising professional class (academics, journalists, nonprofit executives, diversity consultants, and cultural producers) derives status and income not from manufacturing goods or delivering material services, but from managing symbols, narratives, and moral vocabularies. They frequently adopt the most strident critiques of inequality, racism, capitalism, and structural injustice. Yet they do so from within institutions that secure their own advantage and reproduce the very hierarchies they ostensibly deplore.

This paradox is not accidental; it is structural. As Al-Gharbi demonstrates, members of this symbolic elite disproportionately occupy prestigious universities, major media outlets, philanthropic foundations, and policy organisations. They are economically secure and culturally influential. And yet they often frame themselves as embattled dissidents and victims of oppressive systems.

Wooten observes that in affluent societies, critics may focus on abstract harms rather than concrete tradeoffs. Al-Gharbi supplies abundant empirical support for that observation. He shows how campus activism, for example, frequently centres on representational and discursive concerns—language codes, speaker disinvitations, symbolic statements, land acknowledgements, etc.—while paying comparatively less attention to labour conditions for campus service workers or the economic barriers that restrict social mobility. The energy flows toward moral signalling rather than redistribution of resources. This is not to deny the importance of cultural politics. It is to note the asymmetry between symbolic agitation and material reform. Al-Gharbi repeatedly highlights how elite actors can denounce capitalism in the abstract while benefiting from the very educational credentials, professional networks, and institutional monopolies that the current order sustains. In doing so, they convert moral critique into a form of capital—one that enhances prestige within their own class.

It is here that the overlap with “Capitalism’s Paradox” becomes unmistakable. Wooten argues that prosperity creates space for moral self-interrogation, but that this interrogation can become performative. Al-Gharbi’s “Great Awokenings” (recurring waves of elite moral fervour) demonstrate how this process unfolds historically. Each wave frames itself as unprecedented moral awakening, yet each emerges from a relatively secure stratum whose members have both the leisure and institutional platforms to stage such awakenings.

Crucially, Al-Gharbi does not depict this as simple hypocrisy. He emphasises that many participants are sincere. But sincerity does not eliminate structural incentives. In fact, it can intensify them. In environments where moral seriousness is a currency, the most visible demonstrations of outrage, self-critique, or ideological purity often yield reputational rewards. Critique becomes both ethical expression and career strategy.

Wooten suggests that when function is replaced by moral performance, systems are judged less by outcomes than by expressive alignment with prevailing norms. Al-Gharbi shows how this dynamic operates within universities, media organisations, and NGOs. Diversity statements, public condemnations, and ritualised declarations of solidarity proliferate. Meanwhile, institutional selectivity, credential inflation, and professional gatekeeping continue largely undisturbed.

One of the most incisive threads in We Have Never Been Woke is the observation that the symbolic class often frames economic inequality in ways that obscure its own role in reproducing it. For example, highly educated professionals advocate for expanded access and inclusion while defending licensing regimes, degree requirements, and institutional barriers that entrench their comparative advantage. (Not to mention their exploitation of nannies, DoorDash and Uber drivers, and kitchen staff, who make their day-to-day lives easier.) Their critique targets “capitalism” in general terms, but rarely the specific mechanisms—accreditation monopolies, educational stratification, professional cartels—from which they benefit. This is precisely the paradox Wooten identifies: moral denunciation of the system can coexist with, and even reinforce, one’s privileged position within it. Prosperity produces guilt, guilt produces critique, and critique, in turn, can generate status.

Al-Gharbi’s argument also illuminates the psychological dimension of the paradox. In affluent societies, where deprivation is less visible than in earlier eras, moral anxiety often attaches to identity and symbolism. Members of the symbolic elite may experience discomfort not because they lack power, but because they possess it. Public displays of self-critique or structural condemnation can function as mechanisms of moral absolution. The system is condemned; the self is redeemed.
Wooten and Al-Gharbi prove, I think, that debates over “wokeness” are less about generational temperament than about class formation. The rise of symbolic capitalists reflects structural changes in advanced economies: growth in higher education, expansion of professional services, and the centrality of narrative production. They clarify why moral rhetoric can intensify even as material conditions improve. Prosperity does not eliminate inequality, but it does change the arena in which inequality is contested. The danger, as both writers imply, is not moral concern itself. It is the displacement of functional evaluation and reform by expressive signalling. When critique becomes primarily a badge of belonging within elite networks, it risks losing contact with the tradeoffs and constraints that govern real institutions.

In this sense, We Have Never Been Woke reads as an extended case study in the cultural mechanics of Wooten’s thesis. It shows how a class that thrives under contemporary capitalism can simultaneously denounce it, how moral performance can substitute for structural change, and how prosperity can generate not gratitude but guilt—which is managed through ever more elaborate rituals of critique. If the paradox of capitalism is that abundance breeds moral unease, Al-Gharbi’s book demonstrates how that unease is organised, incentivised, and monetised within the symbolic economy. Read together, Wooten’s and Al-Gharbi’s works provide an illuminating yet sobering diagnosis of societies in which critique is ubiquitous, prosperity remains real, and the two are more deeply intertwined than either side of our culture wars tends to admit.

—Glenn McNair

On the Benefits of Removing Comments

A reply to Claire Lehmann’s “Epstein Mania on the Digital Borderlands.”

I really appreciate the clarity of mind. It is rarely seen in these times of fever. You connected for me a number of points that I had not considered. I only thought about the widespread desire for shriving, scapegoats, and blind retribution. The vying to show oneself purer to reinforce belief in a time of raging ideological confrontation had not dawned in my mind.

Besides, a heartfelt thank you for having removed the freewheeling comments to the articles. Free comments have been degrading the quality of publications for almost two decades now, in this social media culture in which everybody feels entitled to vent their immediate feelings without thought. On articles in papers and magazines there are a few interesting comments, but by far a minority, and the rest is inevitably garbage. The editors can take care of publishing the worthwhile ones, while the readers are neither distracted, nor irked, nor prompted to respond to foolish, unreasoned declarations of tribal beliefs.

You have restored my pleasure in reading the wide range of viewpoints that Quillette offers.

—Luc Alexander

Ingratitude Is Human Nature

A reply to Sarah Wooten’s “Capitalism’s Paradox.”

While I find Ms Wooten’s essay insightful, incisive, and one that I largely agree with, I think that she overlooks the role that human nature plays in the issue.

Human beings are creatures built to be dissatisfied with things, no matter how good or bad things are. Satisfaction and happiness are brief and fleeting states that we all hope to realise at least some of the time, but worry, fear, irritation, competitive hostility, desire, et cetera are the states most people are in most of the time.

Among other things, this is why we keep trying to replace what we have with something better. This drive has given us all of the good things that modern civilisation provides (and most of the bad ones, too) but it also makes it very hard for us to be appreciative and grateful for the miraculous world we live in and to almost reflexively find fault with systems that have provided us with so much while indulging ourselves in the fantasy that an imagined perfection is possible.

Because this is central to human nature, it will also lead many to criticise and devalue an economic system that has given us so much wealth and to advocate for one that has a utopian sound and a track record of bloody failure.

—David L. Pogge