Menard Family George Washington Forum hosts author on rise of a new elite on Jan. 20

The Menard Family George Washington Forum will host a discussion with Musa Al-Gharbi on "We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite" on Thursday, Jan. 20, at 7:30 p.m. in Galbreath Chapel on College Green.

This event also will be live-streamed for those who cannot attend in person. All are welcome to attend. 

Al-Gharbi will discuss his first book, “We Have Never Been Woke: Social Justice Discourse, Inequality and the Rise of a New Elite,” forthcoming from Princeton University Press in 2023.

"Musa al-Gharbi reckons that wokeism is a word more used than understood,” said Robert Ingram, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Menard Family George Washington Forum. “He wants us to understand it and today’s political divisiveness in the context both of rising socioeconomic inequality and of the emergence of a new social elite.” 

"One camp in America describes the U.S. as awash in racism, sexism, transphobia, xenophobia and other forms of degradation and exclusion while another camp claims that ‘identity politics’ is tearing the country apart. Meanwhile, socioeconomic inequality has been growing rapidly in the United States and around much of the world — further accelerated in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and in the wake of COVID-19,” al-Gharbi writes in the book announcement. “There is growing distrust of scientists, journalists and government bureaucrats, an erosion of faith in U.S. institutions – and (at least apparently) growing disagreement about basic facts." He dubs this new class of social elites, who he says "traffic in symbols and rhetoric, images and narratives, data and analysis, ideas and abstractions" as symbolic analysts.

"Over the last four decades, symbolic analysts have come to control an ever larger share of social and financial capital in the United States, and have reshaped the economy, politics and the dominant culture to reflect their values, interests, tastes and priorities. Although these new elites present themselves as champions of the marginalized, vulnerable and disadvantaged, upward social mobility has stagnated under their tenure – both in the U.S. and other OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) nations — even as total factor productivity has stalled out. Simultaneously, and perhaps more importantly, a growing share of the population feels excluded from the dominant culture and locked out of decision-making. And they are not taking it lying down. They are revolting," he writes.

Al-Gharbi is a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University and was an SNF Agora Institute Visiting Fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Fall 2021. Previously he was a Mellon-Sawyer Fellow on Trust and Mistrust of Experts for the Interdisciplinary Center on Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), in partnership with the American Assembly, at Columbia University. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, New Republic and many other popular outlets — as well as in publications by the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Army War College, the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point (CTC), the Brookings Institute, RAND Corporation and beyond. He was the communications director of Heterodox Academy (HxA) from 2016–2020.