In a few days, what liberal Americans described as a “mortal danger” to democracy will come to be: Donald Trump will be sworn in for a second term as president of the United States. The many different interpretations of this defeat in the Democratic Party, in the “progressive media” and in academia now constitute a vast and contradictory literature – from fierce self-criticism for the failure to listen to the anxieties of the working class to the complacent reading that racism and sexism are to blame for everything. In the din of confusion over this electoral loss, one voice stands out: that of Musa al-Gharbi.
Al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor at the School of Communication and Journalism of Stony Brook University, and a fellow in sociology at Columbia. He is the author of “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite” (Princeton University Press), published last October. In the book, as well as his doctoral dissertation published in 2023, al-Gharbi, scion of a military family who almost became a Catholic priest before converting to Islam, explains how the embrace between the new elites who produce and manage symbolic values – rather than material wealth – and the Democrats has contributed significantly to their rupture with the majority of American voters.
In this exclusive interview with Kathimerini, he explains why this happened, how Trump took advantage of it and how Democrats can restore their relationship with the average voter.
Could you briefly explain the concept of symbolic elites and how their takeover of the Democratic Party lies at the heart of its problems?
So, symbolic capitalists are people who work in fields like consulting and finance, technonogy, education, media and so on. People who make a living by manipulating data and symbols instead of producing physical goods and services for people. What I show in my book is that, over the past 50 years especially, symbolic capitalists have gained a lot more power and influence over society, and over that period of time, a lot of inequalities have grown, a lot of social problems have persisted or grown worse, and so there are a lot of people who are dissatisfied with the way that the economy and the country is going. Starting in the late 60s, accelerating in the 90s and then even more after the 2010s, these symbolic capitalists have been consolidated in the Democratic Party. Today, professors are voting for the Democrats over Republicans by five to one; in the humanities and social science fields [the ratio] is 10 to one. Only about 3% of contemporary journalists are Republicans. The Democratic Party, in turn, has transformed a lot of its messaging, platform and priorities to cater to symbolic capitalists. We are a compelling constituency because we make more money than other people, we donate more, we’re more politically engaged, we vote consistently.
What we saw after 2010, though, is what I call a “Great Awokening”: symbolic capitalists shifted radically in terms of how we think about politics, how we talk and think about social justice, and the Democratic Party shifted radically at the same time. We became a lot more militant during this period about mocking, censoring, condemning and villainizing anyone who didn’t agree with us about a lot of these issues. And so people noticed these gaps more, they resented us more and the political party that’s really tightly oriented around us became increasingly alienating for large numbers of voters.
In the meantime, income and wealth inequality continued to grow.
Correct. A lot of our institutions didn’t seem to be delivering the goods. We talked about social justice, but that wasn’t the reality that a lot of people were experiencing. This led to dissatisfaction with us and our preferred political party, and led a lot of people to shift towards the Republican Party. The way that we often like to think about this is as a kind of backlash to all the progress that was made during the “Great Awokening”: a bunch of rich, heterosexual white men who were dissatisfied with the patriarchy being threatened aligned themselves with a reactionary Republican Party in the name of white supremacy and so on.
‘We talked about social justice, but that wasn’t the reality that a lot of people were experiencing. This led to dissatisfaction with us and our preferred political party, and led a lot of people to shift towards the Republican Party’
The problem with this narrative is that when you look at who actually shifted in which direction, the backlash is actually being driven by the very people we think of ourselves as champions of. The people who shifted the most towards the Republican Party over the past 10 years are actually racial and ethnic minorities, religious people, less affluent and less educated people, and young people. So the less privileged among us are the people who have actually been the most alienated from the Democrats and who have been shifting most towards the GOP. And it’s really tough to understand a backlash that’s driven largely by racial and ethnic minorities, for instance, as being motivated by racism. Whites, relatively affluent, highly educated people, shifted more towards the Democratic Party over the same period.
Do you think that the rejection of the Democrats in the November 5 US election is more related to what is called “culture” – with the alienation of ordinary voters on a range of social issues – rather than the economy?
Yeah, I think it’s both. If people feel like they can’t get ahead and they feel like their life prospects are going to be worse and the political discourse is focused on this niche cultural stuff and one party is taking these really extreme positions that are far out of step, it makes the cultural distance even more degrading than it would be under other circumstances […] I think it’s definitely the case since 2010.
You have written about the socialist in George Orwell’s “Road to Wigan Pier” who is, of all people, the further removed from the working class. To what extent is this a new development and not just another case of the traditional divide between party elites and intellectuals versus the masses?
I think it’s a divide that’s been long-standing between – especially knowledge-oriented professionals – people like academics and media, people who work in cities and other workers. This gap has become in some ways more salient because the people who work in these kinds of professions have more power and influence over society than before. And in some ways, we are even more out of touch than we used to be. If you look at changes in the global economy from the time when Orwell was writing, these professionals were about 3% of all workers and were more evenly distributed throughout the country. Now we are about a third of all workers, concentrated in a small number of hubs, further removed from other people. This creates an opportunity for political entrepreneurs usually associated with the right to campaign against symbolic capitalists, to pledge to bring people like us back under control, to return our institutions to their proper function. Narratives about […] how the media has become a propaganda machine instead of telling you the truth become popular, in part because there are actual shifts that have occurred during these periods. It’s not purely a moral panic or people being delusional. We actually do conduct ourselves in a different way, and people react to that negatively.
How did a real estate magnate who inherited his wealth, with a track record as president that can hardly be called progressive on economic policy, become the tribune of the American working class? Do you think it’s just about his promise to take on the symbolic elites or is it something else as well?
I view it as a glaring indictment of the Democratic Party and of symbolic capitalists that growing numbers of Americans would trust this person more than us and our party. But I think there’s also a sense in which, culturally, even though Trump is a billionaire who went to an Ivy League school, he is also in some senses closer to the median American voter than most of us and the politicians that we tend to gravitate towards. Look at the weird role that McDonald’s has played in these elections since Trump took office. Trump famously hosted a college football team and served them McDonald’s on silver trays. Many progressives at the time called it an insult, called it condescending, absurd or whatever. But a lot of other folks, including the athletes that he was serving, thought it was kind of great and funny. Or the stunt [in the 2024 campaign] where he worked at McDonald’s. No one sees Trump working at McDonald’s with his expensive suit underneath his apron and thinks that he’s just a regular guy. But what this stunt was really good at doing is generating terrible responses from symbolic capitalists […] who went on disparaging McDonald’s and the kind of people who work and eat there. That’s useful for Trump. And Trump has a genuine passion for the product. He forces other people, including RFK [Robert F. Kennedy Jr], to eat it.
You come from a military family. How effective was Trump’s message against US entanglements in foreign wars in attracting the votes of non-symbolic elites?
It’s been very effective. If you look at some of the places in 2016 that shifted the most [towards] Donald Trump, there were areas that had large concentrations of military people who had been deployed abroad. People who’ve lost someone, who have known the sacrifices of war, who don’t want to see their loved ones dying in pointless struggles. He was helped by the fact that his main opponent was a hawk who had never met a war she didn’t like. Hillary Clinton was in fact talking about escalating conflict in Ukraine and Syria and lots of other places during that campaign. And so this was an important driver of success for him in 2016 and even more so in 2024, with the US enabling these horrific policies in Gaza at the risk of being dragged more fully into [the conflict in the Middle East] because we just do whatever [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu wants.
One of the striking things [of the November election] is that we saw a lot of Muslims and Arab-Americans shifting towards the GOP in places like Dearborn [Michigan]. You might think, Trump is very pro-Israel so why on Earth would these folks vote for him instead of Joe Biden? But the thing is, if you look at the last year, Biden has just done whatever Netanyahu wanted, he hasn’t checked him in any way. And Kamala Harris, although she thinks it’s sad what’s happening in Gaza, policy-wise, there’s no change. I phrase it sometimes as such: if you have to choose between someone who’s definitely gonna cut off your arm or someone who might cut off your arm, might kill you or might give you 2 million dollars and cut off no part of your body, people would rather not have to risk losing their arm at all, but for a lot of people, they would rather roll the dice with option two than take a guaranteed amputation of their arm. Also, Donald Trump was willing to meet with Muslim leaders in Michigan and Kamala Harris was not. The Democratic Party wouldn’t allow anyone of Palestinian origin to be on the stage at the Democratic National Convention, or to talk about the situation at all.