Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
Why did Kamala Harris lose the election? So glad you asked. Pull up a chair—actually, no need to sit, because the answer is so simple that it can be summed up in a few seconds. The main problem was the incumbency disadvantage, exacerbated by inflation—and immigration, and also urban disorder, wokeness, and trans swimmers. Also, Joe Biden dropped out too late, and Harris peaked too early, and the Democrats should have picked another candidate, or maybe they should have stuck with Biden. Donald Trump’s voters were motivated by white grievance, except for the people of color who were motivated by economic anxiety; ultimately, the main issue was the patriarchy, exacerbated by misinformation on long-form podcasts, although of course Harris should have gone on Rogan. From now on, the Democratic Party has no choice but to move left, move right, overhaul its approach entirely, and/or change nothing at all.
A few days after the election, Musa al-Gharbi, a forty-one-year-old sociologist at Stony Brook University, published a lengthy piece on Substack called “A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives,” using bar charts and cross tabs to “rule out what wasn’t the problem”: sexism, racism, third-party spoilers. “It didn’t take me long to write, because I realized I’d written essentially the same piece after the 2020 election, and also after the 2016 election,” he said the other afternoon, at a diner in Greenwich Village, while finishing off a black coffee and a plate of fries. “The details change, of course, but the basic trends have been consistent for a long time.” Harris didn’t do herself any favors, he argued—she was “unwilling or unable to distance herself from the unpopular incumbent,” she shouldn’t have campaigned with Liz Cheney, and so on—but any Democrat would have had a hard time winning, because, during the past three decades, “Democrats have become the party of élites,” alienating increasing numbers of “normie voters” in the process.
More specifically, al-Gharbi maintains that the Democrats have become the party of “symbolic capitalism,” a coinage so important to him that he used it as the title of both his doctoral dissertation and his Substack. The phrase is his play on “symbolic capital,” the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s term for prestige, cultural status, and other types of capital that can’t be measured by money alone. (A TV-news producer or an H.R. officer may wield rarefied forms of social power without cracking the top tax bracket.) Symbolic capitalists—academics, commentators, lawyers, consultants—manipulate words or data rather than making things with their hands. In conversation, al-Gharbi, a tenure-track professor with a sideline in punditry, tends to use “symbolic capitalists” and “symbolic élites” interchangeably, and always in the first-person plural; he may be one of the club’s sharpest critics, but he can’t deny that he’s also a member. “We are valued—overvalued, I would say—for what we know, not for what we make or do in the physical world,” he said. For him, this is the key divide in American politics. In the past three decades, he argues, the Democratic Party has been transformed from the party of non-symbolic workers to the party of symbolic élites. This strikes him as a fateful misstep: If elections are about convincing voters that you’re on their side, then why associate your party with a group that most voters not only don’t identify with but actively resent?
Despite Donald Trump’s many shortcomings as a politician, al-Gharbi continued, “one thing Trump has always been good at is triggering these outraged, condescending reactions from normie liberals, which work to his benefit.” For example: McDonald’s. All politicians pretend to like junk food while they’re at the Iowa State Fair, but Trump, despite being able to afford champagne and caviar, has long seemed to prefer Diet Coke and Filets-O-Fish. “He’s passionate about the product,” al-Gharbi said, with a snort-laugh. “It’s one of the many things about him that drive us”—symbolic élites—“crazy. He was born rich, went to fancy schools. He should be one of us, but he just isn’t.” Al-Gharbi paused to acknowledge the server who cleared his plate. In October, when Trump stopped at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania and briefly pretended to work the drive-through window, he made little effort to hide that it was a flimsy P.R. stunt; beneath his McDonald’s apron he wore a pressed shirt and his signature red tie. “It’s not like voters were supposed to see this and get duped—‘Oh, he’s a regular Joe like me,’ ” al-Gharbi continued. Rather, the point was to “heighten the cultural and class differences between normal people,” who like McDonald’s, and symbolic capitalists, especially coastal liberals, who could be counted on to seethe about the garishness of the spectacle. Substantively, the seethers may have had a point. Harris has spoken fondly about her summer job at McDonald’s, and now advocates for a fifteen-dollar minimum wage; Trump was born rich, and his public gestures are often at odds with his actual policies. (When Trump was asked, through the drive-through window, whether he favored raising the minimum wage, he dodged the question.) Semiotically, though, it’s not hard to see how the episode might have pushed a normal voter toward Trump. Who is more relatable: the scolds who seem to turn their noses up at McDonald’s or the guy who’s clearly lovin’ it?
There is, famously, less social mobility in the U.S. than Americans would like to believe, but al-Gharbi’s trajectory has involved an exceptional amount of change. He grew up in southern Arizona, near an Army intelligence base. Most of his close relatives served in the Army, including his father, who is Black; his mother and stepfather, who are white; and his twin brother, who was killed in Afghanistan. He considered joining the Catholic priesthood before, in his late teens, becoming an atheist; he later converted to Islam and changed his name. Al-Gharbi’s mother, a Trump supporter, sometimes introduces him as “my liberal son,” which he finds amusing. He will cop to being a coastal symbolic élite, but he never refers to himself as a liberal.
He went to community college and sold shoes at a local Dillard’s before getting his Ph.D. at Columbia, an environment that he found both alienating and illuminating. “Our stipend was thirty-seven thousand dollars a year, which was more money than I had ever made,” he said. It wasn’t enough—he was in his mid-thirties, the main breadwinner of a family of four, and he still had to work his way through grad school—but it felt like a lot, “especially since I didn’t consider it, you know, a real job. We were getting paid to go to school. And yet many of my colleagues—most of whom were younger, and living alone, and, needless to say, came from a different background—would openly take the position, ‘Thirty-seven thousand is trash money.’ ” The day after the 2016 election, al-Gharbi went to class prepared to discuss W. E. B. Du Bois, but the planned discussion was cancelled so that his classmates could process their feelings. “There were grown men weeping,” he said, and a mother “talking about how Trump was going to put her child in a camp.” In the ensuing days, he went on, some left-leaning Columbia students “said they couldn’t hand in their papers on time, due to mental distress, and meanwhile most of the people they purported to care about, Black and brown maintenance workers and people like this, kept showing up every day to do their jobs.”
An irony of al-Gharbi’s work, as he knows, is that his critique of the élite consensus can only spread if it is picked up by élite consensus-makers: he’s just a symbolic capitalist, standing in front of other symbolic capitalists, asking them to cite him. Still, he seems to relish telling each crowd what it least wants to hear. His standard PowerPoint starts with Uncle Sam pointing out at the audience—if you’re attending this talk, then you might be a symbolic capitalist—and goes on to assert that, when it comes to issues like inequality, “the GOP is not the main problem.” Another slide speaks to symbolic capitalists through their patron saint, Taylor Swift: “It’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me.”
The month after the election was so rich with instant takes and podcast postmortems—Harris’s top campaign staffers on “Pod Save America,” a bipartisan panel at Harvard’s Institute of Politics—that it’s hard to imagine what else might be left to say. The week after the election, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on MSNBC to explain the phenomenon of the “A.O.C.-Trump voters”—the significant number of people in her district who had apparently cast a split ballot for her and Trump. The host, Joy-Ann Reid, seemed to find this concept baffling (“It makes no sense”), but Ocasio-Cortez didn’t sound baffled. Every campaign, she said, is “a race to convince a person about who cares about [them] more”—the unstated implication being that her brand of left-wing populism and Trump’s brand of right-wing populism both resonated with the frustrations of working-class voters, while Harris’s soft-edged liberalism did not. Still, Ocasio-Cortez cast doubt on any pundit peddling a hasty grand theory of the electorate. “We had an election on November 5th, and on November 6th you’ve got an answer?” she said. “Don’t listen to those people.”
Al-Gharbi may seem like such a person—“One narrative to unite and rule them all,” he tweeted on November 6th, linking to his work—but at least his theory wasn’t concocted overnight. He has been making versions of the same argument, in peer-reviewed journals and in a range of public-facing outlets, for several years. If what we’re seeing now is a partisan dealignment, then al-Gharbi would date its origin to the nineteen-nineties, when President Bill Clinton advanced the interests of “those affiliated with the symbolic economy at the expense of most others.” Clinton, another McDonald’s-philic politician, was both a favorite son of the white working poor and a technocratic striver. In al-Gharbi’s view, Clinton’s rhetoric and signature policies (financial deregulation, tech boosterism, NAFTA, welfare reform) reoriented the Democratic coalition around the workers that his Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, called “symbolic analysts”—yuppies in the New South, I.T. professionals in the Sun Belt, and so on—and away from the working class, both white and nonwhite. In the past decade, al-Gharbi contends, this trend accelerated, as symbolic capitalists adopted sharply more progressive views on a range of cultural issues, dragging their party with them.
Another day-after postmortem came from Senator Bernie Sanders. “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” he posted on X, on November 6th. In an interview with the Times, Nancy Pelosi, the former Speaker of the House, brushed off Sanders’s critique before changing the subject: “There are cultural issues involved in elections as well. Guns, God and gays—that’s the way they say it.” Al-Gharbi is hardly a professional campaign adviser; he doesn’t even vote. Still, in this season of Democratic friendly fire, as the socialists urge the Party to the left and the moderates counsel a tack to the center, he is telling a sweeping story about how both factions may be partially correct. “On economic issues, I see no reason for Democrats to moderate—if anything, they have more room to run to the left,” he told me. “Redistribution, expanding health care—these things are incredibly popular. There’s no reason they can’t combine that with a shift toward the median voter on things like immigration. I don’t think they will, but they could.”
This synthesis, in broad strokes, is not unique to al-Gharbi. Elements of his analysis overlap with those of Timothy Shenk, Michael Lind, Barbara Ehrenreich, and John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, and many others (including a few elected Democrats, such as Representative Ro Khanna and Senator Chris Murphy). Among the one-word explanations currently on offer for what has gone wrong with the Democrats, al-Gharbi’s choice would probably be “wokeness”; but his understanding of the word is not, as is often the case, warped by whichever blue-haired zillennial or overbearing Bluesky post happened to annoy him most recently. His account is granular enough to fill a data-heavy book, published, in October, by Princeton University Press, called “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.” Al-Gharbi identifies three previous “Great Awokenings”—beginning in the early nineteen-thirties, the late sixties, and the late eighties—and argues, counterintuitively, that the most recent one began around 2010 and ended, or at least started ending, in 2021. Instead of defining the term succinctly, he offers a list of “views that seem to be discursively associated with ‘wokeness,’ ” such as a “focus on identity, subjectivity, and lived experience.” He is harshly critical of performative wokeness (“my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism,” as Taylor Swift puts it), but not of its putative goals. “The core idea behind intersectionality,” he concedes, “seems both important and fairly uncontroversial.” His problem with the bulk of social-justice discourse, he told me, is “not that symbolic capitalists are calling for too much justice but that we do so in ways that are counterproductive.”
The book is more diagnostic than prescriptive, and, when I asked al-Gharbi about his policy recommendations, he tried to remain above the fray. “In some cases, we may have to accept the possibility that the things we’ve been advocating for actually suck,” he said, but he declined to specify which things he had in mind. Put simply, he seems to be advocating a kind of Sanders-Pelosi synthesis: a Democratic message that would be aggressive on economic populism but less maximalist on cultural issues. Again, al-Gharbi is hardly alone in this; throughout this post-mortem season, one of the most common refrains has been that, for the Democratic Party to be competitive, it must reject the vanguardist demands of the cultural left, such as decriminalizing border crossings or funding surgery for transgender inmates. For years, “popularists” within the Party have made a similar argument, asserting that normal voters don’t like proposals such as defunding the police and replacing the words “Latino” and “Latina” with “Latinx,” and that, as the salience of such ideas starts to rise, support for Democrats tends to fall.
Clearly, there are swing voters who find vanguardist views off-putting—if there weren’t, then the Trump campaign and Republican groups wouldn’t have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on anti-trans TV ads. Yet Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive political strategist, contends that the way forward for the Party is not to abandon its most socially liberal views but to make a better case for them. “You can’t belittle people—‘What’s wrong with you, why can’t you get the pronouns thing right?’—and you can’t argue them out of their feelings,” she said. “It doesn’t work in relationships, and it doesn’t work in politics. But that doesn’t mean public opinion is static. There is a way to get people to understand new things.” One of the potential dangers of a post-election analysis that reduces to anti-wokeness is that it could encourage Democrats to overlearn the Clintonian lessons of triangulation and Sister Souljah scapegoating—to attempt to pander to centrist voters by abandoning some of the most vulnerable parts of their coalition, such as undocumented immigrants or trans youth. “If we become the G.O.P. Light and campaign on ‘We will also crack down at the border, we will also throw trans people under the bus,’ then not only are we not standing for our principles, we are also boosting the right-wing framing,” Shenker-Osorio continued. “Instead of giving in to the frame that what’s wrong with our country is that trans and undocumented people have too much power, you reframe: ‘We all want similar things, whatever we look like, but today a wealthy and powerful few are trying to divide us from each other, hoping we’ll look the other way while they pick our pockets.’”
In the sixties, according to many public-opinion polls, the methods of the civil-rights movement were considered outlandishly extreme. It’s possible that several Democratic candidates, beginning with Hubert Humphrey in 1968, lost in part because their party was viewed as the party of civil rights. Surely, the lesson here can’t be that a party should always yield to the preferences of the median voter. “You can advocate for positions that you think are morally righteous,” al-Gharbi said. “But you have to try to persuade people who don’t yet agree with you, which means engaging with them charitably, in language they might actually find compelling. We haven’t really tried this. We’ve tried denouncing, we’ve tried coercing, we’ve tried shaming people and implying that they’re backward or pathological, and the modal response to that, unsurprisingly, has been backlash.” To be fair to the Democrats, many of the Party’s most prominent politicians have tried engaging in this sort of outreach for years, even if it hasn’t always worked. “We need to remember that we’ve all got our blind spots and contradictions and prejudices,” Barack Obama said during his speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention. “After all, if a parent or grandparent occasionally says something that makes us cringe, we don’t automatically assume they’re bad people. We recognize the world is moving fast, and that they need time and maybe a little encouragement to catch up.” (This is a note that Obama has been striking since before he was President.) Still, in many voters’ minds, the association between Democrats and supercilious scolding seems hard to shake. Shenker-Osorio said that she is careful not to use condescending language in her campaign messaging, but, nonetheless, some voters may have formed the inconvenient impression that “you have to sign some pledge saying ‘I believe that gender is a spectrum’ before you can vote Democrat.”
Many anti-woke screeds read like Republican oppo research, but “We Have Never Been Woke” is less predictable than that. (The book’s blurbs come from a libertarian, a pro-Bernie leftist, and the conservative columnist David Brooks, among others.) The references are eclectic, but the thrust of the argument is unsparing, especially when the target is white liberals in the professional-managerial class. (New York City’s economy is likened to a “racialized caste system”—in the third paragraph.) Often, al-Gharbi seems to infer cynicism or deceit where another observer might see incompetence or statistical noise, and he sometimes overplays the pervasive power of the symbolic élite (“Myriad other social institutions have also been bent to our will”). Some of the book’s sweeping claims seem not entirely justified by the evidence. (For example, he concludes flatly that the Occupy Wall Street movement “was not class oriented”—a provocative claim, but ultimately not a persuasive one.) Moreover, “symbolic capitalists” is such a capacious category—encompassing both hedge-fund managers and adjunct poetry professors, both the former lawyer Kamala Harris and the former TV star Donald Trump—that it sometimes appears to mystify as much as it reveals. Still, if the goal of a certain kind of big-swing public-intellectual book is to afflict the comfortable, then this book is a bracing way to afflict yourself, for the low price of thirty-five dollars. Or, if you’re a wily enough symbolic capitalist, you can probably find a way to get a copy for free.
When I met up with al-Gharbi last month, he was in the middle of his book tour—in New York for one night only, between an unlisted event in Savannah, Georgia, and a book talk in Austin, Texas. Tonight’s talk was at the Institute for Public Knowledge, an interdisciplinary research arm of N.Y.U., in Cooper Square. “Welcome to the reckoning,” Eric Klinenberg, the director of the institute and an N.Y.U. sociologist, said during the introduction. He and his colleagues had decided to invite al-Gharbi months earlier, he went on, but after the election “it feels even more urgent.”
Al-Gharbi delivered an updated version of his PowerPoint: Uncle Sam, Taylor Swift, and two newer slides putting the 2024 election in historical context. Then he sat for a panel discussion with two admirers of the book, both veteran left-wing journalists. “Like a lot of you, I’m depressed about the election,” Liza Featherstone, a columnist for Jacobin and The New Republic, told the audience. After reading al-Gharbi’s book, she added, “I came away even more depressed . . . convinced that we, as a class, were politically useless. I thought, Maybe we should create a Maoist campaign against ourselves and self-deport to work in the warehouses of rural America.” Still, she said, as bad as things were, it was possible that they were about to get much worse: “For all the problems with wokeness, we might miss it when it’s gone.”
The other panelist was the author Thomas Frank, who is best known for his 2004 book, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” His other abiding project has been identifying what’s the matter with the Democrats, and his answer, which chimes with al-Gharbi’s, is that the Party’s upper ranks have been infiltrated by anti-populist corporate shills. “Musa here puts his finger exactly on the central paradox of our time: left politics being taken up by the people and institutions of power and used for their own ends,” Frank said. Later, he told al-Gharbi, “I’ve read all these anti-woke books. Yours wins the trophy.”
During the Q. & A., the toughest question came from Jeff Manza, the chair of N.Y.U.’s sociology department. He complimented the book at length, but added that it was landing at an awkward moment, when “the future occupant of the White House is planning to deploy the military to round up immigrants” and “the front line of opposition to this are going to be symbolic capitalists.” Given this context, wouldn’t criticisms of the resistance seem misplaced? After the event, the panelists walked a few blocks to a low-lit trattoria (marble tabletops, craft cocktails). Once everyone had ordered—al-Gharbi asked for antipasti without pork and a nonalcoholic beer—Klinenberg, at the head of the table, returned to Manza’s question. “It was easier to kick at symbolic capitalists before this moment, but now it makes me more nervous,” he said. “This line of argument can be weaponized to discredit truth-seeking institutions—universities, scientists—at a moment when those institutions are about to be under severe attack.”
“We can’t control the Fox News crowd,” al-Gharbi said. “We can only control ourselves.” Gesturing around the trattoria, he referred to a passage from George Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier” that he also quotes in his book. “Sometimes I look at a Socialist—the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist,” Orwell wrote, “and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed.” Orwell’s book was published in 1937, but, as al-Gharbi dryly points out in his book, the description “should be immediately familiar to the contemporary reader.”
A few days after the dinner, I spoke to Klinenberg, who reiterated that he admired al-Gharbi’s book and appreciated the necessity for self-critique. “Musa is quite shrewd in his observations of the comical foibles of the élite university world,” he said. “But the more pressing concern, to me, is that we have governors and legislators trying to ban discussion of slavery and climate change—we have an extreme right, maybe a fascist right, getting ready to take power, and it strikes me that all these forces would be delighted to use Musa’s words to help legitimate their cause.”
I called al-Gharbi, and we spoke for another hour. “When voters are seeing these very deep problems in our institutions, and there’s one party saying ‘I will burn those institutions down,’ and another party saying ‘Nope, the institutions are perfect, nothing to see here’—if those are the two choices, guess which one voters are going to pick?” he said. Shortly after we hung up, he sent me a long e-mail, continuing the thought. “If we want to actually understand and address the root cause of the disaffection that empowers people like Trump, then we really need to confront a lot of these issues instead of denying them,” he wrote. “Perhaps especially now.” Trump’s opponents can put off such confrontations for four more years, diverting all their energy to resistance, but such delays, al-Gharbi continued, are often “just a way of saying, ‘Let’s try to preserve the status quo indefinitely.’ And that’s a losing position. It’s a type of posture that’ll end up with the ‘burn it all down’ folks calling the shots.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
