We Have Never Been Woke: A Conversation with Musa al-Gharbi
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Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, and welcome to Madison's Notes. We are the official podcast of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. This week, we'll be speaking with author and professor Musa Algarbi, who recently published We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. He explains to us what symbolic capitalism is.

the structure or social group of people who find their value in society not through the production of physical goods but through symbolic and non-tactile means.

This would be journalists, academics, consultants, authors, etc. He describes the dynamics between social capitalism and the physical productive economy and how it's a better predictor of someone's political associations than simply looking at income alone. Musa doesn't define wokeness, and part of our conversation is uncovering why that is and the emphasis of his discussion on the role that wokeness has played

to social capitalists over the actual content and substance of woke values. Without further ado, let's welcome Musa Algarbi to the show.

Well, Musa, welcome to Madison's Notes. It's exciting to get to have a conversation one-on-one with you. You're very generous and joined the James Madison program for one of our weekly breakfasts yesterday, and everyone was chomping at the bit to try to ask you a question. So I feel quite lucky that I get you to myself for a little bit, but welcome to the show. Yeah, it was great. It was great yesterday. It's great to join you today. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Awesome. Well, you've been doing a bit of a media blitz on your recent book out last year, We Have Never Been Woke, which has caused an incredible stir of conversation that I find really important and I enjoyed going through the book myself. But for our listeners who aren't familiar with it, it sounds like

a bit of a controversial title, but tell me a little bit more about why you chose that title and how it might differentiate from some of the content readers will find in the text. Yeah, so the title, We Have Never Been Woke, is a play on a book by a different sociologist, Bruno Latour. He wrote a book called We Have Never Been Modern, and in that book, Latour argued that

that the stories that we moderns tell ourselves about what separates us from other people, what makes us different and unique, these stories, these narratives we tell ourselves actually obscure the nature of the modern world and make it difficult for us to understand or really adequately respond to some of the challenges of modernity. And in the same similar vein, the argument of my book is that the stories that knowledge economy professionals

tell ourselves about how we are on the right side of history, about how we're advocates and allies for the marginalized and the disadvantaged in society. These stories that we tell ourselves obscure who benefits from a lot of social problems, why they persist, how they come about, and

and therefore interfere with our ability to actually make progress on a lot of these social issues that we're conspicuously concerned about. And as far as when we are talking about the knowledge economy and this formation of a new elite, you do a really great job of disseminating symbolic capitalists.

and you note that it's not a class, but it is a group of people. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you distinguish symbolic capitalists from maybe productive economy workers and why that's important in considering, like, as we build up to the notion of wokeness? Yeah, yeah. So the we of we have never been woke is this constellation of elites that I call symbolic capitalists, as you said. I call...

I call them symbolic capitalists because the main way that we make a living is by cultivating and leveraging what Bourdieu called symbolic capital on behalf of ourselves and other people. Slightly less nerdy way of saying that. Symbolic capitalists are people who make a living based on what they know, who they know, and how they're known. They're people who make a living by producing and manipulating symbols and data and things like this instead of

providing physical goods and services to people. So think people who work in fields like education or consulting or law or human resources and things like this.

because this group of elites that I call symbolic capitalists, they have been known by other names, by other people. A lot of other names for this group called them, referred to them as a class, like the creative class, the professional managerial class. For reasons I discussed briefly in the book and more length in my sub stack, I think it's not super helpful to think or talk about this group as a class. It's an elite formation that kind of cuts across a couple of traditional class lines.

But there are some classy things about them, which is why there are some kind of coherent things about them that make them sensible to talk about as a coherent group. In fact, one of the things that's really interesting about symbolic capitalists and about the ways that symbolic capitalists have transformed the political landscape in the United States is that

Before, in the before times, according to a lot of traditional theories about class and, say, political alignments, you would expect, it's traditionally been the case that the bosses and the workers, for instance, were in different parties. There was...

Today, that's less the case, both for knowledge economy professionals, symbolic capitalists, the people who are the super elite symbolic capitalists who have really extraordinary rates of pay, autonomy, prestige, and so on, and the people who have more precarious jobs, who have less autonomy, less prestige, more precarity. Both of them, despite their occupying importantly different class positions, tend

tend to vote the same way, live in the same communities, share similar lifestyles and things like this. And this is also true, increasingly true, of workers who provide physical goods and services to people. So people who work in manufacturing and service jobs and so on, they've been migrating. Their bosses have long voted for the Republican Party, but now the workers for these industries are also voting Republican in a way that is unusual. Last thing I'll say about this point.

is in a way this divide between symbolic capitalists and people who are distant from us is one of the most important and predictive political divides, including it's more predictive in a lot of ways than class. Okay, so as an example, consider the difference between physicians and surgeons.

Physicians and surgeons, they tend to live in similar communities. They get similar, they work in often the same institutions, in fact. They have similar levels of education. They have similar levels of pay. Surgeons typically, on average, get a little bit more, but they both have healthy six-figure incomes.

But despite, and so according to typical class analysis and kind of conventional political wisdom, what you would expect is these two groups of people who have similar pay, live in similar communities, similar education levels, and so on, would have similar political preferences. In fact, they have diametrically opposed political preferences. Physicians are overwhelmingly aligned with the Democratic Party, and surgeons are aligned with the Republicans, and not just surgeons, but also dentists and other professionals

And the difference between doctors and surgeons is,

is that physicians are mostly symbolic capitalists. They diagnose and prescribe. That's the main thing they do. They don't do things to people's bodies. They write referrals for people to do things to people's bodies. And whereas surgeons, dentists, other people like this are defined primarily by doing things, physically doing things to people's physical bodies. And so what's interesting is that this divide between people who do manual labor, people who do work

who provide physical goods and services to people, even as you go kind of up the income chain, it's more predictive of a lot of people's values, priorities, and politics than class, than education, than a lot of these other things. And as I stress in the book,

The profession that you work in and the professions actually that your parents work in, even for that matter, is increasingly more predictive than class per se at defining and at predicting people's life chances. So if you want to find out if someone is likely to get married,

If someone is likely to earn a six-figure job, if someone is likely to graduate from college, and so on and so forth, it's actually more predictive. Rather than just looking at the income of the parents, it's actually more predictive to look at the job that their parents occupy. That's actually going to be more predictive than class in shaping people's life chances. And so for a number, in these aspects and many more,

Talking about this elite constellation, not in terms of class, but focusing on this elite constellation in a kind of cross-class way provides, I think, a much more powerful lens to understand a lot of different social phenomena. Yeah, and I loved reading the book in part because I heard some of your history. You've had jobs both in the symbolic sphere

economy and also in the physical goods product economy. And I resonated with that. I've worked lots of manual labor, essentially, since I was young, all the way through college and after college. You know, I've even still I've taken breaks in my, quote, professional jobs to go do manual labor because it feels good. But tell me more about that process for you and

how it started, how this book started to be formed as you moved between those two spaces? Because you write the book not just as, you know, standing in one on one side of the river and talking about the other side, but you have experience on both sides of the river. Yeah, I'll say, you know, one of the things that's interesting about the differences between these different types of work is, you know, when I was say when I was selling shoes, like that's a job where we're

or even when I was doing freight work for that matter. Either way, I'll just stick with selling shoes, why not? When I was selling shoes, I would spend the whole day helping people. People would come in with problems, they'd have some kind of concrete problem. You know, I wasn't like saving the world, I wasn't saving anyone's life for the most part. But people would come in with problems, concrete, tangible problems,

Oh, I want to work out. I need some kind of shoe to work out. Oh, my kid's going to school. He's starting school. He needs something on his feet. I'm getting married. I don't need to have something to go with my dress, you know? So they would come in with these problems. I would help them solve their problems. And I could feel good clocking out at the end of the day. I just helped a bunch of people solve concrete problems. And by the way, I could clock out at the end of the day and then I was done working. Yeah.

And then until the next time I went to work. So there's this kind of delineation between work and non-work that I frankly miss. But this is very different from the work that I do today. Today, I don't typically, at the end of the day, walk away from my office or whatever. For one, I'm usually continuing to work in various respects, even when I leave my office. But setting that aside, I

I don't really help people solve practical problems too often. Not kind of concrete practical problems in the world. I kind of miss that. Working as a shoe salesman, you know, you don't have much prestige. It's not a glamorous job. You don't make a lot of money. I make a lot more money. I have a lot more prestige, a lot more autonomy and freedom in terms of how I structure my time and so on.

But I don't spend the day helping people in a direct practical way. And what's interesting about that fact is that one of the things that defines the symbolic professions

is that a lot of our professions are actually defined in terms of helping people in principle. So for instance, academia, scholars are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads and to kind of tell the truth without regards to anyone's political or economic interests. And journalists are supposed to speak truth to power and to be a voice for the voiceless and to educate citizens to be active participants in democracy. Like a lot of our professions, in fact, one of the defining features

of symbolic capitalists and their professions is that they're defined in terms of altruism and serving the common good. But like on a day-to-day basis, we often don't do so much to actually just help actual people with actual problems in the actual circumstances they're navigating.

And actually, I'll add, though, the fact that our professions are defined this way is actually very important for understanding a lot of the themes and arguments of the book. Because the kind of core puzzle that the book is trying to wrestle with

So we have these professions that are oriented around altruism and the common good from the beginning of our professions. The reason why we have more autonomy and pay and status than most workers is because we've said, we insisted that we need these things, that if we're given this autonomy and pay and prestige, it will be to the benefit of everyone in society, including and especially the least among us.

If you look at the contemporary landscape even today, symbolic capitalists are the Americans who are most likely to self-identify as anti-racist, as environmentalists, as allies to LGBTQ people, as feminists, and so on. And so what you might expect and what we promised would happen, what symbolic capitalists promised would happen at the outset of our professions and that we keep

promising, is that if people like us were given more power and influence over society, we would see inequality shrinking. We'd see longstanding social problems getting fixed. We'd see more social harmony because you'd have these technocratic experts who are adjudicating between competing factions and making decisions on the basis of merit and facts and things like this instead of nepotism and pure power and all of this.

And you'd see kind of growing trust in institutions because of all the great work that we're doing. In reality, the book argues, over the last 50 years, it is the case that symbolic capitalists have been given a lot more power and influence over society. But the consequences have not been what we might have hoped or predicted.

Instead, over the last 50 years, we've seen growing inequalities, growing affective polarization, increasing institutional dysfunction and mistrust. A lot of social problems that we condemn have festered or even grown worse than before these shifts to the symbolic economy.

And so part of the core question in a way that the book is trying to wrestle with is basically, why is that? Why do we see the world in which we actually live instead of the world that we might have hoped or expected, the world that previous cohorts of symbolic capitalists prophesied?

promised. So you deliberately refrain from defining wokeness, which was, of course, I picked up the book, I started reading it, and one of my first initial questions was, well, what does he mean when he says wokeness? Like, give me the solid, the clarity. But as I made my way through the book, I started to realize that it was maybe less focused on

its particular meaning and more of the function that it's been playing in regards to this dynamic between symbolic and physically productive work. Can you tell us more about your analysis of its function?

when it comes to seeing the dichotomy between what was told would happen when symbolic capitalism got more power and what we're actually dealing with today. Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that I, as you mentioned, I don't define woke in a kind of classic dictionary style way in the book, in part to the consternation of some readers. But yeah,

But what I, and one of the reasons I don't do this is because I think people sometimes over-focus on quibbling about the specifics of definitions instead of at the expense of substance. And so one of the things, for instance, that I stress, I teach interpersonal communication this semester. And every semester I teach this.

When we talk about language, I do this activity where I ask my students to define for me what an apple is. Give me the necessary and sufficient conditions that include 100% of apples and exclude everything else. And don't give me some tautological nonsense about how an apple is genus this and species that. But like, give me a substantive definition of apple. And I'll sit in the room.

with 30 students, bright students at an R1 research university. And we'll sit there for a good 20 minutes and have, you know,

I'm playing with plausible definitions and it turns out they can't define apple. Now that doesn't mean that they have no idea what apples are such that I said, if I say, hey, go grab me an apple, they're going to come back with a fish or a chair or something. Like it's just not the way that language works, that you need some kind of crisp analytic definition in order to use a word properly. Properly meaning you use the word, people understand what you're trying to convey to them and respond appropriately.

And so this is true, the fact that we actually don't need definitions and actually can't define most of the words we use in a satisfying way. This is true even of kind of banal, relatively uncontested words like apple. When you start talking about highly contested words like woke, for which Apple

you know, how people understand and define and use the term is intimately bound up with a whole bunch of moral and political convictions and different social objectives and stuff like that, then defining the term, just picking a definition and papering over that difference actually obscures more than it clarifies. So instead of doing that, what I tried to do is surface the different ways that stakeholders have understood and used the word "woke" over time.

It's a word with a history that runs more than a century. So I walk readers through that. I walk readers through how different factions within the left have understood the term, how the right use the term. And I even show readers alternative

terms that have served a similar function in the past. I'll give a quick example. Political correctness in the late 80s to early 90s was the last time that we had these kind of big blowups over social justice and institutions of knowledge production and identity and politics and so on.

At that time, the term "woke" wasn't central to these discussions, but instead the term "political correctness" was. And what happened with political correctness is really instructive to dynamics around the word "woke" today. So initially, when people used the word "politically correct," they typically used it to mean their moral and political views were correct. They used it unironically and pretty straightforwardly literal.

At that time, if someone said that something was politically incorrect, they would mean it as in like problematic, the way that we use the word problematic today. They'd say, hey, that was politically incorrect, bro. Okay. Eventually, though, there came to be this divide within the left about political correctness where one faction continued to use political correctness to mean their moral and political views were correct.

another faction of the left started associating that term with a sanctimonious and purely symbolic style of politics. And eventually this dispute within the left got picked up by the right. And they started just basically attacking everything they didn't like, branding it as PC or politically correct. And that took the luster off the term. So eventually people stopped using the term unironically. Oh,

almost any time people use the term PC or politically correct, it was used as some kind of a catch-all slur for the left. And you can see similar dynamics playing out right now with woke. You saw this divide within the left about what, about wokeness. And, and then this divide was picked up by the right who started branding everything. They don't like woke. Last thing I'll say, there was a survey that I include in the book where

Where Axios asked Americans, when you hear the word woke, what do you feel? Do you have positive or negative associations with woke? And it turned out that at that time, most Americans felt on balance positively about woke or wokeness. And then they asked,

Okay, if someone called you woke, would you understand that to be an insult or a compliment? And despite the fact that most Americans felt positively about the term woke, they understood that if someone in today's context refers to you as woke, it's probably going to be used as a slur or an insult. And so the same kind of dynamics that we saw with political correctness we're seeing today with wokeness. Yeah, I appreciated how you described it.

wokeness as moral saturation of discourse and that that's part, you call it a great awokening, this sort of period of time that we're in. And you give some examples of other great moments in history where there's this large societal shift to a certain perspective or a certain disposition. But in regards to the moral saturation of discourse, at

I'm Gen Z millennial cusp. As I was reading, I just was wondering, what did political discourse sound like when it wasn't morally saturated? Because in my mind, when I think about it, particularly politics, it's almost, I

I've always experienced it, whether that's with conservatives or liberals, leftists or right party, as conversations that are morally saturated. So is there a place where those conversations can happen without moral saturation? Is that something we want? Yeah, I mean, yeah. So one of the things that I show in the book, a contribution that I tried to make in the book, is that a lot of people were talking about how something seemed to have shifted in the culture

after 2010, but a lot of these conversations were just kind of vibes-based or anecdote-based. Like, oh, something interesting happened at this school, therefore, awakening. And so what I tried to do in the book is, along with some of my colleagues, is try to measure this phenomenon in a more systematic way. And what I show in the book is that looking at a whole bunch of measures from the ways that...

knowledge economy professionals respond to polls and surveys, to changes in protest activity, to changes in policies, especially in particular types of institutions that were more likely to adopt those policies. You can see changes in

academic outputs, changes in media outputs, changes in entertainment outputs. And so I walked through just tons and tons and tons of data showing that you can clearly see that something changed in the culture around 2010 and changed again around 2021. But what I also show in the book is that using these same kinds of empirical measures, you can see that this period of heightened

around social justice was actually a case of something in that there were three previous awokenings in the 20th century. There was one in the 1920s to early 30s, one in the mid-60s through early 70s, and then one in the late 80s to early 90s. And so by comparing and contrasting these cases, we can get leverage on like, well, why do these things happen at all? Do they change anything? And so on. Okay. So in between the awokenings, yeah, it's not that...

morality goes away or, um, uh, it, although in, in, to an extent that it does to an extent, it does a little bit like, um, so for instance, if you look at the period between the first, between the fourth awakening, though, the one we're currently in and though the awakening of the late eighties to early nineties. So think, you know, uh,

kind of the late Clinton years, the Bush administration through Obama and so on. Yeah, a lot of moral and political discourse there, but it wasn't so focused on race, gender, sexuality, the environment, things like that. There are kind of other political issues that dominate the conversation instead of these kind of

canonical social justice problems. That's one difference, is that the kinds of political issues that become most prominent are just different in these non-awakening periods than they are during the awakening periods. During the awakening periods, race, gender, sexuality, class, inequality, those shoot to the top of the agenda in each of these cases, starting in the 1920s, and kind of displace most other kind of normal politics or most other forms of

uh, contestation of our resources and opportunities and things like this. So that's one change. And then the intensity of, um, politics also ratchets up. So like the, the intensity of protest activity, like there was protest activity during, um, the post nine 11 period, especially around the war in Iraq, um, and against the war in Iraq. Like

Like there was protest activity, but not at the scale of the kinds of unrest that we saw after 2010. And similarly, there were, yeah, I mean, there was coverage of political issues in the news, but it's not like every single news article was focused intensely on politics, politics, politics all day, every day, nothing but politics and violence.

with a particular focus on race, gender, sexuality, and so on. So there are these kinds of... So it's not the case that in between Awokenings, we just don't care about politics and morality, but the discourse does change. Although, last thing I'll say on this, there is kind of a more... The periods in between Awokenings, though, they do tend to be periods where there's still a lot of contestation, but there's also more...

So, for instance, throughout most of the Clinton administration through 2010, there was this kind of both in terms of foreign policy and in terms of economics, there was a broad consensus about like, you know,

that the way to solve a lot of problems was through a combination of free markets plus technocratic know-how. This was true even for the Bush administration. George Bush defined himself in terms of compassionate conservatism. He was for the market but wanted to address a lot of these social problems. He was deeply concerned about poverty and so on. For the war in Iraq and Afghanistan,

They thought that they could just terraform these countries and fly in a bunch of experts from Harvard and stuff like this to kind of these kind of technocratic wonks to kind of just kind of completely remap and rebuild society. And so even even George W. Bush, who, you know, in terms of the way he talked and presented himself.

didn't necessarily convey intellectualism. Still, completely, the way his administration was structured, the kind of moral narratives he told about free markets and prosperity plus concern about the marginalized and the disadvantaged, this kind of Clinton-esque consensus position,

followed into the Bush administration. And so did the focus on experts and technocrats. And he also kind of restructured the, continued some of the Clinton era reforms, restructuring the military in service of, quote, smart war and things like this. And so, yeah, so these periods in between awakenings

There's still politics, but there's more consensus than there is during these periods of awokening. We've got a not definition of wokeness. We've got an understanding of symbolic capitalists. Now I want to understand exactly how symbolic capitalism is maybe, it seems as though you're saying is undermining the values that woke people.

is claiming to make. It's like woke is all these values about social justice, reform, environmentalism, etc. And yet symbolic capitalism inherently doesn't support those things. One part of the problem is that there is this inherent tension because symbolic capitalists

are sincerely committed to social justice and egalitarianism when we say things like we want the poor to be uplifted, that we want the people at the margins of society to live lives of dignity and inclusion. We're not lying. We're not being cynical or insincere when we say that. But our commitments towards egalitarianism are typically not our only set of sincere commitments. Symbolic capitalists also tend to be sincerely committed to being elite.

which is to say, we think that our preferences and priorities should count more than the person checking us out at the grocery store. We think that we should enjoy a significantly higher standard of living than the people delivering our packages. And we think...

And we strongly hope for our children to reproduce our own social position or to do even better than us. Actually, we don't just hope for it in the abstract, but we aggressively work to make sure that that happens. And these two sets of desires are in deep tension, the desire to be an elite and the desire to be an egalitarian. You can't actually be an egalitarian social climber. It's a

contradiction in terms. And so what I argue in the book is that when these two sincere drives come into conflict, as they often do, the desire to be an egalitarian, the desire to be an elite, it's often the desire to be an elite that ends up winning out and kind of transforming and subverting how we pursue social justice so that we end up trying to pursue these egalitarian goals.

mostly in ways that don't cost us anything, risk anything for us, require us to change anything about our own lifestyles and aspirations and so on. And in fact, ideally, in ways that even enhance our social position. And this matters because, as I show in chapter three of the book,

When you look at who benefits the most from a lot of these social inequalities, when you look at how they're perpetuated and so on, it's actually not possible to meaningfully address a lot of the social problems we're concerned with just by targeting, say, the top 1%. And in terms of the GOP, a lot of the people who have been shifting towards the GOP are the very people that we view ourselves as advocates for and allies of, the social

less educated, the less affluent ethnic minorities, religious minorities, and so on and so forth. And so they're also not mainly the problem. They exert a lot less influence over institutions in society than we do. They have a lot less wealth and power and so on. And so, yeah, so part of it is there is this kind of fundamental tension. And then there are these kind of

secondary problems that also interfere with our ability to achieve the social justice goals that we profess. So one of them, for instance, and this has been true for symbolic capitalists for like a century. So Orwell has this book called The Road to Wiegand Pier that he wrote in the 30s looking at symbolic capitalists

and the first great awakening in the UK. And one of the things that he stresses is that at that time, symbolic capitalists thought of themselves as champions of the working man and of the working class. But one, they basically never really met

working people. They had basically no organic connection to the working class. They had no deep understanding of the preferences, priorities, and needs of working class people. And in fact, Orwell argues, when symbolic capitalists came into conflict with, I mean, came into contact with working class people, we tended to recoil in war at their kind of baselessness

base beliefs and their brutish mannerisms. And we immediately tried starting to kind of micromanage them and censor them and correct them and paternalize them. And that tended to generate resentment towards us and our institutions among the working classes. And this same kind of dynamic that Orval pointed out

a century ago almost, is just as true today. It's been an enduring feature of symbolic capitalists. A lot of the people that we think of ourselves as champions for and allies of, we just don't really know those people. We don't know their preferences. We don't know their priorities. And we don't really try that hard, honestly, to find out.

So, for instance, as it relates to African-Americans, if we want to know what do African-Americans feel about, you know, X topic, what we typically don't do is conduct or consult nationally representative survey data of African-Americans in the U.S.,

We typically don't go out into the community and interact with the stakeholders that we're trying to feel out and just talk to kind of normie black people and ask them what they think about. No, we don't do any of that. What we tend to do is go, oh, well, let me see the black columnists at the New York Times. And what do they say about X topic? And the problem with that

is that the people who are columnists at the New York Times tend to be dramatically unrepresentative, demonstrably unrepresentative of the groups that they associate with. So the views of Black New York Times columnists tend to be radically out of step with the views of the median Black voter along a lot of dimensions. And so, and the problem is we don't typically understand

and are discomforted, you know, uncomfortable even thinking or talking about the extent to which these representatives are not in fact representative. And a lot of these purported spokespeople for various groups also fail to understand

when they make pronouncements on behalf of Black people, they often don't understand how unrepresentative their views are either, because they know no less than most of their colleagues. They also don't really have an organic, meaningful relationship

connection with the people they're purporting to represent or help, they also have life experiences and material interests and values and stuff that just diverge in a systematic way from normies. And so there are these kinds of

structural problems and these knowledge problems that also interfere with our ability that often lead us to pursue courses of action that are both undesirable and sometimes actively harmful for the people that we're trying to champion and support.

Yeah, and as you're saying this, you're talking about columnists who represents the picture of what we think we're pursuing. We're like, oh, what is so-and-so think? Well, let's go find somebody who looks like them at the New York Times. But in order to get on the top of major media outlets, major newspapers, major universities, you have to play the game, which means you have to adjust whatever it is that was unique to start with.

to arrive at the top and it's really difficult to maintain. And even once you do there, you will have been changed somehow because we're just changeable beings.

There's this great quote by Chomsky where he said, whenever I talk about things like this to people, there are people who get mad at me. And he gave this example. He said, a New York Times columnist once got really indignant about this. And he said, you know what? Nobody tells me what to write. And Chomsky was like, and that's perfectly true. Nobody tells him what to write. But if he didn't already know what to write,

the things that he was supposed to say and so on, he would never be a columnist for the New York Times. You think the wrong thoughts, you articulate the wrong things, you're not in the system. And so, yeah, it's absolutely the case. And as I've shown both in the book and also in some subsequent talks and articles, the kinds of people who become symbolic capitalists, although we're especially likely to think of ourselves as kind of edgy, nonconformist people, we're actually much, much more likely

to be conformists, to be careerists, to be cowards, to put a non-diplomatic point on it compared to the general public. Light them up.

Well, this is so much fun. And also, we don't have that much time. Boo. But I want to ask, we've discussed a lot of the, you know, some of the overarching themes. And you've been having tons of conversations about this since its publication. There was even a bidding war for the manuscript. Congratulations. But I'm

I'm curious, as you've been talking about this book and the ideas and the culture and the criticisms and critiques and observations you're making, what have been some of the points that you feel readers or listeners are misunderstanding the most frequently? Yeah, I did. I wrote a post on my blog.

going into this a little bit. Yeah, well, what's great about having the privilege to go on tour and talk with a bunch of different stakeholders about the book and its themes is that, one, you get all these opportunities to kind of push your thinking and so on, and you also get to see kind of firsthand what about the book

you could have maybe described differently or better. Like if I do a second edition of the text, if the interest is strong enough, long enough for me to be invited to do a second edition of the text, I probably will rework a few sections because there are things that in retrospect, I think I could have explained differently. And that on talks now, I do explain them differently and you can see people grasp it a lot more readily. So one of those things, for instance,

is oftentimes in conversations and in some of the reviews, there were questions like, well, what about the actual capital? So you're talking about the symbolic capitalists, but what about the actual capitalists? What about the millionaires and the billionaires? I do spend some time talking about that, addressing that very point in the text, but there's actually a much more

powerful, concrete, simple way that I could have articulated some of these points. One of them being, so one thing I do on talks a lot now is I just pull up the richest people in the world and

and the richest people in America. And you can see they're overwhelmingly symbolic capitalists. The actual, you know, the millionaires and the billionaires are mostly and increasingly us. And similarly, and that's, of course, bracketing the point that actually, again, as I said, the extent to which you can actually explain a lot of the social phenomena we're concerned about by just focusing on the millionaires and the billionaires is actually overrated.

And in fact, even the symbolic capitalists who are not millionaires and billionaires play a significant, almost anything that the millionaires and the billionaires and multinational corporations, almost anything that they actually do in the world, they do with us and through us. And the stuff that they do couldn't happen without us. And so just focusing on them and ignoring who actually makes stuff happen is ridiculous.

I'll be polite. So that's one of the things I get a lot in that if I were redoing the book, I might kind of adjust some things. And the other thing also is a question about

What about the politicians? And, you know, there are all these kind of powerful people and so on. And so one of the things that I also stress in the book, but that I could explain a lot more clearly in retrospect directly, that I do now when I go on talks, I just walk people through the three branches of government. And I show them that if you look at Congress, actually about 70% of congressional people today are symbolic capitalists.

If you look at the judiciary, we have an entire branch of government that's 100% symbolic capitalist. Pretty much everyone in the judicial branch is a symbolic capitalist. If you look at the presidency, on the Democratic side, every single presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter has been a symbolic capitalist.

Most of them have been one type of symbolic capitalist, a lawyer, although there's also Al Gore, who was a journalist before. And then even on the Republican side, if you look at the most prominent and influential Republicans over the last half century, they've been largely symbolic capitalists.

Nixon was a lawyer. Reagan was a Hollywood star. Donald Trump, as I show in my talks, actually made most of his money not in construction and real estate and stuff, but by leveraging his brand and through his TV shows and stuff, he's

is most, almost all of his wealth is actually derived through the symbolic professions and his running mate and likely successor, JD Vance, is a symbolic capitalist sampler platter. He has a degree in law. He worked in consulting before that, and he is a bestselling author and memoirist. The GOP candidate right before Trump, Mitt Romney, worked in finance and consulting. And so like even on the Republican side,

Symbolic capitalists are some of the most dominant figures in the GOP in terms of the actual leadership of the party. And yeah, so this is something that, again, when I now in talks, I just walk people through the three branches of government in this way and show them this, show them these facts in a really direct way in the book. This is not something that I did. If I do,

an updated and revised edition down the line. Uh, that's, that's another example of a, of an adjustment that I'd probably make to, to help people see this point, uh,

about a little bit more clear about the overwhelming political influence of symbolic capitalists in contemporary society. Well, now that our listeners have the translation key or the key code to your book, and we've gone through a conversation, we've had a lot of fun, and we definitely haven't had enough time. It's the perfect moment for them to go look for your book. Yeah. Bookshop, Amazon, any of those kinds of

sites. It should be available in your local bookstore. It's got pretty wide distribution. It's available as a PDF. It's available in hardcover. There's an audio version narrated by me. Yeah, so however you consume books. Again, thank you so much for coming on the show today. It was a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for tuning in on today's episode of Madison's Notes. If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to like, share, and subscribe on all major podcast platforms. You can also find us on social media under the James Madison Program. Madison's Notes is researched, produced, edited, engineered, and hosted by yours truly. And my name is Laura Laurent. Thank you for tuning in on this week's episode.