Elite Gatekeepers

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Musa al-Gharbi: I talk about this a little bit in the book, the purpose of a school like Columbia, they’re not just elite schools, they’re schools for elites. They choose, and it’s not a secret, that schools like these basically select who gets to be congresspeople, senators, presidents, Supreme Court justices, they overwhelmingly hail from the small number of schools.

80 percent of tenure track professors come from the top 20 percent of schools.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by Emma Varvaloucas, the executive director of The Progress Network. And What Could Go Right? is our weekly podcast where we try to look at the world through the lens of not what could go wrong, which seems to be the lens that predominates how we view the world, we collectively, but instead, see what else we could be looking at that we are missing. So we’re going to look today a little bit at politics, at the commentariat, at culture, at race, and in academia, a often toxic stew of things that have combined particularly in 2024, very problematically to say the least. But we’re going to talk to someone today who I think has unique views, and I really do mean unique views in a way that both Emma and I found enlightening.

So Emma, who are we gonna talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: Today we’re gonna talk to Musa al-Gharbi. He is a fellow in sociology at Columbia University. And just broadly speaking, his research explores how we think about, talk about and produce knowledge about social phenomena. So everything from race to inequality, to social movements, national security, etc, etc.

So he writes about lots of different things. He’s been published in basically every publication you can think of. So we’re going to also be talking to him today about his new book. I think it’s his first book that’s coming out in the fall. And it’s called, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

So we’re going to talk to him a bit about that today, but also just kind of be spitballing generally about his work. Ready, Zachary?

Zachary Karabell: Let’s do it. It’s a pleasure to have you with us today, Musa. I wanted to start with an article you wrote, the way you looked at coverage of Donald Trump in 2017 and the word choice and the word use. And I know this is something you are particularly focused on in your work, right? How we talk about things, literally, linguistically, like what words we choose, that there was kind of an assumption of word choice or an assumption of how he was discussed that completely colored the ability of people, particularly in 2016, to gauge his support.

Explain that a little more.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: Because it’s obviously relevant in 2024 as well.

Musa al-Gharbi: A lot of my research, as you noted, is kind of focused on how people talk about, think about, kind of produce a shared understanding of different social phenomena, including things like U. S. political elections. And so I’ve done a few pieces on how scholars and journalists try to understand Trump and the Trump phenomenon.

One of them, for instance, I showed that just the level of discussion about Donald Trump was unlike any candidate in modern history, as far back as the empirical record goes, as far as the newspaper corpus I have going back to the 70s. For instance, in 2018, Trump was the number three most used word in all of the New York Times, excluding like, and, the, but, or.

The average New York Times article mentioned Trump directly one to two times and then indirectly another two to three times like commander in chief. And this was a corpus that included everything, weather, sports, drama, you name it, included everything published by the New York Times. And so it was clear that Trump had become kind of a lens through which people interpret reality during that period, a kind of frame through which all other stories were filtered, in a way that was probably not helpful for our sanity or for understanding the social world and so on. Both scholars and journalists, pretty early on, were committed to the idea that the only way that someone could support Donald Trump is if there’s something wrong with them.

In particular, we as journalists and academics seized on a handful of narratives, namely Trump voters are racist, they’re sexist, and so forth. And this actually, because we were locked into these analytic frames pretty early on, it actually made it difficult for us to see data that were right in front of our face that really complicate that story a lot.

So for instance, in 2016, white turnout was stagnant. So Trump didn’t spur a bunch of whites to come to the ballot box to defend white supremacy or something like that. There was not an increase in white turnout. And Trump actually got a smaller share of the white vote than Mitt Romney did. So white turnout was stagnant.

He didn’t do exceptionally well with white people. In fact, the reason he was able to win in 2016 was because he gained a larger share of the Black vote than Mitt Romney did, a larger share of the Hispanic vote, a larger share of the Asian vote. And unfortunately, not only were people unable to perceive this in the 2016 election cycle, because again, they were just convinced that the only way he could have won was white supremacy, people didn’t learn a lot from the election, from that election, to see, as I showed in some of my other work around that time, this trend of attrition among non whites away from the Democratic Party was something that actually started in about 2010. So it had been going on for actually multiple midterm and general election cycles before the 2016 election.

2016 was just the first race where it changed the outcome of the race. But it was something that journalists had a hard time understanding because we were locked into the idea that Trump is racist. And then in 2018 and 2020, you saw the same trends. So in 2018, Republicans held their margins with African Americans, with Asians, with Hispanics.

The reasons why Democrats saw big gains was because of attrition among white voters. So especially highly educated urban and suburban white voters moved away from the Republican Party. And again, it’s hard to reconcile Trump and the Republicans maintaining their hold with non whites, even as they lose support with whites, with the idea that what’s fueling Trump is just racism and white supremacy.

And then in the 2020 election, the Republicans actually got a larger share of the Black vote, including among Black women, a larger share of the Hispanic vote, including among Hispanic women, and a larger share of the Asian vote. And the reason Joe Biden was able to win was because of shifts among whites, again, of white men in particular, moving away from the Republican Party.

And so there’s this, these analytic frames that we locked into pretty early on for Trump’s candidacy have done a poor job of explaining pretty much anything that’s happened over the last, what’s coming up on, over the last eight years. In the midterms in 2022, Democrats continued to see attrition with non whites and so on and so forth.

They haven’t been predictive. And so, one of the things that happens is we end up with these really kind of tortured stories to try to stick to the script that they’re already committed to. So, for instance, one of the ways that some analysts have tried to reconcile the fact that Republicans have been seeing growing support among non whites or that Democrats have been losing support among non whites has been to argue that those voters must be multiracially white. So they’re actually not minorities. If they’re voting for Republicans, they’re just white people. And I guess if you just redefine everyone who’s not voting Democrat as white, then you can stick with the narrative that Democrats are doing fine with non whites, but that’s not a good way of understanding reality, in my opinion.

And, uh, so this has been one of the challenges over the, over the last eight years since Donald Trump has been on the political scene, it’s that a lot of us in the media and journalism, because we’re really locked into the frame that no one can vote for this guy unless there’s something wrong with them. And we have very specific ideas of what’s wrong with those people.

Then it’s really hard for us to understand what’s been going on.

Emma Varvaloucas: Let’s take your argument as fact, right? That that’s the wrong framework in which to understand the Trump voter phenomenon. I feel like this question leads very squarely into your recent work and into your book that’s coming out in the fall.

What is the proper framework for understanding the trends that you just described?

Musa al-Gharbi: One of the core divides, one of the things I show in, as you know, I have a book coming out, We Have Never Been Woke: the Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, it’s coming out with Princeton University Press, and then I have a follow up book that I have, that I’m currently working on, and both of those books and a lot of my other work, one of the things that I argue is that, basically, what’s the core divide in America today that subsumes a lot of the others?

If you want to understand things like the urban rural divide, or the growing gender divide in politics, or the diploma divide, or growing tensions over, quote, identity politics or the rise of Trump and other populist leaders, the core divide that explains all of those, those are fronts or other ways of describing the more fundamental schism in American society today, which is between people who are knowledge economy professionals or associated with knowledge economy industries, so people who work in fields like academia, tech, finance, people who have jobs where they’re manipulating symbols and data and ideas instead of providing physical goods and services to people.

So it’s people who work in these kinds of industries and live in major metropolitan hubs that house these kinds of industries versus people who are sociologically distant from us, people who live in small towns and rural areas, people who have jobs where they’re providing physical goods and services to people, and so on and so forth.

And people who feel left out or excluded, who feel like they’re the losers in the knowledge economy, those are kind of the core battle lines that we see in Americans today that actually explain, subsume, as a kind of master frame that explains the urban rural divide, the gender divide, the diploma divide, and all of these other kinds of ways of conceptualizing what this struggle is, can be kind of housed within this broader framework that I think is actually the main thing that’s going on.

Zachary Karabell: I wonder if you’ve done any work or whether you can speculate if there is a aspect of a global phenomenon of focusing on central power, meaning it seemed to me that one of the aspects, unexpected aspects, kind of digital social media commentary at age, when it comes to political commentary, is a massive acceleration of the tendency to focus entirely on the center and a few figures in the center, like kind of a game or a narrative or sports.

And so that the British Prime Minister, the individual, you know, whether it’s Boris Johnson, or Macron in France, or Modi in India, or Xi in China, becomes part of the whole fame matrix, and then, as a proxy for talking about issues, we just talk about that individual. So I wonder if there’s also a global phenomenon here, not just a Trump one, even though it may be particularly acute with the Trump phenomenon.

Musa al-Gharbi: That’s a really interesting question. There is some data that kind of gets at that indirectly, that’s a question that’s going to be probably kind of haunting my brain, and I’ll probably do some more, okay, people who are part of the symbolic professions are especially likely to have peculiar psychological tendencies, in particular, we tend to be especially characteristically weird, which is an acronym that was invented by anthropologist Joseph Henrich, which stands for Western highly Educated Industrial Rich Democratic, so it turns out that people who live in societies like that.

Zachary Karabell: He wrote a whole book about this, right? About the weirdest people.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. A very long book.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a, it’s a tome. It’s a weighty book.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Musa al-Gharbi: But very readable. I recommend it. So what he shows in his research is that people who live in these societies, in weird societies and cultures, have psychological dispositions that are very different from those of most others.

One of the ways in which we vary from most others is that we tend to focus a lot more on central actors. And a lot more on people’s personality and dispositions when we try to differentiate ourselves from others. So we focus a lot more on like individuals and charisma and the psychological states of people and all that kind of stuff.

And one thing that’s interesting that I show in my Substack essay is that for a whole range of reasons, The knowledge professions, not just in the United States, but around the world, so people who work in fields like academia, journalism, and so on, characteristically are especially weird. We’re the weirdest of the weird.

We’re like super weird. And this is true, again, even in the international market, in international context. And then a second trend that we’ve seen in the United States, for instance, we’ve seen an increasing nationalization of the media. So a lot of local media has been getting either closed or acquired by major national or even sometimes multinational conglomerates. It’s really like local news coverage in many areas. It’s basically non existent today. And instead, the focus is almost exclusively on national figures, on national races, on national politics, a lot of our news organizations that focus on kind of national sphere do tend to hone in very specifically on a narrow range of figures, both because it’s easier than reporting on the hundreds of members of Congress or whatever, if you just focus on five central actors, plus the president, that’s a lot easier to fold into bite sized two minute clips or whatever. You do see this kind of nationalization of politics that’s driven by the fact that the media itself. It’s growing increasingly nationalized in the sense that it’s just kind of focused in these major urban hubs that focuses on big national news stories instead of local ones.

So that kind of feeds into the intense focus on a small number of central actors, and you do see similar processes to that unfolding in the UK, I know, and in France, I’ve seen research that points to similar trends, at least in the UK and France, on that dimension of the kind of nationalization of news and the increasing focus on central figures. And then again, focusing on central figures is something that weird people like us are inclined to do anyway, but it’s a trend that seems to be exacerbated by the nationalization of news outlets.

Zachary Karabell: So it’s basically, we do this anyway, we’ve always personalized politics, it’s the great man question that sort of permeates western society rather than larger forces and trends, right?

Or, I mean, that’s a debate that is unresolved and will remain eternally unresolved. And then that’s accelerated by these sort of more recent trends, collapse of local news combined with, I guess, the clickability of a name versus an idea.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, that’s my intuitive answer. But again, that’s going to be a question that sticks in my cross.

I’ll probably end up doing a deeper dive into that in the future.

Zachary Karabell: I mean, I only raise these things because Americans in particular are more prone to look at what’s going on in our own ecosystem as particular or peculiar to us, exceptional or really bad, as opposed to recognizing that we do live in this kind of global ecosystem, and it may be that things that we are seeing within our own world actually have equal manifestations throughout the world, so.

Musa al-Gharbi: Absolutely. Well, and then one of the things I highlight in my book, too, is there is a tendency, and especially in media, and sometimes distressingly in academia as well, where people tend to view the current moment as somehow really extraordinary or unprecedented. And in many cases, there are strong historical precedents.

And so for instance, one of the things I highlight in chapter two of We Have Never Been Woke, is that after 2010, by a lot of measures, there is this rapid shift in how knowledge economy professionals think and talk about social justice issues. You can see this in things like shifts in media outputs, shifts in academic publications, shifts in how knowledge economy professionals vote, the kinds of express attitudes we give in polls and surveys.

By a number of other metrics, there was a big change that was unique to us and started after 2010 and went through 2020. One thing that’s striking though, is looking at those same measures, we can see that actually the shift after 2010, this great awokening, as some have called it, is actually a case of something.

It’s actually not the first, and as I show in the book, if you look at the 20th century, there were three previous periods, similar periods of awokening. There was one in the 1920s to early 30s, one in the mid 60s through the early 70s, one in the late 80s to early 90s, and then the one that started after it.

And taking this longer view, understanding that this is a case of something, allows us to get a different kind of analytical leverage on it. We can ask ourselves questions, for instance, like, Under what circumstances do these moments of awokening come about? When and why do they fade? How does one influence the next, or does it?

What’s the kind of impact, the long term impact of these moments of increased concern and activism around social justice? But to the extent that we kind of focus on the current moment as novel, and we kind of are really locked into this idea that What’s happening right now has never happened before.

It’s actually kind of difficult to get leverage on some of those types of questions.

Emma Varvaloucas: Musa, I would love to ask your own questions back at you right now because I’m kind of dying to hear the answers about what are the causes and conditions that lead to these great awokenings. This is the first time, by the way, I’ve ever heard someone say that this has happened previously in American history, so that’s fascinating.

And also the impact and when and how they fade.

Musa al-Gharbi: So, chapter two of the book goes into this in a deep dive, but the nutshell version, the kind of core factor, the number one driver, is that they tend to occur in moments of what you might call elite overproduction. That’s a term that was coined by Jack Goldsmith and Peter Turchin, and it refers to a scenario where societies are producing a lot more people who view themselves as entitled to kind of an elite lifestyle, who feel like they’re doing everything right. They went to school in the American knowledge economy context, for instance, it would be people who worked hard. They went to school, they got good grades. They graduated from college and they went to even a good college, but then they find themselves unable to get the kind of job that they think that they’re entitled to or enjoy the kind of lifestyle that they maybe experienced themselves growing up or that they had hoped to provide for their own families.

These moments of elite overproduction, when you have growing numbers of these elite aspirants who can’t be absorbed into the power structure. It’s kind of the core element that is sort of the number one thing that drives it, but the problem is elite overproduction itself can’t explain why they happen when they do, in part because there’s a counter cyclical relationship between the fortunes of elites. Elites here are construed broadly, not just, you know, Jeff Bezos or whatever. The top 20 percent or so of society.

So there’s a kind of counter cyclical relationship between elites and, I guess you could say everybody else. Whereas times that are kind of lean for elites tend to be pretty good times for everyone else, and times that are really good for everyone else tend to be kind of lean times for elites.

And so because there’s this counter cyclical relationship, elite overproduction, so times that are really tough for elites, typically it’s hard to get much action, it’s hard to get anyone else to care. Most other people are doing fine, no one’s going to be breaking out their fiddle about the poor elites who are struggling to reproduce their elite lifestyles and so on and so forth.

Okay. But there are some moments, there are moments when these trajectories are collapsed. So instead of being counter cyclical, they actually kind of collapse together where things have been kind of tough and growing worse for ordinary people for a while. And then all of a sudden they’re bad for elites too.

Those are the moments when awokenings tend to happen. The most recent one was kicked off by the 2010, by the global financial crisis. And you can see at the beginning of the awokening would be what’s now known as the Occupy Wall Street movement. So oftentimes people think of Occupy and the kind of identitarian movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too and things like this as being competitors, there’s even kind of weird conspiratorial claims.

People like Vivek Ramaswamy, who wrote a book called Woke Inc., which basically insinuated in a way that millionaires and billionaires kind of cooked up identitarian stuff as a way of distracting from the broad based movement that was Occupy Wall Street. But as I show in the book, when you look at who participated in Occupy Wall Street, it’s actually the same people who were leading the charge for the resistance movements, for the March of Science, for the Black Lives Matter, for all of these movements.

It’s the same strata of society. It’s mostly highly educated, liberal identifying people who live in major knowledge economy hubs and who are associated with the knowledge professions. It’s been basically 10 years of activism among us.

Zachary Karabell: So I want to shift gears a little, push you a little bit on something you wrote about the protests at Columbia in the spring.

And I mean, there was a pull quote from an article you wrote. You said something basically that one of the core missions of Columbia University and presumably any elite university is the sort of continuation and promulgation of inequality. And I know you’ve written a lot about inequality. I mean, that strikes me as a bit unfair.

In that one could say that there’s a systemic inequality that exists within society partly based on kind of elite distinction degrees, you know, commentary, and there’s a lot of other core missions of which actual teaching and education and knowledge and self actualization and having fun. I mean, you could go down a list of which inequality would be part of that list, but you said it was core and I want to push you on that.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, I think it’s definitely the case that places like Columbia have, for instance, really good scholars and they do a lot of important research. In fact, being associated with a school like Columbia is something that actually helps you publish your research at all. People who work at Tier 3 schools or something, there’s a lot of research showing that there’s publication bias in journals and stuff like this.

So even people who produce good research at tier three schools, they might as well be screaming into a vacuum. They’re not going to get published in the top journals because there’s a strong prestige bias. Even the elite, even the good high quality scholarship that happens at Columbia and other institutions like this, the kind of really important central field shaping scholarship that happens at these universities is itself part of what justifies hiring and promoting graduates of Columbia University in a way that, that’s different from everyone else, giving them higher salaries and pay, giving them higher prestige because they were surrounded by these excellent scholars. So that’s why they deserve to be. If you look at the actual demands at a school like Columbia, the grading is actually a lot softer.

Basically, grade inflation is extreme at schools like Columbia compared to everyone else, because parents aren’t paying $90, 000 a year for their kids to get Cs. So the kids aren’t actually pushed in the same way that they would be if they went to their local university. They’re not held to account. In fact, one of the things that was striking for me as someone who’s taught before at University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, a number of other institutions, one of the big differences, uh, University of Arizona, for instance, if I would give a kid a C, the student would be like, Oh, I got a lower grade than I wanted. What can I do to improve? What did I miss? How can I get better? What can I do? Okay. You give a Columbia student a C, they’re like, what’s wrong with you? Such that I got this bad grade. And oftentimes they’ll fold in third party administrators and other people to kind of boost their grades.

I had one student who was caught red handed cheating and he tried to get his well connected father to email me to make the whole thing go away. Like wild stuff, wild. But even in the absence of that, the grading is just not hard at Columbia and other elite schools. It’s definitely the case that you have higher quality professors there as judged by things like their impact factors and things like this, but the students themselves are not actually held to a much higher standard, but the perception that they are, because these are centers of academic greatness, it actually allows the rich kids to go on and get, especially while playing prestigious jobs in knowledge economy firms, even though they’re actually not working as hard. You have to work really hard to get into a school like Columbia. Here’s the tension. But once you get into Columbia, it’s actually not that hard to graduate with straight A’s.

But to get into Columbia is a relentless rat race that people increasingly start in kindergarten, where, you know, you have to work really hard, you have to be really disciplined, really focused, you have to get all the extracurriculars, you have to make sure you get straight A’s. I talk about this a little bit in the book, though, about the purpose of a school like Columbia.

They’re not just elite schools, they’re schools for elites. One of their main functions is they choose, and it’s not a secret, that schools like these basically select who gets to be congresspeople. For instance, if you look at senators, presidents, supreme court justices, they overwhelmingly hail from the small number of schools.

These schools choose who gets to be professors. 80 percent of tenure track professors come from the top 20 percent of schools. These schools choose. Same thing if you want to work at a firm like McKinsey and you graduated from University of North Dakota, good luck. It’s never going to happen. You have to come from Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and so on and so forth.

So these schools basically determine who gets to be an elite and who doesn’t. And so for this reason, students from non advantaged backgrounds who get into these schools cry, they often cry, you see videos of them crying. The reason why they’re crying is because they understand that they just punched a ticket to a different life.

That just being associated with this school creates opportunities for them that they wouldn’t have had. Irrespective of how they perform afterwards, if they get a degree from Columbia, it doesn’t matter what the degree is in, it doesn’t matter really what their GPA is in, most people who get degrees work in jobs that don’t actually require the formal training they got at university and often unrelated to that.

What matters is you have the degree and you have the brand name of the degree and the same thing, students from well off backgrounds who get into schools like Columbia and Yale have a similarly emotional reaction because they understand that achieving that kind of a milestone is an important step in reproducing their class position or realizing the dreams that they have.

And so I think this is one of the main things. And so they do other things. They do world class scholarship. They bring in fancy academics and all of this, but even the fancy academics and the world class scholarship, one, the part of the reason why they enjoy the kind of publication advantages they have are because journals basically lock out people from mid tier and low level schools, especially flagship journals. And then two, they have a ton of resources, so they can just hire a bunch of TAs and RAs to do all the grunt work, and they can just sit around churning out publications. I mean, I published nine articles while I was in grad school at Columbia.

There are not many students at land grant universities cranking out nine peer reviewed journal articles while they’re in PhD programs. And the reason I was able to do that is because while I was at Columbia University, I just had to TA one class a semester with a cap typically of 30 students that I was responsible for as a TA, whereas at other schools, you have to just full on teach multiple classes, often with 80 students per class in the course of your PhD program. So my workload was very low relative to other students. And in fact, I even bought myself out of that by raising external money. So if you look at my resume, you go, Oh, wow, look how productive he is. He’s such a hard worker. He’s so smart and brilliant. And it’s like, Oh, I had time to just sit around and crank out papers because I’m at Columbia University. That’s not the way it goes at other places.

News Clip: What these colleges have, uh, understood and articulated is that legacy admissions provides an unfair advantage to students, to applicants from families who are well heeled, well off, and in many cases, they don’t otherwise meet the academic, um, standards for admission.

I’ll add one other thing. At Harvard, what the data found is that, uh, applicants are six times more likely. to gain admission, uh, to Harvard via the legacy applicant pool than they were if they were ordinary, uh, ordinary applicants.

Emma Varvaloucas: Musa, I’ll back you up on that and I’ll just tell a quick story that opened my eyes to this about universities being less about educating people and more about gatekeeping.

My partner applied for a course at the University of Amsterdam here in the Netherlands. He’s a blue collar guy. He doesn’t have a BA. The course was open, right? The course was not at all clear that you needed to have a BA or an MA or a PhD or anything. It was paid. Open to the public. He did, you know, the mission essay, he paid the fee, and then they told him, like, hey, you can’t take this, you don’t have a BA.

And it’s just like, well, what’s the purpose of this course, then, is the purpose of this course, which is open to the public, it’s open to non University of Amsterdam students that you are paying to take. You know, he told them, I don’t need the credits, I just want to, like, I want to be educated, right? They were uninterested.

So, yeah, I found that, like, kind of shocking, to tell you the truth, but maybe I’m just naive.

Musa al-Gharbi: Most people who have college degrees, even like, for instance, most STEM graduates don’t work in STEM fields. The specific degree they have and the specific book knowledge that they got out of the course of their degree, isn’t super relevant.

Most of what you learn, you learn on the job. So for a lot of these jobs, there’s actually not a good reason, there’s not like a real practical reason why you couldn’t just open the job up to people who don’t have degrees. The purpose of the degrees is basically to make sure that the jobs go to the right kind of people.

And the problem with that kind of filtering, filtering in that way, is that if you have a job that you create a degree requirement when you don’t need to, when they’re not actually going to be using specialized knowledge, where you’ll take someone who has a degree in engineering, or who has a degree in art, or who has a degree in sociology, you’ll take all of those degrees equally as long as it’s a degree, when you create that kind of a degree requirement, a generic degree requirement, in the United States for instance, a job that requires, that extraneously requires a college degree, put of the gate locks out 85 percent of African Americans, locks out 90 percent of Hispanics, locks out huge shares and even larger shares of people of lower income or working class backgrounds.

These kinds of extraneous degree requirements are things that help protect jobs for children of relatively advantaged backgrounds, and they have the pernicious effect of exacerbating and reinforcing inequalities, and often not for, like, good meritocratic reasons. The kind of book knowledge that people get in school is not actually what they’re filtering for for the degrees, because they often don’t really care what you learned.

They care that you completed the degree, and they care where you got the degree from, and maybe they look at your GPA.

Zachary Karabell: I think part of the problem in all this is where you fall in a classical Marxist universe. I don’t mean Marxist in terms of political systems. I mean, we had a great conversation with Freddie DeBoer a while back. Do you ascribe intent to systems that have clear outcomes versus do these systems evolve messily and produce certain outcomes that many people even who are the beneficiaries of it would admit are not societally optimal, even potentially for the people who are optimized, but it’s really difficult to change systems.

I certainly experienced with my own children and I am, you know, science healed and delivered part of the problem. If by problem you mean product of elite education, utilize credentials advantageously compared to X number of people who don’t have them, and have perpetuated that in both marriage and children, right?

All check, check, check, check, check, if what you believe is that these are self perpetuating systems that essentially benefit the people who are products of them. But a lot of companies who are founded by and staffed by the same people have been pounding the table saying, We need a different credentialing system than a four year college degree. This is ludicrous. It’s an unnecessary tax on a lot of people who could otherwise obtain skills and get a job. You’ve had companies like Google saying, hey, wait a minute, you know, this is an ineffective way to create lots of people who are prepared and skilled to do lots of different jobs. But it’s still really hard to change systems, you know, meaning we are all sort of born into an ecosystem that we would probably not choose if we had the freedom to be tabula rasa about x, y, and z, but we don’t. It’s part of this conversation of here we are in the systems we’re in. Do you ascribe conscious intent to those systems or not? And, you know, I think in your work, you may be more likely to ascribe some intent to them because they clearly have outcomes that are observable.

If enough people found those outcomes that are observable, completely untenable, like slavery, we would do something about them rather than defend them, right?

Musa al-Gharbi: Yeah, I mean, my approach is actually an approach that’s less fashionable in sociology today. I mostly just focus on a functionalist approach, so I mostly just focus on, like, how do these systems work? What do they do? What do they actually do? Whose benefits do they serve in practice? Without worrying so much about the intent question. For instance, in We Have Never Been Woke, and most of my other work, I emphasize that people who say they’re committed to social justice and things like this, they’re not. I believe them.

I interact with them. I interact with them every day. I have no doubt. Like, I don’t think they’re being cynical or insincere. I show how people often, like, instrumentalize social justice discourse in the service of their own ends. They leverage it in ways to benefit themselves. For instance, one of the practical functions that social justice discourse serves today, ironically, is it helps justify why the losers in the knowledge economy deserve to lose and why the winners deserve to have their power and influence.

So, those people in flyover country, for instance, deserve their poverty because they’re a bunch of racists, sexists, authoritarians, those people who live in Trump country. Who are the losers in the knowledge economy? In fact, they have more than they deserve. If they’re suffering, good, they deserve to be suffering.

If they’re marginalized, good, we don’t need to hear them. They have nothing to say that’s of value. And so on and so forth. So these kinds of social justice discourses are ironically used to justify and legitimize the distribution of inequality. Okay, so that’s a functionalist statement. And oftentimes, what happens, especially in journalism and social science and things like this, there’s this assumed dichotomy, where either someone is being sincere and earnest, or they’re being kind of cynical people who are kind of using some discourse to their advantage.

Okay. In truth, I don’t think that thinking of these as mutually exclusive, being sincerely committed to some idea, versus using it for your advantage. I think viewing those things as distinct and competing is a bad way to think about thinking and truths. If we have an incentive to believe something, if we have an incentive to have other people believe that thing, that actually makes it more likely that we’re going to believe it, that we’re going to believe it really sincerely, genuinely believe it. The idea that people use something in a way that advantages them doesn’t mean that they’re being cynical or insincere. They’re overwhelmingly sincere. I have no doubt about anyone’s sincerity, the other goals that we have that are unrelated to egalitarianism or whatever, can color or influence the ways that we pursue those goals.

So we choose to pursue social justice and talk about social justice. We often think about social justice, for instance, in ways that justify why we deserve to have power and why those people don’t. That’s not the only way that we could do that, but that’s the way that we’re pulled to, kind of intuitively pulled to do that.

But that doesn’t mean that we’re being cynical or insincere.

Emma Varvaloucas: There’s less about intent and more, I kind of hear you saying is that there’s the absence, and you’ve written about this, of reflexivity, right? Like I, as someone who is very much so a knowledge economy worker, and I’m in a relationship with someone who’s blue collar, and it’s exactly what you’re saying.

When you merge these two, like, cultural worlds, the problem is, somebody who’s blue collar doesn’t say the things that you’re supposed to say as a knowledge economy worker and they don’t think the ways that you’re supposed to think and I was actually, like, honestly, again, like, very surprised to not only realize that dating someone, like, cross culturally, quote unquote, like that, how much upstream you have to swim, not only with the people around you, but also internally.

That brings me to a question I want to ask you, Musa, because I would like to talk about your personal story a little bit. You are in the knowledge economy, right? But you are obviously extremely reflexive about all of this. You’re obviously thinking very deeply about all of this. Where does that come from?

Musa al-Gharbi: I was a non traditional Ivy League student, so you know, I came from a small town in Arizona from a military family going back for generations. I had a whole life before I started trying to become a fancy nerd. When I started my BA, for instance, I was a good 10 years older than most of the other students.

I had already had a wife, I had kids, I had… I was working in the private sector most of the time that I was going to school because I had a family to support, including all the way through my PhD program, I was working on the side. So coming to Columbia, especially in 2016, I moved from the small military town where I’d lived basically my whole life to the Upper West Side of Manhattan to go to an Ivy League school.

I started at a community college, and so it was kind of this cultural whiplash, and I arrived at Columbia just right before Donald Trump got elected, so I went from this, like, decisively red military community in southern Arizona to this, like, overwhelmingly blue community at this moment of profound cultural unrest, and so it was kind of culture shocky that way.

My first plan in life was to be a priest. I was really interested in a lot of these questions about faith and the meaning of life and the nature of it. And then after I went through multiple iterations of religious belief and other things like this, I ended up translating a lot of these interests into more general kinds of questions about, you know, what do we know in virtue of what?

Zachary Karabell: You just picked a different guild. Instead of the priesthood, you did the professoriate.

Musa al-Gharbi: Yes, a secular priest. Absolutely. It’s a combination, I think, of these kinds of longstanding questions that have kind of haunted me for most of my life, paired with just being a fish out of water. This thing you noted about your boyfriend or your husband?

Emma Varvaloucas: Boyfriend. Yeah, we’re not married, no.

Musa al-Gharbi: One function that wokeness or social justice discourse serves in practice is that it does help signal, like, kind of who’s part of the in group and who’s not, who knows the right things to say at the right time in response to various cues, who uses the right language, marginalized people, does serve this function in practice.

Again, maybe not by intent, but from a functional perspective, one thing that it does is it signals to everyone, if you’re highly educated or not, if you’re from an affluent background. In fact, there’s a great study looking at which students were most likely to talk about overcoming disadvantage based on race, gender, sexuality, and so on in their college admissions essays, turns out that the students who are most likely to talk about this, overcoming these, hell, these kind of heroic bootstrapping accounts of striving in the face of disadvantage and stuff like this, are students who come from families that earn 100, 000 a year or more, relatively affluent students.

When you make the criteria of getting into or getting scholarships, or when you make the criteria for a lot of these things, being able to tell these heroic, bootstrapping stories about coming up from disadvantage and all of that, ironically, you stack the deck in favor of elites. It’s elites who know how to tell the right kind of story there that’s gonna resonate with elite gatekeepers.

A lot of people from less advantaged backgrounds are often ashamed of talking about some of the things they’ve gone through. They don’t think it would be to their advantage, actually, to tell, like, poverty porn stories or disadvantage. Or to the extent that they talk about having overcome disadvantages, they talk about lucky breaks for all of the people who helped them along their way, instead of talking about how, as a result of their grit and, you know, telling the kind of bootstrapping story that the gatekeepers want to hear.

And so, yeah, the kind of people who know how to tell that story to know what the gatekeepers expect to tell the kind of overcoming disadvantaged story that is actually useful, ironically, are going to be kids from pretty advantaged backgrounds.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s so funny you say that because when I was helping my boyfriend with his University of Amsterdam admission paper, I was like, you should tell them your story.

And he was like, absolutely not. It didn’t get in there. And he was rejected.

Zachary Karabell: So, Musa, we’re nearing the end of a conversation that I have no interest in nearing the end of, but I do want to ask you one more in the weeds conversation, and I suppose a challenging one, which is, you have this incredible ability to make really cogent observations about what’s going on in society, the kind of, you know, many points in this conversation, really kind of counterintuitive, forcing us to look at some of our ingrained assumptions, but you’re also embedded in an academic profession, and by virtue of that, a lot of the work that you’ve published, separate from your substack and your kind of professional work is, and I’m saying this supportively as an ex academic, reformed academic, impenetrable unless you’re a sociologist.

You know, you use a lot of jargon, you do what’s necessary to be published and respected within a field that has jargon and methodologies that are ingrained that I’m sure as a sociologist you would acknowledge are signalers to the profession that you are capable, qualified, and able to be, you know, a certified sociologist.

First of all, I guess my question is, why bother? I mean, is it because you feel academia is a legitimately important perch for which to do a lot of the work that you think is societally important, as opposed to just being a guy writing this stuff, like, and look, I am guilty as charged. I’ve obtained these credentials, similar credentials, in part because I thought I needed them in order to say what I wanted to say.

Like, I needed the imprimatur. Otherwise, I’d just be like, who’s this guy? I was very frustrated with the jargon part of it, and not as comfortable, maybe clearly not as comfortable as you, and this is why I never succeeded as an academic, in kind of doing the two tracks, right? There’s the stuff I had to write in order to gain the professional, I mean, I got the PhD, but I wasn’t able to, I decided not to be a professor.

Anyway, I’m just curious about, like, how you manage that. Is it, like, once you get tenure, you’re just gonna say, well, screw it, I’m just gonna write what I want to write. Or do you feel there’s real virtue within the kind of the methodologies of a field of which jargon simply is a shorthand way of talking to other people who are like minded?

Musa al-Gharbi: I’ve definitely been frustrated at various points by the need to demonstrate how knowledgeable you are and to do this kind of acrobatic show. In order to get a paper published, you have to do a literature review that shows that you know all of the, you know, you can’t just go into your study and findings.

You have to show that you’ve read everything else and that you’ve thought about everyone else’s thing before you talk about your thing. There’s a virtue to that in a way, like going through that exercise, at least in the background can help you kind of think about and frame what your contribution is, why your study matters, what it adds.

I think it’s important for people to do that on background. I don’t think it’s necessarily important to include that in the paper itself. All that does is increases the word count, bore people and forces you to do this kind of gymnastic exercise in front of peer reviewers. It really helps to have the kind of stamp of some of these institutions.

I think that haunts me a lot. It’s that, before I went to Columbia, I did a lot of writing for the public, but there were certain, like, prestige outlifts, like the New York Times or the Washington Post. I would pitch to them, and I wouldn’t even get a no. I was, like, below rejection. I was beneath, I was not even worthy of a no thanks.

Zachary Karabell: Below rejection.

Musa al-Gharbi: After I moved to Columbia, the New York Times reached out to me. The editors of the New York Times cold emailed me and said, Hey, would you like to write something for us? Now, it’s not because I suddenly became a magically better writer in the time it took to move from Sierra Vista, Arizona to the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

That’s purely network effects, institutional effects. You know, all the way down. That’s literally all it is. And so it really does help. It really does matter to get a P, especially if you’re interested in writing for prestige media outlets or things like that, it really does matter and help to get a degree from a school like Columbia.

Being a professor, speaking, if I’m writing on some topic as a professor at an R1 research university, which is what I’m doing now, that definitely carries a different kind of weight than if I’m just like, hey, I thought about this. I’m a guy who’s thought about this and I’ve done some reading. You should, you should check this out.

One thing that’s been great about the development of forums like Substack is they are places where, I mean, there’s a lot of professors and media folks on Substack too. It is also a forum where at least a non trivial share of people who have kind of opted out of that can actually build decent audiences and connect with people.

There is some virtue sometimes of some of these norms and traditions of academia. So for instance, for this book, I had Princeton send it to, sometimes when a press is really committed to a book, when they think it’s going to be a hit and they’re pretty committed to publishing it, they’ll send it to peer reviewers who they think are going to be sympathetic so they can check the box of peer reviewing it.

Well, without risking sabotaging this project that they really want to publish. In my case, I really encouraged Princeton to send it to people who I thought were going to be critical, and I gave them some suggestions of people who might be critical, and to their credit, they sent it to those people, and they gave me really good feedback.

Really good feedback that made the work a lot stronger, that pushed me to think about things in a way that I might not have thought about them, that made me really think about some of the ways that I had phrased things, or some of the things that I hadn’t considered. And then even in my PhD dissertation, because the book also served as my PhD dissertation, we folded into the committee Michele Lamont, who’s a sociologist at Harvard who actually does a lot of work about why some of these symbolic gestures actually matter and are important.

And so some of the arguments of my book actually sit at an awkward angle with her own work and arguments. And so folding her onto the committee, someone with this kind of adversarial perspective, she really pushed me. She pushed me a lot to think about kind of how I think about things, how I’m talking about things, to engage with different dimensions of the social world than maybe I had been initially inclined to grab at first.

And so it made the work a lot stronger. There’s a lot to criticize about peer review. So much, so much so that I could spend another hour talking about how terrible peer review is. But when it does work right, when the system does work as intended, it actually can push people to think in much richer ways and produce much stronger work than they would if I had just moved out.

In fact, last thing I’ll say on this is a kind of cautionary tale for me, and one reason why I didn’t move out of academia is I think a lot about the work of Thomas Sowell. So a lot of his early work was like, really interesting, really generative. He was a conservative. It sucks to be a conservative in academia, I’m sure.

And so at some point, he decided that he, rather than kind of dealing with mainstream gatekeeping and all of this, he moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford, so he’s off the, he’s not worried about the tenure track, he doesn’t worry about publishing in peer reviewed journals, he publishes almost exclusively white papers and papers in trade press books instead of academic things.

And to my mind, his work actually got a little weaker, though. It got weaker in part because he’s mostly speaking into an echo chamber of people who agree with him, no one’s really pushing back on him in the same way. And I think it actually, one of the big problems with a lot of left wing scholarship is that even though they’re publishing in journals, they’re basically having the Thomas Sowell at Hoover experience, where they’re basically getting softball, a lot of softball people, because almost everyone who’s reading their work and peer reviewing it already agrees with the basic arguments they’re going to make.

They share their fundamental assumptions and ways of looking at the world. Because I’m a little bit out of step with the kind of prevailing norms, that actually, ironically, it makes things a little harder for me to get published sometimes, but in a way that actually sharpens my thinking, I think, and pushes me to do better work than I otherwise would.

That’s the positive story about why I stayed in, because I think it actually does help me think in a more clear way.

Zachary Karabell: Well, Musa, I want to thank you for the conversation today. Again, you know, this is one of those that I wish we had hours and hours more to do. I mean, if we were Joe Rogan, we would be on hour one.

We are not yet doing a three and a half hour podcast. Maybe that lies in our future, but not right now, but I look forward to seeing your work, maybe we’ll circle back with you when the woke book comes out in the fall from Princeton university. And it’s been a real pleasure getting to know you a bit for the past hour.

Musa al-Gharbi: It’s been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for having me.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, thank you so much. That was a really fun conversation for me because I’ve followed Musa’s work for some time now. And I think, as you mentioned somewhere in the interview, his work is very, very serious and very, very smart. And it’s always a delight when you meet the person and realize like, wow, this guy is super ebullient, right?

Like, wow, he’s charismatic and fun.

Zachary Karabell: Do you know where you found his work?

Emma Varvaloucas: Substack? I, oh, it was over a year ago and then I started following him on Substack and then I was like, wow, like this guy is just really brilliant. And then David Brooks gave him a shout out in the New York Times and his new book not too long ago, so I think he is, has David Brooks called him a rising intellectual star?

Zachary Karabell: Yes.

Emma Varvaloucas: David Brooks could say stuff like that. I can’t, but , I can quote David Brooks. I find what he says very refreshing, I think in part because of this relationship that I’ve mentioned throughout this interview. When you are surrounded by people in the same waters, you don’t see the things that Musa is pointing out, which is that, we didn’t really get into this, but what knowledge economy workers are saying and what they’re doing are two completely different things.

Zachary Karabell: And it is, I’m glad you asked him about his own personal trajectory because he’s clearly framed by an awareness of this world, kind of what you talked about with your partner as well, thinks it’s the world.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah.

Zachary Karabell: But there are other perspectives and other ways that are radically different and often don’t make their way into the dialogue in a way that is hugely detrimental, and again, that’s why the work he did about the complete inability to, for places like the New York Times or the knowledge economy workers, to either grapple with or understand the rise of Donald Trump. Interestingly, we didn’t get into this, but that very inability to grapple with Trump’s support explains a lot of the rise of J. D. Vance, and it’s kind of interesting that, you know, Trump picks J. D. Vance, whose book, Hillbilly Elegy, in many ways was an attempt to say, to that very knowledge economy world, hey, there’s a story here that you don’t fully understand. I think maybe Musa’s background allows him to have that perspective in a way that the world that I’m living in tends to totally lose sight of.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, although I think that Hillbilly Elegy and J. D. Vance is an interesting example when it comes to Musa’s work because he, like, J. D. Vance is kind of the exemplar of class jumping and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and like look at me now and I think like a lot of Musa’s point is like most of the time that’s shut off from people and like we should be looking at the economic realities that most people are living in in the United States and also the like cultural realities and just, he talks about you know people in the United States tend to be left on the economy and right on social issues and knowledge economy workers tend to be, although they’ll say something else, but they tend to be right on the economy and left on social issues.

And I feel like J. D. Vance is kind of like a weird, he doesn’t fit into that. He’s like the guy that everyone wants to celebrate because he did something that you’re supposed to be able to do. But in reality, few people ever do that.

Zachary Karabell: Well, maybe we should have another conversation about that because that’s a whole other fascinating kind of, where are we politically with this particular dynamic?

Anyway, I did think Musa was just, it’s a brilliant conversation. It’s really interesting to take a self critical look at things that are often assumed, and I’m really looking forward to his book. So, thank you all for listening. Check out our weekly shorter Progress Report for news of the week that you may have missed.

We will be back with another interview episode. Check out theprogressnetwork.org, sign up for the newsletter, What Could Go Right? If you haven’t already, conveniently titled the same as our podcast. And please, we really do want the conversation, so send us your thoughts, your complaints, your ideas, your critiques, your suggestions, all of the above, and we will listen with an open heart and try to integrate all that, so thanks for listening.

Thanks Emma for co-hosting and we will talk to y’all next week.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks Zachary, and as always, thank you to everybody.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right is produced by the Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by the Podglomerate. To find out more about What Could Go Right, the Progress Network, or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. Thanks for listening.