Speaker

Musa al-Gharbi

Musa al-Gharbi

Sociologist and Assistant Professor at Stony Brook University, and author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite (2024), a study of the knowledge-economy professional class he calls Symbolic Capitalists and the recurring cycles of elite progressive politics — ‘Great Awokenings’ — that class produces.

Al-Gharbi’s research traces four historical episodes of elite progressive upheaval in the United States (the 1920s–30s, the mid-1960s–70s, the late 1980s–early 1990s, and the post-2010 wave that peaked around 2021), arguing each is driven by acute elite overproduction combined with a countercyclical convergence of elite and mass economic hardship, rather than by any single contingent cause specific to the most recent episode. He writes for outlets including American Affairs and Compact, and is affiliated with Heterodox Academy. Al-Gharbi is a convert to Sunni Islam — raised non-Muslim in a US military community, he moved through Catholicism and a period of unpersuaded atheism before converting roughly fifteen years before his 2024 conversation with Tyler Cowen — and describes himself as a Muslim who happens to be Black rather than a ‘Black Muslim’ in the politically mobilised, Nation of Islam sense of that term.

Core positions

  • Elite wokeness is a recurring structural pattern, not a unique event. Four historical episodes share a common cause — elite overproduction supplying motive, countercyclical elite/mass hardship supplying a mass base — despite occurring in very different media and demographic environments.
  • Symbolic capitalists are a psychologically distinctive, credential-gatekept class. Knowledge-economy professionals are more ideological, extreme, dogmatic, conscientious, and cognitively sophisticated than the general public, a profile present even outside periods of active awokening.
  • Awokening coalitions collapse from internal instability, not resolved grievances. Frustrated elite aspirants disengage once absorbed into elite institutions, while symbolic capitalists’ distinctive political style alienates the broader public base a movement needs to sustain itself.
  • Perceived civilisational difference between Islam and the West is often of recent, not ancient, vintage. Contemporary political Islam, per Olivier Roy’s thesis (which al-Gharbi endorses), is a modern phenomenon tied to 19th–20th-century capitalism, colonialism, and oil wealth rather than a fundamentalist throwback.
  • Different life experience yields complementary, not superior, insight. Al-Gharbi rejects claims that his own Black or Muslim identity gives him special epistemic access to social truths, favouring instead a ‘partially situated knowledge’ model associated with his Heterodox Academy affiliation.

In the wiki