What’s the matter with America, an infinite series

Pretty interesting electoral post-mortem here, with the young sociologist Musa al-Gharbi:

Al-Gharbi is hardly a professional campaign adviser; he doesn’t even vote. Still, in this season of Democratic friendly fire, as the socialists urge the Party to the left and the moderates counsel a tack to the center, he is telling a sweeping story about how both factions may be partially correct. “On economic issues, I see no reason for Democrats to moderate—if anything, they have more room to run to the left,” he told me. “Redistribution, expanding health care—these things are incredibly popular. There’s no reason they can’t combine that with a shift toward the median voter on things like immigration. I don’t think they will, but they could.”

This synthesis, in broad strokes, is not unique to al-Gharbi. Elements of his analysis overlap with those of Timothy Shenk, Michael Lind, Barbara Ehrenreich, and John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, and many others (including a few elected Democrats, such as Representative Ro Khanna and Senator Chris Murphy). Among the one-word explanations currently on offer for what has gone wrong with the Democrats, al-Gharbi’s choice would probably be “wokeness”; but his understanding of the word is not, as is often the case, warped by whichever blue-haired zillennial or overbearing Bluesky post happened to annoy him most recently. His account is granular enough to fill a data-heavy book, published, in October, by Princeton University Press, called “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.” Al-Gharbi identifies three previous “Great Awokenings”—beginning in the early nineteen-thirties, the late sixties, and the late eighties—and argues, counterintuitively, that the most recent one began around 2010 and ended, or at least started ending, in 2021. Instead of defining the term succinctly, he offers a list of “views that seem to be discursively associated with ‘wokeness,’ ” such as a “focus on identity, subjectivity, and lived experience.” He is harshly critical of performative wokeness (“my covert narcissism I disguise as altruism,” as Taylor Swift puts it), but not of its putative goals. “The core idea behind intersectionality,” he concedes, “seems both important and fairly uncontroversial.” His problem with the bulk of social-justice discourse, he told me, is “not that symbolic capitalists are calling for too much justice but that we do so in ways that are counterproductive.”

The book is more diagnostic than prescriptive, and, when I asked al-Gharbi about his policy recommendations, he tried to remain above the fray. “In some cases, we may have to accept the possibility that the things we’ve been advocating for actually suck,” he said, but he declined to specify which things he had in mind. Put simply, he seems to be advocating a kind of Sanders-Pelosi synthesis: a Democratic message that would be aggressive on economic populism but less maximalist on cultural issues. Again, al-Gharbi is hardly alone in this; throughout this post-mortem season, one of the most common refrains has been that, for the Democratic Party to be competitive, it must reject the vanguardist demands of the cultural left, such as decriminalizing border crossings or funding surgery for transgender inmates. For years, “popularists” within the Party have made a similar argument, asserting that normal voters don’t like proposals such as defunding the police and replacing the words “Latino” and “Latina” with “Latinx,” and that, as the salience of such ideas starts to rise, support for Democrats tends to fall.

I know it’s not the kind of thing that should matter, but I don’t know any Hispanics or Latinos who don’t find the term “Latinx” somewhere between mildly and extremely off-putting. I’m trying to find an analogy, and all I can come up with is if a bunch of upper class white gentiles started telling Jewish people with names like Goldman that they should really call themselves Goldperson, because of the patriarchy. (I didn’t say it was a good analogy).

This is all related to how so much of contemporary politics is about various basically aesthetic attractions and aversions, which is a subject for another post. But I think it’s fair to say that political aesthetics are working against the Democrats right now, and al-Gharbi’s critique captures some of that.