Pun Salad

I picked this book up at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, expecting that I'd dislike it. I was pleasantly surprised. The author, Musa al-Gharbi, is an honest, sharp-eyed observer of the self-proclaimed "woke" fractious faction. And he makes a convincing case that their nostrums are ineffective at solving the problems they describe.

Briefly: the "woke" are largely "symbolic capitalists", dealing in services, ideas, and concepts, not concrete products. They are largely white, male, cishet, and extremely well-off. In any honest telling, they are an elite, holding down the commanding heights in academia, media, and (increasingly) at tech businesses. They tend to be located in geographically compact regions: Silicon Valley, New York City, Seattle, …

And, even though they "talk the talk", their walking of the walk leaves much to be desired. Their remedies do not raise up the American downtrodden, even in places, like California and New York, where they seem to have a firm grasp on political power. And (to a certain extent) this is intentional.

(I say: "they". Which is a little misleading. al-Gharbi fully admits that he's in that elite "symbolic capitalist" group. So am I, for that matter. But I've never, ever, claimed to be "woke".)

In certain spots, al-Gharbi seems to echo critiques made by us "right-wingers". He's brutal on folks like Elizabeth Warren, Jussie Smollett, Rachel Dolezal. And he quotes folks like Thomas Sowell and Bryan Caplan approvingly. (There's also a positive blurb from Tyler Cowen on the back.)

Once you get the gist of al-Gharbi's thesis, it's hard to avoid seeing confirming evidence. Do DEI efforts actually work, or are they just noisy virtue-signalling? From the February 7 WSJ: DEI Didn’t Change the Workforce All That Much. A Look at 13 Million Jobs. Subtitle: "For all the controversy that diversity programs stir up, most senior managers are still white men."

How about the notion that the Democrats have become the favored party among the well-off "symbolic capitalists", concentrated in their small-area conclaves? That can't be true, can it? We're always being told that Republicans are the party of the fat cats!

Exercise for the reader: click over to smartasset's 2024 list of America’s Richest Congressional Districts. Go down the list of districts, ranked by affluence, and look for the first one represented by a Republican.

I had to go down to #15: New Jersey's 7th Congressional District sends Thomas Kean Jr. to D.C. He squeaked by Democrat Susan Altman in last year's election 51.8%-46.4%. (Trump also edged Kamala in NJ-7, 49.8%-47.8%.)

On Kean's House page, as I type: "Kean Fighting to Restore SALT Deduction". Is that fighting for the poor and downtrodden? Not exactly. From the Tax Policy Center: Repealing The SALT Cap Would Overwhelmingly Benefit Those With High Incomes. (And, for the record, Sue Altman, Kean's opponent, came out in favor of that too, although that involved a hypocritical flip-flop.)

But if I have to gripe about something: al-Gharbi's analysis of "inequality" unfortunately involves some usual lefty stat-hacking. Without getting into the weeds on that, the book could have used some insights from a recent book by Phil Gramm, Robert Ekelund, and John Early: The Myth of American Inequality.

al-Gharbi is also short on recommending policy prescriptions; he admits this upfront. Which is fine, his goal is to describe, however imperfectly, the state of play.