After spending ten posts (beginning here) outlining Musa al-Gharbi’s arguments in his book We Have Never Been Woke, it’s time to move on to my evaluation of those arguments. In my first post discussing this, I covered al-Gharbi’s claim that elite overproduction is an important cause of “Awokenings.” Today I want to explore how thinking about incentives and political coalitions might help us evaluate al-Gharbi’s explanations.
Bootleggers and Baptists
Another point in al-Gharbi’s argument is that, in the guise of social justice activism, woke activists promote policies that benefit themselves, but are harmful to the poor and vulnerable, as a means of protecting their own status. He shows that when many of the policies associated with progressivism (or wokeism) today were first introduced during the first Great Awokening. These included welfare and social aid programs, education requirements, increased and more rigorously enforced regulations, licensing and certification laws, zoning and development regulations, and technocratic economic management.
As al-Gharbi notes, the early progressive movement originally pursued these policies as a means of ensuring high-status social positions would be kept out of reach of the “wrong” kind of people (women and racial and religious minorities in particular) and as a means of bringing about eugenicist goals.
This creates an interesting situation. The goals and motivations of modern progressives are very different from the explicitly racist, classist, and eugenicist goals of the early 20th-century progressive movement. Yet in pursuit of outcomes that are the opposite of those intended by early progressives, modern progressives tend to advocate…basically the same set of policies.
There are a few ways we might square this circle. The most uncharitable is to suggest that the goals of progressives never changed, and the movement is still intent on keeping the “deplorables” in their place. In other words, that modern progressives are deliberately dishonest about their goals.
Another possible explanation is the bootleggers and Baptists approach: Some progressives are Baptists, and genuinely believe that, say, occupational licensing laws are beneficial on net and their absence would bring about all manner of terrible outcomes. Others, however, cynically use licensing laws to protect incumbents and shut people out of upward mobility, as in the case of Sandy Meadows, described here by George Will:
Meadows was a Baton Rouge widow who had little education and no resources but was skillful at creating flower arrangements, which a grocery store hired her to do. Then Louisiana’s Horticulture Commission pounced.
It threatened to close the store as punishment for hiring an unlicensed flower arranger. Meadows failed to get a license, which required a written test and the making of four flower arrangements in four hours, arrangements judged by licensed florists functioning as gatekeepers to their own profession, restricting the entry of competitors. Meadows, denied reentry into the profession from which the government had expelled her, died in poverty, but Louisianans were protected by their government from the menace of unlicensed flower arrangers.
But Musa al-Gharbi’s explanation is that the proverbial bootlegger and Baptist are one and the same. The woke want to be upwardly socially mobile and protect their status — their inner bootlegger. But they also want to bring about egalitarian goals — their inner Baptist. When there’s a conflict between their inner bootlegger and Baptist, the woke behave like bootleggers and speak like Baptists – and construct narratives to convince others, but mostly themselves, that their behavior is also Baptist in its motivation as well.
I think there some truth to this analysis. But, how much of the variance does it explain? I’m still skeptical that it explains much about why modern progressives support the policies of they do.
Consider one particular policy that was originally, and for a long time, advocated for specifically on the grounds that it would serve as a barrier to entry to keep “undesirables” such as racial minorities and women unemployed: the minimum wage. As Thomas Leonard documented in his book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, what many economists now cite as one of the most damaging results of the minimum wage – how it disproportionally drives the most vulnerable people out of work – was originally considered to be the minimum wage’s primary benefit by progressives. Progressives today continue to be particularly aggressive in their support for increasing the minimum wage – but it’s far from clear to me that their modern support for that policy is ultimately rooted in the initial justification.
Though al-Gharbi isn’t quite explicit on this point, there are a handful of passages in the book that lead me to believe he’s in favor of increasing the minimum wage. Certainly, however, al-Gharbi does not desire to ensure the most vulnerable people be shut out of upward mobility.
Supposing I’m right about al-Gharbi’s support for an increased minimum wage, it naturally raises the question – if al-Gharbi can support this particular policy today for reasons contrary to the initial gatekeeping purposes it was meant to serve, can’t the same be true today of progressive who favor, say, licensing, certification, and educational requirements? And even if I’m wrong about al-Gharbi’s support for minimum wage increases, surly it’s not hard to imagine why progressives today might support that policy even while opposing the goals for which it was originally instated. Indeed, I suspect the vast majority of progressive simply have no idea that displacing the poor and vulnerable was the original goal of so many of the policies they support.
I can’t help but wonder if there is a potentially much simpler explanation underneath it. But first, a digression into a different Scott Alexander post.
In the post I have in mind, Scott Alexander describes (without necessarily endorsing) “the theory that the fear of disease is the root of all conservativism.” This elaborate theory, he points out, actually has a lot of fancy research supporting it:
There has been a lot of really good evolutionary psychology done on the extent to which pathogen stress influences political opinions. Some of this is done on the societal level, and finds that societies with higher germ loads are more authoritarian and conservative. This research can be followed arbitrarily far – like, isn’t it interesting that the most liberal societies in the world are the Scandinavian countries in the very far north where disease burden is low, and the most traditionalist-authoritarian ones usually in Africa or somewhere where disease burden is high? One even sees a similar effect within countries, with northern US states being very liberal and southern states being very conservative. Other studies have instead focused on differences between individuals within society – we know that religious conservatives are people with stronger disgust reactions and priming disgust reactions can increase self-reported conservative political beliefs – with most people agreeing disgust reactions are a measure of the “behavioral immune system” triggered by fear of germ contamination.
He also proposes the idea of another “Grand Narrative” underlying conservative thinking on social policy:
The Narrative is something like “We Americans are right-thinking folks with a perfectly nice culture. But there are also scary foreigners who hate our freedom and wish us ill. Unfortunately, there are also traitors in our ranks – in the form of the Blue Tribe – who in order to signal sophistication support foreigners over Americans and want to undermine our culture. They do this by supporting immigration, accusing anyone who is too pro-American and insufficiently pro-foreigner of “racism”, and demanding everyone conform to “multiculturalism” and “diversity”, as well as lionizing any group within America that tries to subvert the values of the dominant culture. Our goal is to minimize the subversive power of the Blue Tribe at home, then maintain isolation from foreigners abroad, enforced by a strong military if they refuse to stay isolated.”
Both of these grand and complex theories Alexander was proposing were meant to explain a particular question – specifically, the difference between Republicans and Democrats on the issue of how to handle the possibility of an Ebola outbreak in 2014. At that time, the position among Republicans was that the disease should be contained through travel restrictions and strict quarantines of those who might have been potentially exposed. And the position among Democrats was that even suggesting the use of even very limited quarantines or lockdowns to contain the spread of disease was an unconscionable violation of civil liberties, was harmful to the poor and vulnerable, and was intrinsically racist. As Alexander put it,
What’s more, everyone supporting the quarantine has been on the right, and everyone opposing on the left. Weird that so many people suddenly develop strong feelings about a complicated epidemiological issue, which can be exactly predicted by their feelings about everything else.
What’s interesting is this was written in 2014, which, dear reader, means it was written about a half-decade BC (Before Covid). And when Covid came around, suddenly the partisan divide flipped, with Democrats being overwhelmingly likely to embrace even widespread lockdowns and quarantines, and Republicans taking the opposite view. (Libertarians, by contrast, were consistently on the “oppose quarantines” side for both occasions.) This is pretty difficult to square with either of Alexander’s Grand Theories. However, in the same post, he does suggest there might be a simpler explanation:
Is it just random? A couple of Republicans were coincidentally the first people to support a quarantine, so other Republicans felt they had to stand by them, and then Democrats felt they had to oppose it, and then that spread to wider and wider circles? And if by chance a Democrat had proposed quarantines before a Republican, the situation would have reversed itself? Could be.
I think this is ultimately a much stronger explanation than the fancy theories. And to put a bit more flesh on this – while there was a lot of screaming and yelling among the Extremely Online Crowd during 2014, the whole episode was fairly short-lived and had little impact on most people’s lives. (I suspect many people reading this post today forgot that there was ever an Ebola controversy in 2014.) As a result, neither position really “took” as being the “official position” for either party. However, Covid had an overwhelming social impact and left nobody’s life untouched. As a result, when that event occurred, many issues that were never politically valanced before became durably coded as the “conservative” or “progressive” view.
In the same way, it seems to me that a simpler explanation is that progressives initially recommended a variety of social and economic policies for particular reasons at the time. But over time, those policy positions themselves became durably coded as “progressive.” And, over decades, people who thought of themselves as progressive would simply adopt whatever policies were coded with the proper political valance. They weren’t progressive because they supported those policies – they supported those policies because they considered themselves to be progressive. As Arnold Kling would say, we choose what to believe based on who we believe.
I think in most cases people support the policies that are coded as favorable to their political ideology, rather than supporting an ideology because they deeply understand the history and impact of various policies associated with that ideology, or even an understanding of how the policy would impact them personally.
To be clear, this is not to say I think al-Gharbi’s explanation is completely wrong. But I think it does explain at least some of the variance, and it represents a genuine contribution to understanding how the world works. I’m just not sure I’m convinced that the desire to protect one’s social class is a dominating factor compared to a desire to defend policies favorably coded by one’s political ideology.
In my next post, I’ll be examining on some of al-Gharbi’s commentary on economics, and economic policy.
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