My latest for Symbolic Capital(ism) explores the highly censorious culture that prevails in many symbolic industries.

It argues that universities play an important role in shaping institutional culture in all of these other fields --but not for the reasons most think. 🧵 So, one thing that separates WHNBW from many other books charting the culture wars is that it spends precisely zero time trying to genealogize, taxonomize, or evaluate the correctness of "woke" theorists or ideas.

Antiwoke and right-aligned folks were SUPER annoyed with this, apparently having gone into the book hoping the book would be a definitive takedown or refutation of "wokeness" and discovering that, in fact, the book is not very interested theorists and their ideas.

One reason for this, as I've detailed previously, is because these sorts of considerations are orthogonal to the actual questions the book is trying to answer (see screenshots): musaalgharbi.substack.com/i/158204710/it…

BUT, it's also important to stress, that even if we want to answer some of the specific questions that the antiwoke crowd is interested in -- you simply can't get much mileage by studying widely-evoked thinkers and their work, for reasons I explain in my latest essay: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/you-ask-i-an…

My latest for Symbolic Capital(ism) explores why the symbolic professions tend to be highly unrepresentative of the societies they purport to serve, and are often dominated by bizarre beliefs and norms.

tldr: It's because they tend to be comprised of people who are cognitively sophisticated and highly educated. Quick 🧵 One thing that's critical for understanding how intelligence and education relate to political beliefs and behaviors is to recognize that our cognitive and perceptual systems are wired primarily to help us enhance our status and further our goals. We perceive and think about the world in fundamentally self-interested ways: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-people…

For Symbolic Capital(ism), I just published a piece pulling together lots of empirical data to answer questions like:

Did Trump win because of racism?
Did Trump win because of sexism?
Did Trump win because "elites" bought the election?
Did Trump win because of third-party "spoilers"?
Did Trump win because of weak turnout?
Did Trump win because Harris chose the wrong running mate?

As the essay details at length, the answer to all of these questions is "no." It's easy to see how people would be drawn to these questions, but none of these hypotheses do a good job of explaining what actually happened in 2024 (or the previous Trump cycles, for that matter). 🧵 Let's start with race: Democrats saw gains with white people this cycle. Harris did about as well with whites as Democrats typically do. She saw improvement with whites across gender lines relative to 2020: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/a-graveyard-…

So why did she lose? Well, that would be because of shifts among non-whites. Non-whites across gender lines moved away from the Democratic Party. Harris put up weak numbers with Black women (relative to Hillary or Obama). Democrats' margins with Hispanic women shifted dramatically towards the Republicans. They saw losses with Asian women. And non-white men shifted even further (even as white men shifted heavily towards Democrats over Trump's tenure in office).

The preferred narrative on race is helpless to explain the trendlines among whites and the trendlines among non-whites. But put simply, Harris didn't lose because of the whites. She lost despite solid (and growing) support among the whites, because non-white voters had other ideas.

Today on Symbolic Capital(ism) I review George Orwell's "The Road to Wigan Pier" which had an immense influence on my thinking about Great Awokenings, but is also highly relevant to understanding many contemporary political dynamics. Quick 🧵 One of the first things that jumps out at you reading the book is how much the first Awokening has in common with the current one: musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/book-review-…

We have X. Kendi writing "Antiracist Baby." They had Comrade X writing "Marxism for Infants."

The Oppressor/ Oppressed framework? More than a century old.

Intersectional social justice struggles? Same, same.

I suspect the depictions in the screenshots below would seem immediately familiar to contemporary readers.

One of the most disturbing elements of reading a lot of historical texts is coming to see in stark terms the truth of Ecclesiastes, that there is nothing new under the sun.

Yes, absolutely. Mainstream media is a (*checks notes*) poor helpless victim when it comes to (*double-checks*) influencing public perceptions about culture, world events, and the media itself.

Bezos is definitely *blaming the victim.* Poor widdle mainstream media. 😥

A 🧵

https://twitter.com/TheAtlantic/status/1852322647289303464

It's sad that they can't even be perceived neutral when journalists are rabidly clamoring for a political endorsement of the Democratic nominee, and the paper itself quite explicitly defined itself in opposition to Trump since 2016.

And the endorsements definitely don't reflect or enhance perceptions of political bias. The fact that the paper has literally never outright endorsed a Republican since 1976 when they started the practice -- this is just a pure coincidence: washingtonpost.com/opinions/patri…

The Democrats are just better, 100 percent of the time. That's not bias, that's fact. And the editorial bones should make no bones about it. And if the public thinks it might indicate bias that over nearly 50 years the paper endorses only one political party for the presidency (and overwhelmingly endorses Democrats for lower seats as well) -- that's just because *those people* have their brains cooked by the Koch Brothers and Trump.

Lots of folks on this site began by smearing McDonalds, showing revulsion for that kind of work, for the food, and disdain towards the kinds of people who would eat there. And then, when the poor class implications of these narratives became undeniable, they tried to retrofit their comments as being about something else... like the staged nature of the event, faux populism, etc.

It's fine to criticize those things! But that wasn't the initial tenor of the conversation at all. And the initial conversation is a good example of why this was a good political stunt for Trump -- provoking the Democrats' core constituency into mocking and deriding "those people" in elitist ways. The same kind of thing happened when he served up McDonald's to college athletes: cnn.com/2019/01/15/pol…

For his part, Trump famously loves @McDonalds. He's eaten there his whole life, and has a really idiosyncratic go-to order, as highlighted during his initial run for office: businessinsider.com/trumps-mcdonal…

So it's theater. But it's also real passion for the product. And this latter fact is the kind of thing that a certain bloc of America really finds grating about the man. And another part of the population finds endearing.

Critically, the cause of the gap depicted here is 100% shifts in *women.* Men 18-29 are no more rightwing than any other cohort of men. For men, it's basically a straight line going all the way down the generational ladder (with the exception of 45-64 year olds).

All the action is with *women.* But this is, unfortunately, unlikely to be how the trend is analyzed. We'll likely hear a lot about "right wing young men" after the election, even though they're no more conservative than any other dudes (and are markedly less conservative than 45-64 year olds).

Another example of ironically ignoring female agency in ostensibly "feminist" work. In truth, if we want to understand growing gender polarization in politics, all the "action" is on the female side of the equation.

But because polarization is widely perceived as "bad" and women are "good" scholars tend to ignore the female line, and try to explain "bad" things in terms of men, even if their own data clearly suggest that women are driving the trends. We see the same type of tendency in analyzing "red" and "blue" lines of political trends, as I detail here:

Anything that is "bad" (e.g. polarization around science, identity, etc.) is explained in terms of the red line, even in cases where all of the "action" is clearly on the blue line.

Back in @GuardianUS for a piece looking at the racial dynamics of #Election2024.

tldr: polls show Trump poised to take home roughly 20 percent of the black vote. That probably won't happen.

But @TheDemocrats *will* likely see continued losses with black voters. Which may be offset with gains among whites. 🧵 Let's start by disabusing readers of one storyline about why the @GOP is unlikely to receive the black vote share that current polling suggests: Kamala's race.

In truth, black voters have been really tepid on Harris. This was clear in the 2020 primaries, in the 2020 general election, and in contemporary polling. Black voters have not shifted towards Democrats any more than any other block has since Biden dropped out. They might've shifted a bit *less.*

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

In recent years, I've dedicated a lot of effort to chronicling and analyzing the rapid shifts among knowledge economy professionals that seems to have kicked off after 2011.

Alongside colleagues like @DavidRozado, @epkaufm and @ZachG932, research has documented major shifts in journalistic outputs, books, academic articles, political attitudes and behaviors and more.

In my forthcoming book, I expand this work to document shifts in television, movies, music and other entertainment industries.

But to my knowledge, no one has done #videogames yet. I don't even do it in my book! To rectify this oversight, my latest for Symbolic Capital(ism) tries to map out whether the shifts observed in other cultural spheres extend into the gaming world.

Boy, do they ever. 🧵 Let's start with #gender: Prior to the Great Awokening, only about 4 percent of title had exclusively female characters. By 2015, that number had doubled. By 2020, *that* number had doubled:

Today, a plurality of games include protagonists of both sexes (and a growing number include non-binary options too). And for titles that include protagonists of only one gender, nearly half now feature exclusively women.

Female characters have also become far less sexualized, and have much more agency, with marked shifts occurring after 2012.musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/video-games-…

Why are there so few conservative or religious scholars in academia? Two popular theories:

1. They face discrimination on the job market, and a hostile work climate if they are employed
2. They would rather do other things with their lives.

There is some evidence in both directions, but also deep problems with both of these narratives as sufficient explanations.

A new piece in @NationalAffairs provides a more unified and compelling account of what's going on here, and possible responses. Some baseline facts: as my own work for @HdxAcademy shows, the professoriate is highly unrepresentative of U.S. society overall along many dimensions, including and especially along ideological lines:

This is a problem for knowledge production (as I illustrate here: )

It is also a problem for public trust in our institutions, undermines the impact of our work, and threatens the long-term independence and financial viability of our work.

When people feel like they don't have a voice or a stake in institutions, and especially when they view them as hostile to folks like themselves, their natural and rational response is to delegitimize, marginalize, defund or dismantle those institutions (and it works the other way too, when people do feel like their will and interests are represented, as detailed here: ).musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/professors-a…

foreignaffairs.com/articles/world…

Lots of places talk about viewpoint diversity, but @compactmag_ walks the walk.

Earlier today, they published an article by Alan Dershowitz arguing that Israel has committed no war crimes. My own article, just published, is a direct refutation of that position. IDF representatives have repeatedly boasted about Israel's precise targeting capabilities. This raises troubling questions about the extraordinary level of killing of people who should be protected under international law: compactmag.com/article/israel…

My latest explores the information warfare underway with respect to war crimes committed by #Hamas and #Israel, the failure of journalists to exercise due diligence before amplifying many of these claims, and the importance of acknowledging inconvenient facts. @thenation In the immediate aftermath of the #HamasMassacre, many circulated false, unsubstantiated or misleading claims w/ a clear intent of driving support for rapid and aggressive violence against #Gaza, #Iran, #Hezbollah + others: thenation.com/article/world/…

My first essay for @CNN explores tensions within the GOP over "populism."
…

@Mike_Pence described populism as a "road to ruin" for the @GOP, joining a chorus of establishment figures in both parties across time. Yet economic populism is quite... popular! cnn.com/2023/09/26/opi…
As @leedrutman illustrated, we can divide the American electorate into four quadrants based on their cultural and economic leanings. The quadrant he labels as "populist" (economically left, culturally right) is not well represented by either party: cnn.com/2023/09/26/opi…

A string of great articles came out recently by @mattyglesias, @JonHaidt & @Noahpinion, exploring how liberal teens tend to be much more depressed than conservative peers. For @AmericanAffrs, I do a deep dive into the literature on well-being and ideology: americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to… Some findings: the well-being gap is not unique to teens. Across age groups and gender lines, conservatives tend to report significantly higher levels of happiness and fulfillment while liberals are far more likely to report mental illness and disorders: americanaffairsjournal.org/2023/03/how-to…

Great essay by @Edsall @nytimes on some of the tensions around contemporary higher ed. A few quotes from myself made it into the column: nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opi… There is a robust and ever-growing pool of evidence showing that many of the DEI initiatives being defunded by DeSantis et al. are not just ineffective relative to their stated goals, they're actively pernicious: musaalgharbi.com/2020/09/16/div…

HOWEVER, and this is critical...