Elite capture is clear within Wokeism

Wokeism's elect and society's elite ... a clownish display of illogic. Photo: Source

The concept of "elite capture" is a useful one in considering what's happening in the West with the rise of the political correctness promoted by Wokeism through its adherence to the brave new world of critical race theory and transgender ideology.

In another illuminating podcast, Yascha Mounk explores the implications of societies and their institutions being dominated by one set of intellectual principles. Mounk, who is a West German-born American political scientist, is Associate Professor of the Practice of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington D.C. He asks:

Do humans generally, including philosophers and social scientists, just have trouble letting go of one master narrative? Are we just hardwired to want to see the world through one prism? As the saying goes, “If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” It seems to me that, in so much of intellectual life, [this] ends up being true. 

To find an answer to his question he enters into a discussion with Olúfẹmi Táíwò, who is a philosopher and an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. His latest book is Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else).

Táíwò lays out where the problem lies when there is a sole narrative within and between academia, the corporate sector, the social elite, and all those who aspire to be accepted within that grouping: 

With elite capture itself, I worry there's a kind of path dependency: the longer the more entrenched elite and top heavy social institutions exist, the harder it seems to reverse—barring some kind of weird cataclysm or accident of history. Once you start to lose the kinds of institutions that are designed to challenge elite control over everything (unions, strong social movements, etc.), I worry that even increased attention or understanding of social problems won't do anything. And then there's a worry about the kind of conversation around elite capture and identity politics, so-called “wokeism”, and cancel culture. 

[...] the real thing that's happening is the actual institutions where we develop habits, where we refine our ideas, are more and more owned by and responsive to a very small group of people. That, in and of itself, is the problem. 

Referring to Elite Capture, Mounk says:

I found it quite convincing—this is partially just Miłosz’s explanation of the captive mind—that there is an intoxication in being able to waltz into any conversation and say, “Well, actually, that's all wrong. I have a vocabulary that I've learned—a certain form of Orthodox Marxism—that tells me that this is all about class and class relations in this particular kind of way, and not only does that make me feel like my life has meaning (because I'm a foot soldier in an important, trans-historical movement for justice), but also, I get to lord it over you a little bit, right? Once I've mastered it, I can go in and say, ‘Hey, you're an idiot.’”

Mounk asks for clarification on what "the current framework" of Wokeism fails to achieve. Táíwò replies:

I'm trying to see what the current framework does achieve. What's the output of diversity training, in terms of political outcomes or social interactions? I think what I'm getting at is not just different modes of attacking the problem, but a different understanding of what the problem is in the first place. [...]  I think there's a sense that people feel powerless and disconnected, and there's a question of who and what to put the blame on. [...] I don't think there's any version of responding to that kind of diagnosis of the problem that would solve the thing that, it seems to me, people are worried about.

To which Mounk responds:

[...] To what extent can we summarize the most important takeaway you offer us by saying: we keep thinking exclusively, primarily about race and identity, when we really should be thinking about economics and social class? How much does that capture, and how much important insight does it leave off the table? 

Which meets with limited concurrence by Táíwò: 

There's definitely a way that people can talk about race that might distract us from a more complex understanding of what's going on, and that would include class and economics. But that's not a particular feature of race discourse. You could talk about anything in a close-minded, reductive sort of way. My particular perspective on this has as many bones to pick with class reductionism as it has with race reductionism. So I wouldn't describe the takeaway of this book as an attack on race reductionism in particular. Maybe it would be better to just describe it as an attack on reductionism.

A follow-up question from Mounk: 

We've heard some of your concerns earlier in this conversation about what happens when you try to solve the current problems of the United States through at least one particular kind of race reductionist framework. But if you say, “This is all about class. As long as we elect Bernie 2016—to caricature a little bit—and give lots of nice European-style welfare state benefits to poor people, all of these other problems will go away,” that perhaps would be a form of class reductionism (there are more and less radical versions of it).

What would that get wrong, both about the current state of America and how to fix what's wrong with the current state of America?

Táíwò in reply:

I think that version of class reductionism has a lot more going for it than most other versions of class reductionism. Maybe that would get somewhere: just give people a bunch of money, free healthcare, etc., and the rest will sort itself out. I don't think that's true. But I think it's worth pointing out the differences between a kind of class reductionism about how we should respond to social problems, versus a class reductionism about what those sorts of problems are in the first place. 

[...] It just isn't true that mass incarceration is purely a problem of class. It has a lot more to do with class than people give it credit for, and the way that poor white people are policed is maybe not as different from the way that poor people of color are policed as people might guess, but it is measurably different. There's libraries of social science explaining why it's different.

It just isn't true that the problems of toxic waste and environmental racism are entirely explained by class or the level of income of residents. There are measurable relationships between the demographics of a community and zoning decisions about industrial pollution. If you're looking at what our world is—how it decides who to make predator and who to make prey—there are just more things going on than class. 

Narratives can vary, Mounk says, but the "hardwired" nature of an elite's choice of narrative is important as it has a bearing on the political and social relationships throughout society. Táíwò takes up the issue:

There have been, as a matter of fact, historical eras and epochs where people just seemed willing to accept, or respond to in friendly ways, different overlapping narratives about what the world was like, what was wrong with it, and what to do about it. I think what we're seeing in our time period is not the effect of some deep-seated human inability to move between different narratives of the world, but a manufactured kind of scarcity and competition between political narratives. Part of the manufacture of that has to do with the way that the platforms we use have been constructed.

I think the better part of explaining that has to do with the kind of austerity moment that we're living in, where there's fewer and fewer parts of the economy where people can experience anything like economic security, which fosters a sense of competition between the people who have resources and the people who don't. I think those are the things that we should look at if we're trying to explain why people talk about politics, or many other things, in the ways that they do.

This is the point in the conversation where Mounk spoke the words used at the top of this piece about everyone wanting to comply with the leading narrative. He concludes that thought with this question:

It seems to me like some of our intellectual class today suffers from the same temptation, and can walk into any conversation saying, “Well, this is about white privilege and microaggressions.” [They] get to go into a conversation with people discussing other terms and dismiss them without having to think very hard. Do you think there's something to that parallel? 

To which Táíwò replies:

I think that's right. There's a few kinds of temptation going on. I agree that people want to be able to feel like they understand something, and potentially to lord that over people. They want to feel like they're part of something. They also don't want to feel like they don't understand: complexity is daunting and humbling in ways that not everybody accepts. I'm coming around to why you said “hardwired.” Find me a generation of people where those desires aren’t pushing at us, right?

What's different about what's happening now is not those desires, but the relative absence of the checks on those desires. Decades ago, if you wanted to have the perspective that communism has figured out everything—i.e. ”Our intellectuals have the master narrative of what's good and what's bad, and they have created the singularly most important movement for justice in history”—one of the things you would have had to do is respond to a bunch of people saying, “Well, here's what the Soviet Union is actually doing. Here's what Mao's up to. Here's what's happening in Albania,” and you would have to position yourself in response to that. You may do that in a healthy and honest way, with integrity. You might fail to do that. But those are things that you would have to answer, and not just answer in an interpersonal way.

 Now, in the age of the so-called “end of history” (maybe we won't want to describe it that way anymore), that's no longer the geopolitical situation. In the United States, there is a kind of hegemony of capitalism as the actual master narrative—regardless of whether we give it a thumbs up or thumbs down—that explains what happens in our lives. There's a functional hegemony of the core US political institutions, military and national security.

Again, there are people who would give those institutions a thumbs down, but those institutions do not fear that they will not exist in a few years. So it just means a different thing to have any kind of opinion on political matters, master narrative or not. It means a different thing in our context to succumb to those desires, because there isn't any real political situation or set of institutions forcing you to have a “come-to-Jesus” moment about whether those desires should really be directing your behavior. There's none of the brakes or constraints that there might have been in particular, other eras—or less of them, maybe.

Has the virus of Wokeism infected the United States, and in a secondhand fashion, Canada, the contagion bred in the cesspool of individualism and moral permissiveness? Will America be able to recover its intellectual integrity? Or is America "blinded and hell-bent on its own destruction" as one American wrote for a New Zealand newspaper chain and website? Will Americans being able to excavate their soul to understand why they have "gone completely off the rails", as that American wrote last month, even though expressing his views from a very wokeish perspective. 

💢 See also from Persuasion:

 The Warped Appeal of "Anti-Racism" 

John McWhorter - The Elect: Neoracists Posing as Antiracists 

 When an opinion is an act of violence  

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