How Western wokeness weakens the West but empowers China

When wokeness becomes a smokescreen for inequality, the elite just keeps real change out of reach, writes Stephen Saunders.

INTERVIEWED IN JULY 2025 on his Australian book tour, U.S. sociologist Musa al-Gharbi waxed eloquent on wokeness and inequality, on the U.S. and China.

We met the same day as Musa’s Canberra event, his best attended. Would some see his much-discussed We Have Never Been Woke (WHNBW) as validating their attitudes?

He rejoined:

“Lots of people start from the assumption I’m on the same team as them.”

Others imagine it’s “kind of a right-wing tract.”

Reviewing WHNBW for Australian Population Research Institute and The Australian, I’d tagged al-Gharbi more as a curiosity-led scholar, driven by data and evidence.

In his observations, woke is a definable set of attitudes and behaviours developed in the U.S. (and other wealthy nations) among the supposedly altruistic “symbolic capitalists” (or top 20 per cent) of the knowledge economy.

This elite, he writes, aligns with the top 1 per cent. The second allows the first to “opportunity hoard” an attractive share of the loot. Wokeness justifies this appropriation.

The top 20 per cent self-identify as “allies” of disadvantaged groups, aesthetically embracing “diversity” and “inclusion”. Focusing on identity and subjectivity, they “recognise” their privilege but work on “unconscious” biases. Theirs is a “tight” focus on disparities between identity (race, gender, sexuality) groups, not on inequality at large.

Instead of arresting widening post-1970s inequality, these Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI) tropes camouflage and extend it.

Rather than lubricating the social-mobility ladder, Musa observes:

"[The woke] just want to make sure people at the top of the ladder are appropriately diverse”.

About the author

Of Arizona military family, al-Gharbi switched from Catholicism to Islam, from shoe-selling to New York academia.

Fresh from his (Columbia) PhD, Musa got a fly-back, for an Arizona position. “I was overqualified”. After his cultural and class shift, how to stay grounded? There’s a book for that, Jennifer Morton’s Moving Up without Losing your Way.

Also:

“I do events at churches, I’ve done events at resource centres for senior citizens.”

Currently he’s a journalism/sociology prof at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York. Where would he do a sabbatical? Rather than nominating a top European school, Musa parries, Perth’s Forrest Research Foundation would like him back.

Around the book

WHNBW really got noticed in the U.S. — I’d spotted a thumbs-up in the New York Times (NYT). What recent books would Musa himself recommend?

He advanced Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s The Overlooked Americans, giving the lie to negative perceptions of smaller-town America:

“There’s a lot more social cohesion, people flourishing, less inequality.”

Another suggestion was Trump’s Democrats, burrowing into forever-Democrat districts that flipped for Trump in 2016.

The author is frank:

“Part of the reason Princeton was interested in publishing the book is because I’m a black Muslim.”

But they weren’t getting any identity-focused academic-influencer:

“If I hadn’t been from a military family, if I’d just grown up in Manhattan, I would’ve been confident, progressives are on the right side of history.”

Cautions the book, “woke” isn’t just a left thing.

Says Musa now:

“Right-leaning symbolic capitalists actually tend to think about social-issues pretty similar to their peers on the left, they’re often not much more practically oriented to solving problems.”

This happens in Australia too. Sussan Ley “Liberals” are conning and donning Labor tropes — UN net-zero, gender-equity, identity-groups. Shadow Treasurer’s new chief adviser is academic Steven Hamilton, a hyper-immigration shill.

As Musa reminds me, upon Mitt Romney’s 2012 loss to Barack Obama, Republicans considered going “more hip” on race and gender. Even when Trump 1.0 won in 2016, Musa perceived a “broad continuation”. Not so, with Trump 2.0.

Compared with Scandinavia or Singapore, I complain, Anglosphere nations baulk at putting citizens first. Musa points to the state universities of the U.S., which prefer full-fee cash-cow international students, frustrating “local kids”.

World-champion at this scam, I note, is remote Australia. Astonishingly, we glom nigh on 15% of the global international-student trade, faking this as “export education”.

Has identity-politics now supplanted equality-politics?

Musa responds:

“This identitarian approach is actually very compatible with very high levels of inequality. We can miss, what are the baseline conditions for [suffering] people who are not advantaged. The GDP can go up to the moon, it isn’t helping people.”

I recall that rentally-challenged dad on ABC-TV, urging a migration pause, but mocked by a Labor Minister. He pitched a protest tent by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s $4m beachside mansion.

Would he have been treated less cruelly, we wondered, had he ticked diversity boxes?

Musa ventures:

“There’s this narrative that all white people have the same privilege, which is false. Poor white people, they must really suck. You’re born on third base, and you can’t get across the home plate?”

Can Western nations push back towards greater equality, or will wokeness reign? For the U.S., Musa expresses “mild optimism”.

He cites sociologist Robert Putnam’s The Upswing. Though the relative egalitarianism of mid-century U.S. has fallen apart, “in principle we can do it again”.

The U.S. won’t rediscover its egalitarian pathway, however, from Scandinavian nations:

“They are much more homogenous, have generous entitlement programs, they are also very deliberate about immigration.”

I’m thinking, let’s task al-Gharbi to write a micro-credential for Treasurer’s chummy productivity roundtable. Something like, "Stop Helping Yourselves — Start Serving Others".

Australia and U.S.-China

Australia obsesses. Will he (Albanese) or won’t he meet him (Trump)? The U.S. is ho-hum, though at long last NYT's Australia desk is onto the case.

WWII John Curtin had pivoted, from the UK to the U.S. alliance. What to make now of ambivalent Albanese’s genuflections to China?

Musa’s vigorous reply isn’t ANU line:

“Look, there’s a lot to criticise about the American order. Our promotion of democracy is inconsistent at best. China doesn’t care about it at all, democracy and freedom. The surveillance state they have for citizens, even towards the diaspora. There is no ‘unicorn’ state, the options that we have on the table right now are America and China.”

Though Australia’s strong focus on Indigenous issues differs from the U.S., other patterns are similar. What he says next isn’t the ABC line, nor that of our so-called “Race Discrimination” Commissioner.

He said:

“White Americans [white Anglosphere] are demonstrably some of the least racist people in the world.”

Musa illustrates, via an anecdote from his father-in-law’s Shia village in Lebanon. When the latter promoted a diligent Sunni ahead of an indolent Shia, this was seen as immoral.

Musa reckons:

“...this isn’t the way people think about it in the Anglosphere."

Even in Alabama, the competent black will probably best a mediocre white.

The next book

At first, the grand scheme of WHNBW was 200,000 words, way overlong. The other half is to surface in al-Gharbi’s recently announced second book:

“Those People will explore the causes and consequences of the growing social distance between symbolic capitalists and ‘normies’, which leads symbolic capitalists to misunderstand [misrepresent] others’ alienation.”

The first book resonated in WEIRD (western, highly educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) nations. The second likewise, if to judge from chapter titles Unrepresented America, Asymmetrical Multiculturalism, and Antipolitics of Humiliation.

Rental-protest-dad would fit in. As would our racially biased “Race Commissioner” and plainly divisive “Special Envoys” for Antisemitism, Islamophobia, Social Cohesion.

Here are tips on Australian cohesion. Never mind Trump hysteria, worry about our local extremes. Endless immigration provides 75-80% of our population growth. Labor routinely rebrands standard-of-living pain as Treasury wins, whilst maintaining racially discriminatory sweetheart deals for unchecked Indian immigration.

And climate-woke?

Rather than innovation, WHNBW notes, wealthy nations are experiencing “stagnation and declines...dysfunction and mistrust”. While their “symbolic capitalists are among the primary beneficiaries of the environmental devastation they conspicuously condemn.” I saw this form of wokeness as crucial, craving greater coverage.

Like, the UN net-zero fallacy has swept WEIRD world, with Australian science going overboard for “climate action”. Little solace for Planet Earth. Global population and immigration pressures never slacken, but woke science refuses to link population to ever-plummeting habitats and species.

Though the U.S. shows signs of reindustrialisation, other WEIRD nations deindustrialise. Not-woke China may lead the so-called electrification of everything but is also the runaway leader for CO2 emissions. Ignoring this reality, virtuous commitment to an imagined “net-zero economy” is catnip among the top 20%, “legislated” in Australia. As in the UK, this elite hypocrisy heralds austerity for ordinary people.

Musa comments, the “concentrated one-party rules” of Democrat New York and Democrat California are among the “worst states” for inequality. Their governing classes, I’d add, excel at climate-action grandstanding that effectively favours China. Yep, the totalitarian super-power super-polluter.

OK, Those People isn’t going to be that book about climate-woke. Though Musa muses, the intensive rhetoric of climate-mitigation could lend it an interesting case-study.

Ordinary folks (also his Arizona mother) have acquired a certain mistrust of the “strong claims” made over the decades by elite climate journalists, experts, and institutions, where the “uncertainty” of their models is not conveyed.

Though consuming way more coal than rest-of-world combined, China still bluffs net-zero 2060. Dissing that script, Earth’s graphs of population, consumption, GDP, emissions, CO2 levels, temperatures, keep on rising.

Stephen Saunders is a former public servant, consultant and 'Canberra Times' reviewer.