How elites co-opted wokeness

TL;DR

Elites co-opted wokeness because symbolic capitalists sincerely hold progressive values while also using them to serve their own class interests and consolidate power.

Key Points

• 1.Wokeness is the fourth awakening, not a novel phenomenon. Algarby identifies four historical awakenings (1920s, 1960s, 1980s–90s, and post-2010), each sharing elite overproduction and popular immiseration as root causes, with the 1980s equivalent being 'political correctness.'
• 2.Elite overproduction drives awakenings. When society produces more people expecting elite lifestyles than positions available — college-educated, credentialed workers expecting six-figure salaries and homeownership — frustrated aspirants indict the social order and try to displace existing elites.
• 3.Symbolic capitalists are not the 99% they imagine themselves to be. Journalists, academics, lawyers, and managers compare themselves upward to Zuckerberg and feel like normies, but adjunct professors still out-earn average American workers and enjoy higher status and better conditions.
• 4.The George Floyd example exposes elite media's self-serving narrative. Algarby argues the New York Times and HBO only cared about Floyd after his death made him useful to elite power struggles — had he lived and wanted to write for the Times, his perspective would have been ignored entirely.
• 5.Both woke and anti-woke camps share the same symbolic worldview. Both sides treat cultural battles — building names, curricula, rhetoric — as the highest-stakes struggles, mirroring each other's cosmic framing rather than focusing on material outcomes for disadvantaged people.
• 6.Awakenings consistently produce right-wing backlash infrastructure. The 1960s awakening spawned the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation; the 1980s awakening spawned Fox News; the current one has produced Truth Social and Musk's Twitter takeover — all built on monetizing distrust of mainstream institutions.
• 7.Positive social reforms tend to be orthogonal to awakenings, not caused by them. The First Step Act — the most significant criminal justice reform in decades — resulted from decades of cross-partisan consensus building, but symbolic capitalist extremism during the current awakening destroyed that coalition and stalled further reform.
• 8.Black spokespeople in elite spaces are unrepresentative of Black America. At a polarization conference, all four Black panelists were mixed-race, Afro-Caribbean, or recent immigrants — not monoracial non-immigrant Black Americans who are the overwhelming majority; Black Americans are culturally conservative yet elite DEI culture suppresses those values.
• 9.The symbolic capitalist class has grown from 3% to roughly one-third of workers since the 1920s. This concentration allows elites to write off mainstream American values, remain financially and politically viable, and sustain a bifurcation Algarby warns is ultimately unsustainable and risks institutional collapse.