We Have Never Been Woke

""[We Have Never Been Woke] announces [al-Gharbi] as a rising intellectual star.""---David Brooks, New York Times ""A book I’ve been waiting for someone to write for a long time…a damn good book.""---Jesse Singal, Blocked and Reported ""A sharp, well-researched critique aimed at politically active readers who want to better understand why people believe what they believe."" * Library Journal * ""[al-Gharbi is] the Alexis de Tocqueville of this moment.""---Frank Schaeffer, In Conversation...with Frank Schaeffer ""While many people will no doubt disagree with al-Gharbi’s account, it is one of the most historically rigorous and empirically grounded investigations of “wokeness” we have.... Encyclopedic in breath, and painstakingly in-depth, We Have Never Been Woke establishes al-Gharbi as one of the most insightful and provocative sociologists of his generation.""---Adam Szetela, Washington Post ""A sharp critique of the ways many of us, on all sides of politics and culture, have used social justice as a subtle way to serve ourselves.""---Lee C. Camp, No Small Endeavor ""illuminating.... For anyone genuinely curious about why working-class, culturally conservative Americans, many of them evangelical Christians, remain so loyal to Trump, We Have Never Been Woke is required reading. In a book that’s both granular in its detail and panoramic in its perspective, al-Gharbi builds a tightly argued case for how the “Great Awokening” is neither particularly novel nor particularly helpful to the marginalized and disenfranchised of American society.""---Carrie McKean, Christianity Today ""sprawling, ambitious, and perceptive...We Have Never Been Woke...raises too many provocative questions and gores too many oxen across the political spectrum to let anybody feel very complacent. It’s a highly erudite book, idiosyncratically straddling the line between an academic publication and a broader interest page-turner, that, at its sharpest, transcends all of the citations and footnotes to achieve a pungent first-person sociological and psychological clarity.""---Jesse Adams, Washington Examiner ""We Have Never Been Woke is a great book on wokeness, probably the most incisive and interesting one that’s been written. It also holds appeal as a work on political beliefs, as a work of political sociology, and as an incredibly well-sourced piece of cultural criticism. It is very much worth reading.""---Oliver Traldi, City Journal ""Al-Gharbi avoids denunciation in favour of sober, rigorous analysis. For this and other reasons, I suspect it is the only book on the subject that will still be worth reading in a decade.... What We Have Never Been Woke offers, in contrast, is demystification. In eschewing the self-aggrandisement and moralism typical of woke and anti-woke literature alike, al-Gharbi offers a model for others to follow.""---Geoff Shullenberger, Unherd ""One can only admire al-Gharbi’s fearlessness…. Probably to his credit, al-Gharbi puts the best possible face on a reality that is variously amusing, infuriating, and even occasionally relieving…. By the end of the book, it is hard to think of a faux-sacred cow al-Gharbi has failed to expose…. The core of We Have Never Been Woke is persuasive, and it’s hard not to see his thesis in operation in all kinds of fields, once you look at the world his way.""---Aaron Weinacht, Front Porch Republic ""Mr. al-Gharbi compares what symbolic capitalists say to what they do and finds a pronounced, lamentable gap.... [his] effort to move proudly analytic symbolic capitalists to analyze themselves is important. He is mainly in the business of describing not moralizing.""---Jonathan Marks, Wall Street Journal ""In six compelling and comprehensive chapters, Al-Gharbi lays out his case… Al-Gharbi brings to bear the sociological data that illustrate the actual harm upon our societies by the elite claims to victimhood which underlie a culture of ‘wokeness.'""---Guy Lancaster, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books ""Musa al-Gharbi presents a thorough and provocative critique of the contemporary woke movement and its cultural contradictions.... Following Bourdieu, the author brilliantly portrays symbolic capitalists.... Al-Gharbi urges us to reconsider what true progressivism should look like and how to build a more inclusive movement that addresses the material concerns of all people, rather than focusing solely on the symbolic victories of a privileged few.""---Pedro Ángel Palou, El Heraldo de México ""provocative and compelling .... it may be that the most significant lesson of al-Gharbi’s book is not that the Left is hypocritical but that, as a society, we care too much about symbols. Politicians, it is said, will always disappoint you. Al-Gharbi’s view is that symbols will, too — regardless of who endorses them.""---Michael C. Behrent, National Review