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Musa al-Gharbi

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57
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2024-10-16
most recent
2024-10-16
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  1. “Yeah, yeah. So those are other factors at play. So I argue those are just two of the kind of bigger predictors. One of the reasons why Awakenings fizzle out is so when you have this moment where these two things come together, then that creates the conditions for the awakening to take off. But one problem is that as it rolls on, these alliances between frustrated people who want to be elites and other people, they tend to be kind of unstable. They're unstable in part because at the end of the day what a lot of the erstwhile elites want to do is they want to be elites. Like that's the main thing they're concerned about.”

    2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That is also frustrated and wants to see some kind of change. And this creates a kind of opening for these frustrated elites.”

    2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “They have a motive, but they don't always have the means, and this is because as Seamus Khan and others have argued, there's this kind of counter-cyclical nature of fortunes between elites and non-elites. So when times that are relatively good for elites, when the goods and services that they can acquire, they have a lot of power over workers to get goods and services at cheap rates and things like this. Anyway, so times that are good for elites tend to be a little tougher for ordinary workers. But on the flip side, times that are tougher for elites tend to be pretty decent for a lot of other people. And so it's hard for elites to get anyone to care if they're having a tough time in a lot of circumstances. But there are some moments when these trajectories get collapsed, when things have been kind of bad and worse for ordinary people for a while and all of a sudden they're bad for a non-trivial share of elites too. And then those are the moments when the awakenings tend to, because you have a large share of the public, large swathes of the public.”

    2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Yeah, I mean, by some of the measures, actually, there has been improvement. I mean, the academic job market is tough and will probably continue to be tough for these kind of deeper structural reasons related to growing emphasis on contingent labor and so on and so forth. I argue in the book and in some of my other public work that there do seem to be some indicators that the kind of the worst part of the 2010s crunch seems to be fading out a little bit. And so that's one of the things that you might expect would correlate with a great awakening tapering. But the other thing that's really important that ultimately leads these awakenings to fizzle out is that so the elite overproduction creates the motive, right? It creates the motive for a lot of these elites to condemn the prevailing order and the people who are at the top and who were successful and to try to purge some of those people and create room for themselves and so on. Okay.”

    2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Acute. This is a term drawn from Jack Goldsmith and Peter Turchin for people who are not already familiar with it, which is basically when society starts producing more people who think that they should be elites than we have capacity to actually give those people the lives they feel like they deserve. So we have growing numbers of people who did everything right. They did all the extracurriculars. They got good grades in school. They graduated from college, even from the right college and the right majors. But they're having a hard time, you know, getting the kinds of six-figure jobs they expected. They can't buy a house. They're not being able to get married and live the kind of standard of living their parents had and so on. When you have growing numbers of elites and elite aspirants that find themselves in that position, then what they tend to do is grow really dissatisfied.”

    2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Yeah. One of the things that I argue in the book that I think is really important for contextualizing the current moment is that this current period of rapid change in how knowledge economy professionals talk and think about social justice and the ways we engage in politics and all of this, this moment is actually a case of something. As I show in the book, looking at the same kinds of empirical measurements, we can see that actually there were three previous episodes of kind of great awakenings by comparing and contrasting these cases, we can get insight into questions like why do they come about? Why do they end? Do they influence? Do they change anything long term? And so on. And so to that question, kind of why did they come about? Why do they end? It seems like from what I argue in the book is there seems to be kind of two elements that are important predictors for one awakening might come about. One of them is that they tend to happen during moments of elite overproduction when it becomes particularly”

    2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I have published an essay where I argued the Great Awakening does seem to be winding down. In the book, I argue looking at a lot of different empirical measures and in some of my other published research before the book. But I argue that it seems like starting after 2011 with race, gender, and sexuality and stuff, but starting a year before that with Occupy Wall Street and things like this. But basically starting around 2010, there was this significant shift among knowledge economy professionals and how we talk and think about social justice issues. But that does seem to have peaked around 2021, looking at the measures that I was looking at in the book. Seems like a lot of those are on the decline now.”

    2024-10-16 · Conversations with Tyler · Musa al-Gharbi on Elite Wokeness, Islam, and Social Movements · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source