Why the Left’s Calls for Social Justice Don’t End Inequality

Liberal elites say they oppose social injustice, but extreme inequality persists even in some regions dominated by left-leaning political parties. What’s going on? Why don’t we see more positive changes for the people whom the left aims to help?

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi tackled these questions at a Nov. 12 event hosted by the Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education as part of a series called The Future of the American Left and Right. Al-Gharbi is an assistant professor in the School of Communications and Journalism at Stony Brook University and author of We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

Including himself as a member of the group that he analyzes, al-Gharbi said that liberal elites have gained “a lot more influence over society and culture, but the consequences of that are not what we might have hoped or have expected.” He pointed to increased inequalities, growing mistrust in institutions, and racially segregated school systems in places like New York City, which is dominated by Democratic politicians.

To try to understand “how things went off the rails,” he looked at what he calls “Great Awokenings,” periods in which he said left-leaning elites have increased their focus on social justice issues and moved farther left in their views, creating a greater division between them and those with centrist or right-leaning politics.

What happens, he said, is that elites focus on symbolic change more than substantive change, so that they can retain their power and prestige. Yet that strategy can backfire for the groups they are purporting to help. 

Symbolic changes, such as renaming a school to honor a civil rights leader, may do little to address the primary concerns of working-class people, argued sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, left, at an event moderated by Eitan Hersh, A05, director of the Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education. Photo: Alonso Nichols

Al-Gharbi was invited to be the new center’s inaugural speaker because he “interrogates the structures of power and culture often taken for granted, and he helps us see the interplay of symbolism, institutions, and inequality,” the center’s associate director, Arik Burakovsky, F17, said in his introduction. “His research is highly relevant to understanding where the American left as well as the American right stand today and how they might evolve going forward.”

Here are four takeaways from al-Gharbi’s talk.

College-educated elites want to lift others up while also retaining their own power and status.

“Great Awokenings” arise when liberal professionals and ordinary workers are both experiencing tough times, al-Gharbi said. The elites may be motivated by their own economic concerns—that the lifestyle they aspire to may be out of reach, for example—but “the presence of these other people who are also mad and suffering allows these elite aspirants to say, ‘Hey, this power struggle I’m engaged in, it’s not for me. It’s for these people. Look, these people are suffering,’” al-Gharbi said.

For example, he pointed to the push for universal student loan forgiveness, which would aid only college-educated people, arguably at the expense of those who never attended. Rather than acknowledging that the policy would benefit themselves, liberal elites promote it in the name of the most disadvantaged borrowers, he said.  

When the commitment to help the poor is in tension with the commitment to be elite, being elite wins, he said. “So we end up mostly pursuing [social justice goals] in ways that don’t cost anything or risk anything for us or require us to sacrifice anything ourselves.”

Symbolic changes don’t always address the concerns of communities they claim to help.

As an example of a social justice action that these elites might support, al-Gharbi described a hypothetical effort to rename a school so that it would honor a leader of the civil rights movement rather than a Confederate general.

“The reason [other] people get frustrated with that is not that they really love Robert E. Lee and they hate Rosa Parks,” he said. Rather, it’s that their top concerns for their children’s education do not include the name on the building.

Yet “rather than finding out what their actual concerns about the school are or trying to do anything about their actual concerns … we change the name, we declare a victory, and we do our next culture war thing,” he said. “Meanwhile, for the people who live in that community, nothing has changed for their children, for their children’s education, for their children’s life prospects.”

“Great Awokenings” don’t create the changes they might intend—and can inspire a backlash.

Periods of “Great Awokening” in which elites shift farther left do not in fact lead to a meaningful allocation of resources and opportunities to the “genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society,” al-Gharbi said. They also do not lead to “significant and durable changes in public perception or treatment of people from historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups.”

What are the actual consequences? “Stuff that’s not great, in my opinion,” al-Gharbi said.

That includes increased support for right-aligned politicians, even from the groups that liberals purport to help, he said.

These periods also lead to the creation of “alternative knowledge economy infrastructure,” such as Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter or President Trump’s creation of Truth Social, he said. Those platforms build their audiences by fomenting culture wars and diminishing trust, al-Gharbi said; another outcome is decreased trust in institutions.

People on the left give ammunition to their detractors.

Liberal elites tend to think about politics and morality and engage in political action in ways that others find off-putting, al-Gharbi said.

“During these periods of Awokening, we become much more militant about mocking, demonizing, and censoring people who disagree with us, even for views that we adopted five minutes ago,” he said. For example, when some on the left started calling to defund the police during the Black Lives Matter movement, they said, “if you disagree with me about defunding the police, I’m going to call you a racist,” he said.

That created an opportunity for those on the right to win power by vowing to bring things back under control, al-Gharbi said.

In this way, “we usually end up handing shovels to our own gravediggers,” he said.

Still, the political pendulum swings and “anti-woke movements” that focus on right-wing symbols and rhetoric ultimately fizzle out, he said.

“Usually how these things end up resolving themselves is that the out party [which does not hold power] eventually finds its way to a position that better represents the positions of the public, and then they end up being able to unseat their rivals,” he said. “There’s some evidence that that’s happening now, although it’s important not to overstate the extent to which that’s happening.”