Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I am the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

I am joined today by Musa Al Garby. He is a sociologist in the School of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. His new book, his first book,

is exciting, a lot of discussion and debate. It is probably the most substantive book yet written

on the subject of what is called wokeness.

It is called We Have Never Been Woke, the Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite.

It's available now from Princeton University Press.

Musal Garvey, welcome to Current Affairs.

Thank you. It's great to be here. Thank you so much.

I actually want to start with the election because you recently wrote on your substack.

You have a long dissection of the election called a graveyard of bad election narratives. And the reason that I would like to ask you a couple of things about the election is, first, one of our writers, Alex Brunzini vendor, who's about 18 years old, went to a presentation you gave recently on the election, said it was the best breakdown of the election he had seen anywhere by anyone.

And also, the thing that happened in the presidential election is closely related to what you write about in the book, because there's all this commentary on the fact that Kamala Harris won among rich people, and Donald Trump made a lot of inroads among working-class people, including among working-class black and Latino people, and all of this.

My God, but if Trump is a racist and the Democrats are the Party of the People and Trump

is the candidate of the billionaire elites, what the hell is going on here?

So give us your little answer to what the hell is going on here and what is being talked

about as the de-alignment in this election.

Yeah, I mean, so as you mentioned, I did publish this essay on my substack just yesterday or so.

But one of the things that's interesting is that I've actually written the same essay three times.

I wrote one.

I wrote the same essay after the 2020 election.

I wrote the same essay after the 2016 election, producing the same

kinds of charts to push back against the same kinds of narratives, and so on.

And so that I mentioned this only because one of the things that's clear in a lot of the

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