Why Wokeness Failed (Robert Wright & Musa al-Gharbi)
Robert Wright's Nonzero
Nonzero
4.7 • 618 Ratings
🗓️ 10 February 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
0:28 Musa’s track record as Trump-reader and his new book, We Have Never Been Woke 2:19 The reason Trump won—twice 14:49 Messaging that works for the working class 20:58 Has the left lost the faith(ful)? 27:39 Who is wokeness even for? 33:44 Biden’s bad messaging 36:04 Why elites failed to deliver on social justice 51:28 Heading to Overtime
Robert Wright (Nonzero, The Evolution of God, Why Buddhism Is True) and Musa al-Gharbi (Stony Brook University, We Have Never Been Woke, https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/). Recorded January 29, 2025.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/NonzeroPods
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero podcast. You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast. |
| 0:27.1 | Hi, Musa. |
| 0:30.8 | Hey, Bob. |
| 0:31.5 | How's it going? |
| 0:32.9 | Can't complain. |
| 0:34.1 | Let me introduce this. |
| 0:35.0 | I'm Robert Wright, publisher of the non-zero newsletters. |
| 0:37.9 | This is a non-zero podcast. You're a Musa Al Garby, a sociologist and a professor of communication |
| 0:45.0 | and journalism at Stony Brook University and the author of We Have Never Been Woke, published by Princeton University Press, pretty recently. |
| 0:58.3 | Like, I think, I don't know what, four or five months ago? |
| 1:02.3 | October 8th, whenever that was. |
| 1:04.5 | Let me do the math. Yeah, yeah. I'll call that a few months. |
| 1:09.0 | And we're going to talk about the book. |
| 1:16.2 | First, we're going to talk about a related matter, which is Donald Trump. |
| 1:22.9 | I'm going to try to get you to give some tactical and maybe even strategic guidance to opponents of Trump. |
| 1:28.8 | At a minimum, tell them some mistakes that maybe you should avoid that some of them made last time around. I should say by way of establishing your credentials here, you were one of the very few |
| 1:35.4 | people emphasizing in the run-up to the 2016 election that Trump actually had a good chance |
| 1:40.8 | of winning. Not many people were saying that at all, certainly not going |
| 1:44.6 | on record the way you were. And you and I had a podcast conversation a year or two into the Trump |
| 1:52.5 | administration that was called Why Trump Won and Could Win Again. So I guess you're two for two. |
| 2:00.5 | I think you had in mind the 2020 election |
| 2:03.2 | is the most likely time he would win, but actually he almost did win that. And in any event, |
... |
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