Crabs in an Ivory Bucket

The past five years of seen thousands of articles about one lone professor facing down the woke mob — and the New Yorker alone must be responsible for at least a few dozen of them. But very few have nailed the real stakes like Emma Green’s recent profile of James Sweet, former president of the American Historical Association. That’s because very few writers in the genre have bothered to explore the professional caste dynamics that usually underly white collar disputes over wokeness.

Green, to her great credit, goes there. After giving plenty of space to a fairly standard summary of the surface-level conflict — older white professor opines on the danger of “presentism” and critiques the 1619 Project, causing a younger and more racially diverse pool of professors takes umbrage — she dives into the political economy of academia:

A commonplace about the wokeness wars is that they essentially recapitulate the “political correctness” arguments of the 1990s. That’s true, but it isn’t the whole truth: there is a difference, and much of it lies in the relative labor situation of the combatants. The Clinton-era job market for academic historians may have been more precarious than it was in the 1960s, but Ph.D.-holders of that era certainly hadn’t seen how bad it could get. Similarly, book store sales were still on the rise, and prestigious magazines were experiencing something of a heyday. Craigslist had yet to kill the newspaper classified page, and Hollywood was still producing mid-budget, mass market films oriented around bona fide stars. Compared to now, the culture sector — comprised largely of the academic, film, journalism, and publishing industries — was in more than decent shape.

A lot has changed. The bottom has fallen out of the job market in social sciences and the humanities. The economics of book publishing and movie-making have gotten totally fucked. And as for journalism—well, we all know what’s happened to journalism.

As a result, the culture sector now has a tiny and dwindling number of positions that satisfy the average white collar culture worker’s desire for both stability and professional recognition. At the same time, there are more prospective candidates for those jobs than ever. We find ourselves with a classic case of what UConn’s Peter Turchin calls “elite overproduction.” The remaining high-status, high-stability posts are occupied by an elite within the cultural elite; their nominal colleagues mostly get consigned to a vast pool of precarious labor. Some of this is objectively low-wage labor; much of the rest of it is just low-wage relative to the sizable investments these culture workers plunged into their educations.

Within this hierarchy, older and more entrenched hierarchies reassert themselves. The precarious culture worker is probably younger, and more likely to be a woman, non-white, and/or queer. Higher-status culture workers are also more likely to have capitalized on either inherited wealth or family connections to land their spots at the top. This is basically why the whole nepo baby discourse has become so popular.

But this is not a stable equilibrium. First of all, the number of available spots at the top is continuing to shrink. Second, holding one of those spots is no guarantee you’ll get to keep it forever. Celebrity professors may have tenure, but they’re still expendable; the contingent worker pool contains plenty of younger, hungrier, savvier academics eager to take their place. This fundamental asymmetry — the combination of relative comfort and clammy hyper-vigilance that marks life in the upper strata of the culture sector — has haunted the “cancel culture” panic. So too has the justifiable resentment of those not at the top: the people toiling away as underpaid adjuncts or freelancers while well-off (mostly older, mostly whiter) mediocrities enjoy the few remaining spoils in their chosen discipline.

This dynamic has supercharged the old political correctness debate, especially because the few beneficiaries of the current labor system are in no hurry to talk about the material context to all this (or perhaps, because they don’t need to worry about money, they fail to even realize that money is a factor). That’s why so much of the legacy media’s coverage — Green’s article being a notable exception — feels curiously insubstantial or elusive, like everyone’s politely talking around the real story. Probably the best example of this is the Harper’s letter, which somehow managed to perfectly capture the zeitgeist and fuel months of heated recriminations without saying anything remotely concrete.

The problem is that talking around the material context and endlessly rehashing fights over political correctness degrades public discourse—just not in the way that Sweet or the Harper’s letter let on. The problem is the very people who have attempted to monopolize the pages of major publications with turgid agonizing over woke censorship.

As those at the top of the media and academic food chain have gotten more paranoid and more jealous of their positions, they’ve also become more tedious and parochial. Who wants to read endless fretting over the fate of literal billionaire J.K. Rowling? Who, besides the heirs and heiresses who sit at the very top of the Times hierarchy, is the audience for yet another Pamela Paul column about wrongful sort-of-cancellations?

Or to put a finer point on it: Don’t the last full-time public intellectuals in American life have anything other than their own jobs to be public intellectuals about? Aren’t they bored with listening to themselves? And don’t they realize they’re making the case for their own obsolescence?