Prof. Andrew Koppelman on “The Cultural Contradictions of Wokeness—and Anti-Wokeness”
My sense of Koppelman is that he’s very much a man of the center-left, but I’ve found his work to be insightful. Here’s an excerpt of his latest column in The Hill, which builds on Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite:
American elites need to do a better job of making themselves useful…. The cluster of political positions and communicative moves called “wokeness” is often alien to the people it claims to represent—most black Americans don’t want to defund the police, and almost no Hispanics identify themselves as “Latinx.” …
[I]nequality is inevitable in a capitalist economy. The interesting question is under what circumstances it can be justified. Here the philosopher John Rawls offers a crucial insight: inequalities are justified to everyone in society if they operate to the benefit of the least advantaged. This is one important justification for capitalism, which has nearly eradicated world poverty…. The medical profession is [another] example: it is a path to wealth, but it has also prolonged everyone’s life, including the poorest people in the poorest countries….
[Symbolic capitalist professional elites are worth what they are paid]—but onl
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