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In this episode of Heterodox Out Loud, John speaks with Musa Al-Gharbi, Daniel Bell Research Fellow at HxA and a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia University. His research explores how we think about, talk about, and produce knowledge about social phenomena including race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy and domestic U.S. political contests.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Musa Al-Gharbi, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Musa Al-Gharbi: It's great to be here.

John Tomasi: It's a special pleasure to have you here. I'm a colleague around HxA. We spend a lot of time in the seminar room next door, and it's good to have you in the podcast studio to talk some ideas.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah, I'm really excited about the new podcast.

John Tomasi: I just want to start by telling you something that I'm not sure I've told you before, and it's how I first came to hear about you and your work. Two years ago, a little more than two years ago, I've been approached by Heterodox Academy about leaving my job at Brown to becoming, taking on this role. And I started reading around on the blog, and I started coming across these pieces by this person, Musa Al-Gharbi, these remarkable pieces. I actually printed out a couple and brought them along with me. One was called, one of your pieces, 2019, was called Seizing the Means of Knowledge Production, a clever title, and a lovely, lovely article. And another one was called, Colossal Failure, 100 Years of Viewpoint Diversity Activism, where colossal failure referred to split brain syndrome, as I remember. And I remember reading those pieces by you, showing the historical roots of our contemporary problems in a way that convinced me that these issues that HxA is struggling with and that our members are working on are not just problems of the day or of the hour, but longstanding problems of the, maybe committed, maybe entwined with the whole academic experience itself. Do you want to say something about those early pieces? Do you remember them? You've written so much, you've written so much since then, but do you remember those early pieces? Do you have any thoughts about that? Yeah, no, I mean, in general, I think that you often gain a lot of insight into almost anything by kind of stepping back and taking a kind of longer historical lens. And I can't talk about it right now because it's embargoed by Princeton University Press, but in my book, I do the same thing. I take this kind of long look at the last hundred years in some of these kind of periods of tumult around identity issues. And, you know, with respect to things like open expression or viewpoint diversity in higher ed, I mean, one of the striking things is going back all the way to like 19 to like 1915 era, when kind of the contemporary standards that we understand for tenure and promotion and academic freedom were kind of starting to be formalized. Almost immediately, one of the things that faculty members started doing once they wrested control away from people like university presidents to just fire people arbitrarily for political reasons was they started sorting themselves into cliques and engaging in these power struggles to kind of purge other people using faculty committee decision-making and things like this to kind of purge heretics and stuff. So the university president and other donors and stakeholders were more constrained in their ability to do that. But professors were given more power to do that themselves. And they, you know, they decided to utilize that power. And I think part of the part of the reason why some of these issues persist is because like what we're trying to do in academia is actually hard and in some ways kind of runs contrary to human nature. Like the normal human impulse is like people like to sort with people who are similar to them. That's a normal universal human impulse. People tend to respond to information that flatters their priors and kind of just and helps further their goals in a different way than they respond to information that challenges what they believe or is threatening to them, right? That's just a normal human impulse. And so we have these institutions that we've created that are trying to, while we're in these spaces and occupying these roles as professors, as scientists, we're supposed to embrace information that challenges our priors, that's threatening to the things that we already believe, that's maybe even challenging to our identity in some ways.

Musa Al-Gharbi: We're just supposed to like accept that if it's true and deal with it and work with people who are very different from us in the same way that we work with people who are more similar to us. And that's hard. That's a kind of perennial challenge, right? And so some of the tensions that we see around that just aren't going to go away, right? They're just kind of part of the, it's work that we have to do constantly, right?

John Tomasi: That's really nice. We might say scholarship and unnatural practice. There's something, it's really striking, right? Because we're embarked on this project that many of us sort of think, well, why can't universities just get their heads on straight and become the kind of places for open inquiry that we all know they ought to be? And part of the reason is that these human parts of us, all too human parts of us, keep on interceding.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah. If only it wasn't for the pesky humans, universities would be fantastic.

John Tomasi: Though I think, I know we would agree that though we'll always be humans inhabiting universities, there's still this open question, can we build better universities? Can we build them? Universities that have a wider range of viewpoints being expressed in a serious way, being received in serious ways. You know, the values that HxA really, really works on. That's sort of a, that's the project that brings us here.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah, absolutely. And in some ways, you know, what we've seen over the last hundred years is, in some ways, things are actually better with respect to having different people from different backgrounds engaging with each other and embracing different viewpoints. And in some ways, worse, right? So before it was the case, for instance, women, people of color, openly gay people, they weren't even part of the academic conversation. They weren't, they couldn't even apply to a lot of jobs. And now they can. And university spaces are a lot more diverse in that way. Even some of the hiring and promotion practices. And then even some of the hiring and promotion practices are in some respects significantly more meritocratic than they were, say, in the 1950s, right? Like, there's more concern for evaluating people along relatively objective standards. And there's, there's problems with that. There's kind of gamification. There's kind of this weird reductionist stuff that happens with this kind of over-focus on things like grants and publications and things like that. But, but it is the case that, and so there are these kind of, and this is another important point, I guess, is for almost any institution reform you do, there are trade-offs, right? So sometimes in trying to fix one problem, you create other ones. And this is, again, part of the reason why the work, why the work is perennial and why organizations like Heterodox Academy will probably always be necessary, actually, because the problem space might evolve, the specific issues might evolve that we're trying to deal with, but the, the kind of core tension of how do you have these institutions where people are engaging, trying to find the truth together and supposed to be engaging with people who are very different from them and dealing with evidence and information that is like challenging for them. That's just a, the specific challenges that, that, that academics face and the specific ways that we kind of trip up are going to be different from one era to another, but the, the kind of tensions and the difficulty of doing the work that we're committed to in higher ed is going to be persistent. Yeah. That's really, really beautifully said. And it makes me think just for myself that when I read that from you, from those early essays of yours that I, that I mentioned, my reaction was, oh, I better go do that work. But maybe my reaction should have been get out of this business, do something else to stay, stay at my university. So I want to go, go, I want to go back to you. And, and again, I'm just going to just tell you how I first, when I first met you and when I first met you, I think two years ago, a little bit less than two years ago, you were an East coast elite. You were this star graduating graduate, finishing graduate student coming out of Columbia with all kinds of incredible accomplishments. And you were super sophisticated. You are the super sophisticated person that I see here sitting there next to me.

John Tomasi: So I, I, when I met Musa Al-Gharbi, you were a, you know, high-flying Ivy league, East coast elite. Is that who you are? so that's a complicated. Is that who you always were? Should I say?

Musa Al-Gharbi: Should I lead the question that way? Well, so it's funny. So we actually met, we met briefly, before Heterodox Academy, because I did a talk at Brown at the political theory project. Yeah. Yeah. I did a talk on, on this paper that became the book that was kind of a, a crazy in some ways for what became my book about looking at, inequality in America and who, who, who benefits from it and how it's perpetuated. What year was that? I think 2018 probably. Yeah. and, and you told me then that, you like that I stock big game. Like the thing that you like about me is that I stock big game. It's been stuck in my head ever since. but, but yeah, before I was a fancy nerd, but may I say when you were stalking big game at Brown, you were an East coast elite.

John Tomasi: I was, I was, I was already, I was already here in the Ivy league, very comfortable from one Ivy league to another. so what, what tell us the backstory? Yeah, no, where'd you come from?

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah. I had a kind of a weird journey, to here, that took a long time. so I grew up in a military family in Southern Arizona and, I went through a whole bunch of different visions of, I really had no, like the thing that I wanted to do with my life initially was I wanted to be a priest. And then I had this crisis of faith and I became an atheist and I didn't really know like what I wanted to do with my life. So I was just attending community college classes in Arizona kind of off and on, for about, I don't know, good five or six years. and then working, in the, in the, in working jobs in retail and sales and, other things like that. yeah. Yeah. Until 2016, I was selling shoes.

John Tomasi: You were pretty good at it. I was, I was, I was, well, any tips, like what did you do?

Musa Al-Gharbi: Well, so actually I think, I think actually, selling shoes, and sales in general is actually maybe you develop some skills that are maybe useful for academia. So like, for instance, there's a perception maybe for people who does, who haven't done sales, that what you should do is like you, you should tell the customer what they want and you should try to ram as much stuff as you can into their bag or whatever. But actually, a good salesperson, because you can never like keep the business going from one sale. The way you keep the business going is repeat customers. And you get repeat customers by making sure that they get the thing that really satisfies, that they love, that they use all the time and they want to come back and they want to talk to you. And so what you do as a salesperson, keep going, keep going. This is great. Yeah. And so what you do as a salesperson is you, you, you start asking, like you, you become, you don't start by thinking, you know, what's best for them. You ask questions and you get to know them and you know their needs and then you find, and then you talk with them in a collaborative way to find out, you know, to find things that work for them. And then you start leveraging the knowledge you have about what's in this, about what the different models are, about what's in stock, about what's in fashion or whatever. So you, you do have some specialized knowledge, but you, and you start to leverage it to help, to help them find what they want. and, this is a skill that I think actually, more academics could do. And, how would it, so make the connection, how would it play out in the academy? Yeah. So for instance, I mean, I do a lot of, I do a lot of public facing work and, and public facing like writing for, media audiences. I mean, for, for the kind of the public in general is, similar in that way where you have to, figure out kind of what it is that the audience. So you have all this specialized knowledge about any number of things. but you have to determine like what is actually useful, to, to convey to the audience and how do you convey it to them in a way that they'll find to be compelling and, and useful. And that speaks to their needs, that speaks to their concerns, that speaks to the things that they care about. in fact, when I was at university of Arizona, for instance, I had, it was actually kind of a point of contention because I was a, I was a student and there were faculty members, who were like, who had been working on these issues for decades. And they had tons of knowledge, great knowledge, genuinely great, important knowledge. but when the media, wanted to ask about say the civil war in Syria, they often didn't reach out to the professors. They asked me and they asked me because I was out there in the, because the journalists themselves aren't experts in, in all of these things. And so they, when they're looking for someone to connect with, they, I'm out there in the public already taking this knowledge that I have and conveying it to people in ways that they found, useful.

John Tomasi: Even as a graduate student, you're doing that.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Mm-And so they, and so, yeah. And so journalists would reach out to me because they knew that I knew stuff and that I was, oriented to, to, to connecting it with their needs, with the needs that they had as journalists. I could give them a comment that they could use. They could say, where do you think things will be going in the next, six months? And I could give them a concise answer instead of talking for, well, you see, you have to go all the way back to, you know, et cetera, and giving them, and, and this is the point is like a lot of academics, like when they, when they try to convey knowledge to other people, they focus on the things that they think are the most important or interesting rather than starting from the question of like, oh, okay, well, why are they asking, like, what are they looking for? What do they need? What would be most useful for them to convey to them? Like what, what could I give them that they would actually find useful or compelling? And is that a shoe salesman? That's a shoe salesman.

John Tomasi: That's my, academic shoe salesman approach to it. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. And just a bit more about your personal life. So you had a difficulty when you're at, when you were at Arizona, can you say a bit about that? yeah, well, so, so there's this kind of, so I published this, this article in this journal called Middle East Policy and it's, it's, it was very exciting.

Musa Al-Gharbi: It was the top cited journal in the field of kind of contemporary Middle East studies at the time.

John Tomasi: And you were working in Middle East studies at the time.

Musa Al-Gharbi: I was, yeah, I was pursuing, dual degrees in philosophy and Middle East studies. And I was managing an academic consortium that brought together soldiers and students from more affected regions to study conflict together. and, And again, being from a military family, this was a natural kind of connection for you to make.

John Tomasi: Most people wouldn't do it, but you were doing it along with everything else you do.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Well, I mean, part of the reason I became a, part of the reason I started doing the, applied work in the first place was I had a twin brother, who was killed in Afghanistan. and then before that tragedy, I hadn't really, taken politics too seriously. you know, I thought the big questions in life were things like metaphysics and, and, politics as people getting distracted by the little things. but, after, as my, as I was kind of working through this tragedy with my family, I started to realize that politics was kind of more important than I thought and important in different ways than I thought. And so I switched, I was already in a philosophy program, but I switched my focus then from metaphysics to applied social epistemology. And I pursued a dual degree in Middle East studies with the idea of, focusing on things like national security and foreign policy to help other families avoid going through the kinds of tragedies that my, my own family.

John Tomasi: Can I just state that again? So you were working in, in meta metaphysics, which is one of the most, the most abstract clusters of problems in philosophy, one of the most abstract clusters of problems in the whole academy, I would say. And then this thing, your, your brother tragically, tragically died in combat and you shifted toward your field of study to think about, try to contribute to the world to make the world a better place in these areas, because now you're thinking about them so much.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah. And, and so I published this article in Middle East Policy and, there was a, there's kind of a cottage industry of, for lack of a better word, you could call them, I guess, like anti-Muslim, Muslim.

John Tomasi: So if you're, if you're someone who's- Anti-Muslim, Muslim.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah. Like, so if you're a Muslim person or someone from the Middle East and you want to say like, other Muslims are horrible, I would know. there's kind of a cottage industry of that if you want to go on kind of right-wing media doing that, especially at this time, which was like when ISIS was still a, a, a big thing. and so I got in an argument on Twitter with someone, so I published my article in Middle East Policy and someone who's part of this kind of media circuit.

John Tomasi: And it was an academic scholarly piece of work.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Mm-Yeah. Yeah. Obviously. and then someone who's part of that kind of media circuit, tried to, kind of troll me on Twitter, and, about the piece. And I, I kind of destroyed this guy.

John Tomasi: Like it was, it was like, I don't even engage this more, this way anymore for reasons that maybe we'll talk about, but, but, You were still learning about Twitter.

Musa Al-Gharbi: But at the time, yeah. So, so for instance, and it was, it was, So as he started losing the empirical side of the, of the, argument, he tried to shift to the, these kind of principles about liberty and stuff like this. And I was like, oh, great. I'm at university of Arizona. One of the top political philosophy you want to talk. Okay. Let's, let's talk principles. Let's do this. Just showed, twisted the knife, showed this was a completely, that he, you know, he was a kind of vacuous individual. but the problem with that is, he had much bigger platforms than me, right?

John Tomasi: I was a graduate student who, and a columnist for Al Jazeera, but he had access to Fox news, which is like one of the top, you know, You were, you were a columnist for Al Jazeera.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Al Jazeera America. Yeah. and, so election day. So he, he basically launched the smear campaign to try to get me fired from the university of Arizona by taking bits and pieces from articles that I've published in, various places and taking them way out of context and kind of making it seem like I was, this kind of anti-American Muslim radical who was, corrupting the youth. And so on election day, 2014, if you would have gone to Fox news.com, the first thing you would have seen was my face, radical Muslim professor. They gave me an upgrade. I wasn't even a professor. I was not an instructor, like if only it was true that I was a professor. but, but yeah, every department and institution until it came out that the Republicans took the Senate at which, at which point that became the news. I was the news that day. I was the, I was the way that they filled the air.

John Tomasi: and how did that affect your experience at Arizona, teaching at Arizona and launching your career? So you're in the graduate program working towards a PhD.

Musa Al-Gharbi: No, I wasn't. I, I, I was, I had just finished my master's and I was working for this, academic consortium. and I was, an adjunct instructor in political science where I was teaching classes on national security and foreign policy. and every, as a result of this kind of campaign to get me fired, basically every department and institution that I was affiliated with at university of Arizona got flooded with death threats and hate mail and, like, right-wing journalists were trying to kind of, crash my classes so they could catch me in the act of corrupting the youth or, or whatever. and, and in the aftermath of that, the, university, even though I had kind of, glowing teaching recommendations and I was teaching core classes and I was publishing more than actual professors, even though I was not one, they didn't, they declined to renew my teaching contract. they, they, they let me go and I later found out that, I was blackballed. So the, my, my immediate supervisor wanted to rehire me. He was told apparently from higher ups under no circumstances, well, you renew the contract of this guy. because I guess a trustee got mad or something by the, by the, and then on top of that, I applied, when I applied to grad school, the next cycle, I applied to a couple of programs at university of Arizona and other places for PhD programs. and I got universally rejected from every school that I applied to. I only applied to what I thought were safe schools and I got rejected from all of them. and so it was kind of a dark period and I was like, oh, well, okay, I guess this, this isn't for me. And I was going to, maybe just, join the military as an officer, go into the family business. That's what my, both of my parents were military. My grandfather, was military.

John Tomasi: So three generations and, I just, but I need to just make a note here that your position when this happened to you, you were an adjunct professor, which is, we talk about at HxA, we talk about the importance of academic liberty and academic freedom and which groups are vulnerable and the adjunct professors are often the most vulnerable to these kinds of situations or the untendered long-term teachers.

Musa Al-Gharbi: And I think there's actually, if anything, the discussion is, almost too focused on the, in general, not necessarily at HxA, but I mean, just broadly, the, the conversation about academic freedom and stuff is too focused on, tenured and tenure track professors who feel uncomfortable and self-censored and things like that.

John Tomasi: Or on the other hand, students.

Musa Al-Gharbi: so those are the two, the two groups that everyone talks about a lot. It's like, you have professors, you have students, like you have tenure, tenure track, tenure stream professors and students. But then, there's this whole other group of people who actually do most of the teaching. They comprise most of the faculty positions increasingly on like something like 70% of all jobs in a given cycle, these days are for non-tenure line instructors. And they basically have no academic freedom to speak of. I mean, on paper, they do. I mean, even at the University of Arizona in the immediate aftermath of it, the university communications team was like, oh yes, well here at University of Arizona, we respect academic freedom. And then they proceeded not to renew my contract, right?

John Tomasi: Yeah. Just quietly don't, don't take the action. Like, like Hamline, Hamline University firing the adjunct professor who showed images of, of, of, of Muhammad. but just, I want to move to your work in a moment, but just to one more thing about your life, your life, your life is so fascinating. So there you were, you couldn't get into the second year graduate programs or the local programs you applied to. How do you, how'd you become an East Coast elite? Yeah.

Musa Al-Gharbi: So I got some life, I got some life changing advice. and so, and that advice was that, when I was only applying to safe schools, I was actually making a mistake. The schools that I thought were safe, were not safe for someone like me because most, PhD programs, what they're looking for is they have kind of very specific specializations and they want someone who's going to like play to the department strengths or kind of, fit into a kind of a neat kind of box. and they also have kind of relatively low risk aversion, because, they don't have a lot of money to kind of throw around on, on people who are either not going to make it into the program or who aren't going to be able to get jobs afterwards and things like this. So they're, they're kind of, they have concern about, like how likely are you going to be to actually, you know, make it through the program and, and possibly like do something with this degree that can help us with our rankings and whatever. and so, my advisor said, a better way to go instead of trying to play it safe would be to actually just apply it at the top programs because they have, they have a lot of money so they can be more risk, more risk taking if, if you can be the next big thing or you might explode in a blaze of glory, they're willing to roll the dice about that. And they can, they can have a bunch of flame outs because they've got endowments of billions of dollars. and, and, and they're hungry actually for, for people who are going to like make a big splash and shake things up and stuff in a way that other departments aren't necessarily. And so the next round I applied only to elite schools and then I got in basically everywhere I applied. I got into Columbia. I got into Yale. I got, so it was life-changing advice.

John Tomasi: and, I would describe that advice a little bit. I would, I would say that the elite schools, the most competitive schools are in the business of trying to find exceptional talent who are going to try to do potentially really, discipline-changing work. So a steady performer is not what they want. They're, they want to collect a whole group, small group, but still a whole group of people who are, have the potential at least to bust out and do some brand new work.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah.

John Tomasi: Which maybe is the same thing that you said, but it's a little bit different. Well, and actually the reason I picked the department- You're putting more, you put yours with more humility. I'm adding a little bit more meritocratic oomph to the concept, to the process.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Well, but the reason I picked the department I went to, Columbia, so Columbia Sociology was structured in this way where they, like their, their core priority is to find people who are going to do interesting work. That's going to either put the field in conversation with other fields in a new way, or it's going to move the whole field in a different direction. And so they free you up to do just that. So at Columbia Sociology, this isn't the case for all Columbia departments, but the Sociology program, you have no required courses after the first year. You can take whatever you want in any department, in any school and everything counts. You can just stop taking classes and do private studies with professors. If you want, you never take anything from a letter grade. There's no comprehensive exams. just kind of total freedom. They have you kind of basically act like a faculty member or like a, like a professional researcher from the beginning. And the way researchers work, as opposed to the way students work, as researchers find problems that interest them, then they pour themselves into that problem, as opposed to going through root, root, root, root learning the various pieces along the way. And it's not for everybody though. I mean, like some people actually need this structure, need more structure and they need, especially when you're a student and you're kind of trying to figure, and they, they try to tell you that like, it's kind of easy to languish in that program. Like people are easy to, people are eager to help you if you seek help, but no one's kind of holding your hand and there's kind of a lot of just total freedom. Not everyone, not everyone thrives in that. But for me, I had a pretty advanced, research agenda that was already underway. I had kind of questions that I was interested in. I'm a kind of interdisciplinary scholar by nature. And so for someone like me, it was like really just, you couldn't have picked a better place.

John Tomasi: I'll just mention too, just, you know, for our listeners that there are a number of elite graduate programs that have that same kind of structure. Like Caltech works that way. Oxford and philosophy works that way. There's all, there's that sort of a sense of you're on your own kid, but if you want to be on your own, cause you love the ideas and you're finding things to work on, then there's people who want to talk with you and work with you. And that's just kind of one of those interesting features of those, those kinds of programs.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah. And, Chomsky said before I read an interview with Noam Chomsky, cause he, he, and he went to, both in K-12 and then also the, when he went to college, he had this kind of weird arrangement, that was really unstructured like this. And he said, if he had been in a more, if he had been compelled to go into a more kind of rigorously structured thing, he's not sure he would have ever graduated. And I don't know if the same is true for me. Cause I had a wife and kids that like not graduating wasn't an option.

John Tomasi: Like I have to put food on the table, but, but, I think Chomsky, by the way, was, was his education was pretty unstructured from the beginning. So he, you may well, you may know that his, his father, worked at a, as I understand, worked at a, a newspaper stand on 72nd street on the, on the upper West side. I, I, I lived in an apartment near there, years ago. And apparently Chomsky used to sit around as a little, little Chomsky and, you know, read, look, talk to talk with the guys who was hanging around the newspaper stand, just kind of learning and talking and working with ideas informally as well, as well, as well as a school, I want, I want to shift to talk about some of your work and, I want to talk about your, the stuff you're working on now, especially, but before, before we do that, I just want to go back to a kind of a remarkable period of your scholarship regarding the, the, the run-up to the election of Donald Trump, because you are one of, one of the very few, I'll put it that way, who saw the Trump election coming. And I remember so well, I was a Brown at the time in the political science department and my colleagues who are experts on the American elections, and they're genuinely experts on this, they were, you know, you know, there were uniform in their belief that Hillary Clinton was going to win and was going to win big. And I even remember a department meeting before the election, when a couple of my colleagues went up to the chalkboard and just sketched out some different scenarios, how big of a win, what the implications were going to be for various other parts of our government. There was not an option on the board that said Trump was going to win, but you were out there, one of the very few talking about the real possibility of Donald Trump winning the election. Can you tell us about what you were thinking then? I want to know how you got there because all my social science friends want to know why, how do we miss that? What did we do wrong? How did, what did you do right? What were you, what were you thinking? And tell us, tell us what you were, tell us about your work back then.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah. I mean, so honestly, I think getting canceled by Fox News helped me here because, because when I got, before I had gotten, before, before the Fox News incident, I had been mostly, like my assumption was like, who would want to hear anything that I have to say as a black Muslim academic? Oh, well, probably someone on the left. And, and so I wrote pretty much only for left aligned outlets. I engaged pretty much with only left aligned people.

John Tomasi: And you see your, you describe yourself as a person from the left. When I call you an East Coast elite, I implicitly mean lefty.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah, liberal, of course. It's, yeah, it's implied.

John Tomasi: East Coast elite also means liberal typically.

Musa Al-Gharbi: But, but after I, so, but the way I responded to.

John Tomasi: You're saying that Fox News helped you sort of approach the election a little bit different.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Absolutely. Thank you, Sean Hannity. No, so one, yeah. So as I was kind of reckoning with like, how did this happen? Why did this, like, how was it that people were so willing to believe? Because again, like the truth of the matter is, again, I'm from a military family, military community from what was at the time, a pretty red state. And I was only doing the work I was doing at all because I personally know loss from war. So how is it that so many people could have been so convinced that I was the kind of person that I was portrayed as at Fox News? And there's, you know, the kind of typical thing that a lot of academics in that position would do would be to say, oh, it's easy. It's because they're terrible, evil people and Fox News is brainwashing them all and they're all racist and whatever, right? But at the time that this was happening, I was reading this work by this guy at Yale, Dan Kahan, who does this work on cultural cognition. And one of his core findings is that oftentimes when people seem to disagree about the facts and like one of the reasons why things are intractable is like, it's because people are talking past each other like that. And so if you try to engage with people about substance and you just concede, if you just talk to them in terms of their own values, in terms of their own narratives, in terms of their own frames of reference, you can actually make progress on the substance because you're not, if you just stop arguing about the framing of the facts and start and kind of go on to their territory and talk to them about the facts. And so I responded to getting canceled by Fox News by doing a pilot, by trying to test Kahan's theories in the world. So I started taking the same articles that I would normally publish in Al Jazeera or Salon or somewhere like that. And I started submitting them instead to the National Interest and the American Conservative and National Review.

John Tomasi: I just want to pause for a second because that's kind of a remarkable moment. Most academics I know who are public intellectuals wouldn't consider trying to publish in the outlets of the people who don't share their conclusions. I wouldn't have either.

Musa Al-Gharbi: And it was only getting canceled by Fox News that made me think, well, actually, maybe it's important to talk to those people, right?

John Tomasi: So now you're thinking to yourself, I'm going to write pieces for that audience that's going to be judged by those editors. And they're not going to share my conclusions. They're not going to make it easy on me. They're probably going to make it hard on me. Go on. So what did that lead you? Where did that path lead you?

Musa Al-Gharbi: Well, yeah. And so I took the same article that I would write for Al Jazeera or whatever. I just changed the framing a little bit. Like I never said anything. I never refrained from saying anything that I would say in a left-leaning outlet. I never said anything that I didn't believe. I just changed the way I talked, the way I conveyed the same facts in a different way and to a different audience. And not only were the editors willing to publish these articles, that were challenging. I mean, they were challenging articles. Like my first article that I published for the American Conservative was about why there are no Black Republicans, why there aren't many Black Republicans. And it was not gentle. Like it was critical. But the piece was really well received. Like my articles were really well received. And the conversations I started having with people, and actually the effort that I had to exert to think about, how can I talk about this in a way that is going to be accessible and compelling and resonant for the audience that I'm trying to reach and for the editors that I have to work through, the effort of trying to talk in this other language, to talk in the language of the people that I was trying to reach. In virtue of doing that, though, and in virtue of engaging with people as I published pieces, my own thinking on a lot of issues started to evolve. I started to actually recognize that there are all these blind spots. There are all these things that I hadn't considered before. There were dimensions to these problems that I had been kind of taking for granted. And so having these exchanges with people who actually didn't agree with me already, both deepened my own understanding of issues and also led me to like re-evaluate the work that I had been doing before, right? Because if you're trying to convince people, for instance, not to bomb Syria, then you should probably, then if you're publishing in Al Jazeera, don't bomb Syria. There's nothing like edgy about that. Like there's a lot of like tenured radicals who publish articles like this in left-leaning outlets and think they're doing something risque, but they're not. There's preaching to the choir. There's nothing risque about that, right? And not only is it not like edgy, but it's also not particularly valuable because you're not actually – in order – if you want to stop them from bombing Syria, you have to go to the people who want to bomb Syria and explain to them in a way that they'll care about, in a way that they'll find persuasive or compelling, why they shouldn't do it. And so it changed the way that I do my own writing now.

John Tomasi: So now, no matter – Can I – I'm sorry to interrupt, but I just want to say that just to put a name on this, what you're describing, you're describing doing that unnatural scholarship, that unnatural thing that is, even for the best scholars, often a bridge too far or an undiscovered country perhaps because the incentives don't encourage people to do that. So you were doing this kind of unnatural practice. I want to know more about how you started analyzing the election as it was coming.

Musa Al-Gharbi: So also – and it was – so because I was already in this habit, I think it helped a little bit because I'd already been engaging more with the right and reading things on the right more and more charitably.

John Tomasi: Constructive disagreement, one of our three big principles at HxA.

Musa Al-Gharbi: And, yeah, and then so going into the election, I was – I also observed that everyone was very convinced that Hillary Clinton was going to win and Trump was going to lose, that Trump stood no chance. And it wasn't – the thing that I was disturbed by or that I found interesting, the reason that I started working on politics, because before this I had done almost nothing on domestic politics. I was mostly focused on national security, foreign policy stuff. And the reason I was interested in this is because I saw this epistemological bubble forming where it wasn't just that people were like, oh, I think it's more likely than not that the Republican is going to lose this, or that I think it's more likely than not that Trump is going to win. It's like it's literally impossible. There are all these pieces. It's literally impossible that Trump would even win the Republican nomination. If he wins the nomination, I'll eat the paper this column is printed on and things like this, right? And then he won the nomination, and for like five seconds, people were like, huh?

John Tomasi: Eating – as they're eating the paper.

Musa Al-Gharbi: As they're eating the paper, they're like, huh? Maybe we should – we won't underestimate this guy again. But then once Hillary Clinton won, they're right back to that. It's going to be a landslide. The Republicans are going to be destroyed for a generation, et cetera. Nate Silver gave Hillary Clinton – gave Trump a 30% chance of winning.

John Tomasi: I remember reading that.

Musa Al-Gharbi: One in three.

John Tomasi: I remember reading that. And Musa, let me tell you something that I'm not very proud of, but I'll just share it here on the podcast to the whole world as well. I was so convinced by my colleagues that Hillary Clinton was going to win that when we were watching the election, our results come in, and he won a couple surprises. I was like, you guys know, I know from the experts, and I actually went to bed. I didn't stay up to watch the end of the election. I was that convinced by my – I'm embarrassed to say it, but here, I just did. So go on.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah, yeah, so Nate Silver, Nate Silver, he got a lot of – Nate was – he was one of the ones, I bet.

John Tomasi: Yeah, he was more bullish.

Musa Al-Gharbi: He gave one in three chances, which is not – which is significant. I mean, a lot of people – well, okay, we'll skip about how people misunderstand probability. But the point is, is he just said – but even one in three, even saying a one in three chance, people were like, what's wrong with you, Nate Silver? Are you a Hillary Clinton – are you a Donald Trump supporter? One in three chance? That's crazy. But for me – so I came from a military family. Both of my parents were military intelligence. And in the military, there's this practice called red teaming. And what red teaming is, is because lives are on the line, depending on if the plan you drew up and the assumptions you're working from are accurate, like if they're wrong, the people that you sent in will die. And in fact, you can, on top of that, have a whole bunch of other kind of collateral problems, diplomatically, geopolitically. Like a lot is on the line with plans being accurate or not. And so there's this practice that developed, especially after the war on terror started going kind of sideways, called red teaming, where you would have one set of – you would have one set of people draw up a set of plans, and then you would have another set of people who had no role in drawing up those plans, basically approach it as a hostile actor. So they would say – they would come into it thinking, if you follow this plan, you're all going to die. America is going to be set back. Like it's going to be a problem. This plan is garbage. And here's why. Like they approach it as a hostile actor. So the idea behind red teaming is you start by assuming the opposite of what you want to happen, and then you look for evidence for why the thing you don't want to happen will happen. And so I basically started red teaming the 2016 election. I was curious. I was like, well, is there actually any evidence that this guy – that Trump could win, that maybe everyone is wrong? And I found a lot of it, to my surprise and dismay. And so I spent most of the 2016 cycle trying to get people to take this more seriously, largely in vain.

John Tomasi: And some of the information that you were looking at that other people were not seeing was not just about the narrative of angry white people rattling around Trump. It was also the reactions of minority citizens to the situation. Can you tell us something about that?

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah. Well, and so actually – so the minority – the trends among minority voters. So one of the most disturbing things to me about the 2016 election wasn't even that there was this kind of enormous collective failure to understand Trump's prospects leading into the election. But then after the election, the thing I was almost more disturbed by than the kind of complete blindness during the election was that after the election, very little was learned. Because rather than going like, oh, okay, where did we go wrong here? What's wrong with the Democratic Party such that we're not compelling to voters in the way we should be? What's wrong with experts and academics such that we undervalued this guy's prospects? Instead of doing that, there was a little bit of that. But most – probably the predominant thing was, what's wrong with these people that they elected this person? And so there was this whole genre of work basically pathologizing Trump voters as racist, sexist, authoritarian, feminist, misogynistic. There was work on like fake news and the Russians. So just basically like what kind of pathology and deficit, what kind of evil external actors are responsible for this rather than like really doing a lot of reflexive thinking about what – where things went wrong on their end.

John Tomasi: Which, by the way, is another symptom of team thinking. The team thinking doesn't allow you to ask yourself, what are the premises that we share? How can we make – we grow and change and become stronger in our views? It's a simpler path and maybe a more natural path to pathologize the other side.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Yeah, absolutely. I mean that's the normal – it's an example of one of these kind of normal tendencies that we all have.

John Tomasi: Natural, natural.

Musa Al-Gharbi: But the problem with this tendency is it interferes with our ability, especially the problem with this – so this tendency for us to start by assuming people like us are kind of morally and factually right and analyzing difference from us in terms of pathologies and deficits, that's kind of a normal thing. But in a world where the academy was constructed of this kind of really heterogeneous mix of people, that kind of bias might actually not be that problematic because you would have this kind of – if you tried to engage in that kind of partisan thinking, then you would be checked by someone else who would like highlight the issue and the things that you're – the kind of biased ways that you're talking about this group or the things that you didn't think about that you should think about. And you could have this kind of colliding set of – but in a world where pretty much everyone in the academy is on the blue team, then you don't have that happen. What instead you can have happen is that biases actually get reproduced and exacerbated. And it becomes hard actually for the people who are going to – who are like, I don't know about that to actually break through because the whole – there's this kind of whole blue team cartel that's kind of crushing. And so you saw this in the aftermath of the election. So with respect to minority voters, for instance, one of the things I point out in my research is that starting from basically 2010, my non-white voters have been consistently shifting away from the Democratic Party in every midterm, in every general election. Because in 2016, the reason why Trump won – like Trump, turnout among white voters was actually stagnant in 2016 compared to 2012. And Trump won a slightly smaller share of the white vote than Mitt Romney. And the reason he was able to win then was not because he appealed to white supremacy and led to a bunch of white, like, enthusiasm to come to the race and turn out to drive to destroy the legacy of Barack Obama or whatever these narratives were. That didn't happen. There wasn't increased white turnout. Trump didn't get an extraordinary share of the white vote. He got a smaller share of the Mitt Romney. The reason he was able to win is because he gained significantly more black votes than Mitt Romney, significantly more Hispanic votes than Mitt Romney, significantly more Asian American votes than Mitt Romney. And so Trump won because of shifts among minority voters despite his relative weakness with whites compared to Mitt Romney.

John Tomasi: And those claims about the – those data points that you just mentioned, they run directly against that main narrative that we're all hearing, that it was basically a resurgence of racism in America, and that's why he won rallying the – And what's striking is that the trends have continued.

Musa Al-Gharbi: They've continued through 2018. Like, if you look at the midterm elections, the Republicans lost seats. But why did they lose seats? It's because of shifts of highly educated white voters. The Republicans actually held their margins with non-white voters. In 2020, Trump actually won – the Republicans actually increased their share of black voters. They increased their share of Hispanic and Asian voters. And not just non-white men, but women as well, non-white women as well. And this would have been impressive. This increased vote share would have been impressive, even if turnout had been stagnant, but turnout was much higher. So Trump – actually, Trump won a bigger share of a bigger pie of non-white voters in 2020. And the reason Joe Biden was able to win was because of shifts among the white vote, especially white men. It was actually white men that saved America from Trump. It was shifts among white men. If it was – the shifts among minority voters actually were towards the Republicans. And again, it's – and in 2022, similarly, Democrats continue to lose – lose vote share with non-white voters. And this is the thing that – because so many of us in academia are locked into this narrative that the only reason someone would vote Republican is because they hate non-white people, or they hate Muslims, or they hate LGBTQ people, or they're misogynistic, or something like that.

John Tomasi: Hate has no home here. Yeah. I am a Democrat. I am. Yeah.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Because they're so convinced of this, it's like impossible for them to sometimes see data that are right in front of their face. So I have this paper that I did called Race in the Race for the White House on Social Research in the Age of Trump that was published in The American Sociologist. And what I show in that paper is that there are all of these, like, highly cited, very influential studies that purported to show that the Trump voter was motivated by racism that are filled with, like, blatant errors and confounds. Like, in one case, there was a graph – this guy had a visual to show that in 2016 the Trump vote was driven by racism. And what the chart showed was that in 2016 the gap between Democrats and Republicans on symbolic racism measures was bigger than it had ever been before. And on this basis, he argued, therefore, race probably played a bigger role in this election than in previous ones. That's a reasonable inference. But then he went on to conclude, therefore, Trump voters must have been driven by racism. But what's striking is, when you look at his chart, what it actually shows is that Republicans in 2016 were actually less – even if we just bracket the symbolic racism stuff and just assume that it measures what people think it measures. Okay. Republican voters were less racist in 2016 than they were in 2012. That is, Trump voters were less racist than Romney voters. That's what his data showed. And the reason the gap – you can just look at the graph and see this. You can just – it's a downward trend. And the reason the gap between Democrats and Republicans was bigger than ever before was because of this radical shift on the blue line among Democrats. So Democrats from 2012 to 2016 shifted to endorsing these kind of symbolically racist attitudes to the lowest levels in the history of this graph, which goes from 1988 to 2016.

John Tomasi: So when you say symbolically racist, do you mean identitarian? What kind of things are you thinking of?

Musa Al-Gharbi: Oh, so symbolic racism scales usually measure things like, for instance, opposition to affirmative action is coded as symbolic racism. So the idea behind symbolic racism is that it's now taboo to say, like – to just say, I don't like black people. You shouldn't marry black people. Black people are inferior. But a lot of people can't say that anymore, but they still feel things like that. And so they find ways to – and so you have to – in order to kind of capture the kind of discrimination, discriminatory, prejudiced attitudes that people have, you have to use indirect measures to get at those. And so that's what symbolic racism scales are supposed to do. Now, there's a lot of contestation about the extent to which they actually do that. But even if we just take for granted that his graph measures racism, what you see is that the reason the gap is bigger is because Democrats were less racist in 2016 than in any year previous. In fact, they were less racist than when they had a black person on the ballot from their own party, America's first black president, Barack Obama. In fact, when Barack Obama was on the ballot, Democratic endorsement of racism went up and stayed up, which is completely unanalyzed in the literature, by the way, because we don't focus on the blue line. And so he took this effect that's completely driven by shifts among Democrats and used it to impute something about Republicans that his own data, that you can just look at the chart and see the thing he was trying to impute, is wrong. Republicans didn't grow more racist. They grew less racist. You can just look at the chart and eyeball it and go, yeah, that's what happened. But he literally couldn't see it. Like, it's right in front of his face. And not only could he not see it, the editors couldn't see it, the people citing it couldn't see it. So there's this kind of cascade of blindness. And this is exactly the problem is when everyone is on the blue team, you can have these kind of obvious things that are just right in front of your face, but that are, like, literally impossible for you to see almost.

John Tomasi: So let me try counterfactually with you on that state of affairs. What if the academy during those years, 2012, 2016, what if the ideological imbalance was reversed? So let's imagine we have political science departments where there's 80% of people who are all registered Republicans, and proudly so, and 10% who are more radical on the free market side, let's say libertarians. And there's hardly any progressives at all, hardly any Democrats at all, let's say. And the ones who are, the Democrats who exist in the academy are people low profile generally. They don't speak the word. Would they have analyzed, would our scholarship around the elections have been different? Not just in the media, but with the scholarly studies that were done, how would it have been different?

Musa Al-Gharbi: Well, okay.

John Tomasi: Would it have been better? Are you going to see colossal blind spots on the other side?

Musa Al-Gharbi: No, no, you'd see blind spots on the other side. So you can see this at places like Liberty University, for instance, where it's overwhelmingly Republican. You still have censorship of political views. It's just censorship that cuts in the other direction, and you'd still have systemic blind. In fact, one of the things that I want to do, a paper that I want to write, and anyone who's watching this, hit me up if you want to write this with me. It's like, I'm really, I would actually really love to do a study that basically, that does this exact thing. That asks, okay, if we were going to analyze this, if we were going to analyze Democrats the way mainstream people analyze Republicans, what would that look like? And so, for instance, I can, I already have an idea of, so for instance, right now there's this whole genre of studies that get published that's basically like, why would someone vote for Trump? Is it because they're more racist, or sexist, or authoritarian, or ignorant? Like, which one of these negative traits best explains the variance for why people would vote for Trump? Okay, now if they were presented with a study that's like, why would someone vote for Hillary Clinton? By the way, they don't even ask that question. The question of why someone would vote for Hillary Clinton is not like an, even an interesting scholarly question for most scholars. It's like obvious to us. So we don't even, we have all these studies about why would you vote for Trump, but we don't even go, why would you vote for Barack Obama? Why would you vote for Barack Obama? We don't even ask that. But, but if you did, if you did, why would you vote for Hillary, why do people vote for Hillary Clinton? Is it that they are, is it that they hate America? Is it that they're communist sympathizers? Is it that they're anti-God? And you could, if you design, misogynist, we could like rank, rank, rank all these different things. Anti-male or anti-white, you could actually design scales. Like you could reverse code the patriotism scales and you would 100% find that if you, if you chose to interpret the, the, the, the coefficients, the way that we interpret them when we're reading Republicans, you would 100% find. If you reverse coded the patriotism scales, if you reverse coded the patriotism scales, that voting for Democrats was correlated with lower levels of patriotism. So you could say the, the democratic vote was driven by anti-Americanism. If you wanted to, in court, you know, describe the findings, the same uncharitable kind of ways. And similarly, if you looked at communist sympathies, you would 100% find that people on the democratic side are more inclined to support socialism or communism. And so if you were going to interpret them the same way, you can say, oh, well, the democratic vote is driven by communism and you can see this. And this is, one of the things that's striking is, about the, the, the prejudicial way, nature of the way that, so for instance, there are these scales that are developed like social dominance orientation. And, which is like, how inclined, like how, how, which is a measure of like inegalitarian views. And, and, one of the things that's striking is when you do polls and surveys and you look at the difference between Democrats and Republicans on, in, in symbolic, symbolic, sorry. And social dominance orientation, what you'll often find in studies is like something like, the Democrats will be something like, say it's a 10 point scale where one is completely egalitarian. And, you'll have something like, you'll have something like Democrats are a 3.5 on the social dominance scale and Republicans are something like 3.7. and on this basis, because the Democrats are lower on the scale, they'll say, well, see, the Republicans are driven by dominance orientation, but their, their scores are objectively low. In fact, since both of them are under the, both Democrats and the Republicans are under the midpoint of the scale, they're less than five on a 10 point scale. It would be more accurate to describe both Democrats and Republicans as fundamentally egalitarian with Democrats, with maybe the Democrat vote being slightly more oriented towards egalitarian than the Republican vote. But both of them fundamentally are egalitarian, but that's not the way it's described. The way it's described is that the Republicans are driven by their commitment to dominance. And so if you, if you wanted to analyze Democrats in the same way, even though most Democrats are not socialists or communists, because they would rank higher on the communism scale, you would say, aha, the democratic vote is driven by communist commitments and sympathies, or it's driven by anti-Americanism. The hatred of America. Democrats are more likely to be non-religious or, or, or, or atheists. And so you, you would find that scale and go, aha, see, the democratic vote is driven by hatred of God. Right. And, and, and that's, and so that's, that's what I think it would look like if you, and I, I want to publish a paper actually where I do this, where I just put together the scales, run the regressions, and then say like, oh, look, here's, here's how I'm being very like front forward about what I'm doing. So this is a, that this is a, that we're analyzing the Republicans in the same way, right? Just to illustrate.

John Tomasi: I want to, I want to close by just to beg you to say a word or two, if you might like about, about the book you have coming out. It's called, We Have Never Been Woke. One of the interesting things about the book that I think I can share here is that there was a, a bidding war among some top presses to have the book come out, which is kind of an unusual thing for anyone to happen to anyone, but even more unusual for a person finishing a PhD. Graduate students are usually desperate to get their first book published anywhere. And there you were sitting in the catbird seat, ironically, given your, Pat, your history and that your, your trajectory of actually having your choice among top presses. Can you say, just tell us a word about that book?

Musa Al-Gharbi: Sure. So the, the, the basic thing that it, the basic argument of the book is that over the last half century or so, there's been a kind of shift in the global economy to favor people who work in what you might call the knowledge industries. So like journalism, research, science and technology, nonprofits, education, consulting, finance, things like this. What's interesting about a lot of these kind of knowledge professions is that from the beginning of the professions, they've kind of justified themselves and, and legitimize themselves and define themselves in terms of altruism. So these are helping professions. They're, they're serving the greater good. They're, they're kind of oriented towards helping the marginalized and the disadvantaged in society. And most of the people who belong to these professions self-identify as liberal and are affiliated with the democratic party. They're the Americans most likely to self-identify as environmentalists or feminists or anti-racists or allies of LGBTQ people. And so what you might think is that as people like us kind of gain more power over society and gain control of more wealth in the United States, that things would be getting more and more egalitarian, more and more equal. That's not what you see. In some dimensions it is actually, interestingly, on the symbolic dimensions of, of life, like things like overt bigotry are less tolerated. Now you have to like things like representation are, are a bigger priority. Right. Socioeconomic inequalities over the same period have increased significantly, including, racialized and gendered inequalities. And, and, and, and, and a lot of respects, actually the United States in 2023, looks a lot like the United States in, in the Gilded Age. and, and, these two trends are, are, are not, unrelated. They're both tied to the rise of this new, knowledge economy, and the professionals who kind of dominate it. And, yeah, so that's the argument of the book. One of the, what the book seeks to explore is to under, is to understand this tension where the people, like today, it's the case that the people who benefit most from what sociologists would describe as gendered inequality or racialized inequality, or even just socioeconomic inequality in general, the people who benefit most from inequalities are also the people who are most likely to understand themselves as egalitarians.

John Tomasi: it's fascinating. It's fascinating. And the book's called, We Have Never Been Woke. So we'll, we'll look forward to this. When is that coming out?

Musa Al-Gharbi: it should be available for pre-order in March of 2024 and, available for purchase on, in the fall, early fall of 2024.

John Tomasi: And having been, having been lucky enough to read an advance, to read an advance copy, I'll just say to our listeners, it's really something. And it's, if you've enjoyed this conversation with Musa, you'll really enjoy the book. It's, it's a, it's a fabulous, it's full of surprises. And it has, if I may close by saying it has that book, your book shows this, this, I think it was really distinctive, methodological characteristic of your work and your approach to scholarship, which is something like a deep perspectivalism. I think you, more than most people I know, most scholars who I know are just so intensely and so constantly aware that we're always seeing the world from some perspective. And what you seem, you seem to have this easygoing drive to see the world, to be aware of that and to try to shift to other perspectives as you, as you go about doing your work. And, and, and I'm just going to embarrass you by telling you that, you know, that, that combination of rigorous scholarly perspectivalism with a kind of peace to all that you seem to carry with you, you call it, you cross these ideological lines. You sit with people from very different ideological commitments with very fiercely held opinions. And you sort of move through that world with such grace. It reminds me of the Gandhi's conception of ahimsa, which is often translated peace, but it's also means truth. And as I'm sure, you know, Gandhi talks about truth and a deep truth, truth, truth revealed by religions as being like a gem with different facets. And to understand the whole of the truth would require that we could see through all these different perspectives, or at least try to see them simultaneously. And there's some of that ahimsa about the way you, you carry yourself in the world that I just really admire.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Oh, thank you. That's a, that's a high praise thing.

John Tomasi: How can I not end it by, by embarrassing you with a compliment like that? Musa Al-Gharbi, thank you for joining us on Heterodox Out Loud.

Musa Al-Gharbi: Oh, it's been great. It's been a lot of fun.