Members of Donald Trump’s inner circle understandably wish to interpret the election results as a mandate for the most extreme right-wing policies, which include conducting mass deportations and crushing their political enemies.

But how many Trump supporters think that’s what they voted for?

Many seem not to—persisting in their denial of not only Trump’s negative qualities and the extremism of his advisers, but the idea that he would implement policies they disagreed with. There were the day laborers who seemed to think that mass deportations would happen only to people they—as opposed to someone like the Trump adviser Stephen Miller—deemed criminals. There was the restaurant owner and former asylum seeker who told CNN that  deporting law-abiding workers “wouldn’t be fair,” and that Trump would not “throw [them] away; they don’t kick out, they don’t deport people that are family-oriented.” There are the pro-choice Trump voters who don’t believe that he will impose dramatic federal restrictions on abortion; the voters who support the Affordable Care Act but pulled the lever for the party that intends to repeal it.

This denial suggests that voting for Trump was not an endorsement of those things but a rebuke of an incumbent party for what voters saw as a lackluster economy. The consistent theme here is that Trump advisers have a very clear authoritarian and discriminatory agenda, one that many Trump voters don’t believe exists or, to the extent it does, will not harm them. That is remarkable, delusional, and frightening. But it is not a mandate.

[Read: Voters wanted lower prices at any cost]

During the last weeks of the campaign, when I was traveling in the South speaking with Trump voters, I encountered a tendency to deny easily verifiable negative facts about Trump. For example, one Trump voter I spoke with asked me why Democrats were “calling Trump Hitler.” The reason was that one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff, the retired Marine general John Kelly, had relayed the story about Trump wanting “the kind of generals that Hitler had,” and saying that “Hitler did some good things.”

“Look back on the history of Donald Trump, whom they’re trying to call racist,” one Georgia voter named Steve, who declined to give his last name, told me. “If you ask somebody, ‘Well, what has he said that’s actually racist?,’ usually they can’t come up with one thing. They’ll say all kinds of things, and it’s like, ‘No, what?’ Just because the media says he’s racist doesn’t mean he’s racist.”

I found this extraordinary because the list of racist things that Trump has said and done this past year alone is long, including slandering Haitian immigrants and framing his former rival Kamala Harris as a DEI hire pretending to be Black. He made comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood of the nation” and having “bad genes,” an unsubtle proxy for race. Trump’s very rise to the top of the Republican Party began when he became the main champion of the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not really born in America.

This is consistent with Trump voters simply ignoring or disregarding facts about Trump that they don’t like. Democratic pollsters told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent that “voters didn’t hold Trump responsible for appointing the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade, something Trump openly boasted about during the campaign.” Sargent added, “Undecided voters didn’t believe that some of the highest profile things that happened during Trump’s presidency—even if they saw these things negatively—were his fault.” One North Carolina Trump voter named Charlie, who also did not give me his last name, told me that he was frustrated by gas prices—comparing them with how low they’d been when he took a road trip in the final year of Trump’s first term. That year, energy prices were unexpectedly depressed by the pandemic.

Many Trump voters seemed to simply rationalize negative stories about him as manufactured by an untrustworthy press that was out to get him. This points to the effectiveness of right-wing media not only in presenting a positive image of Trump, but in suppressing negative stories that might otherwise change perceptions of him. And because they helped prevent several worst-case scenarios during Trump’s first term, Democrats may also be the victims of their own success. Many people may be inclined to see warnings of what could come to pass as exaggerations rather than real possibilities that could still occur.

[Read: The Trump believability gap]

Watching Trump “go from someone who’s beloved in the limelight to someone who’s absolutely abhorred by anybody … in the media is completely—I don’t understand it. It doesn’t make any sense to me,” another Georgia Trump voter, who declined to provide his name, said to me. “And generally, the things that don’t make sense are solved by the simplest answers.”

This speaks to an understated dynamic in Trump’s victory: Many people who voted for him believe he will do only the things they think are good (such as improve the economy) and none of the things they think are bad (such as act as a dictator)—or, if he does those bad things, the burden will be borne by other people, not them. This is the problem with a political movement rooted in deception and denial; your own supporters may not like it when you end up doing the things you actually want to do.

All of this may be moot if Trump successfully implements an authoritarian regime that is unaccountable to voters—in many illiberal governments, elections continue but remain uncompetitive by design. If his voters are allowed to, some may change their minds once they realize Trump’s true intentions. Still, the election results suggest that if the economy stays strong, for the majority of the electorate, democracy could be a mere afterthought.

Of all the promises, from quixotic to horrifying, that Donald Trump has made about the next four years, the one that seems least likely to be fulfilled is his vow to “defeat anti-Semitism.” He has nominated a slew of cranks who have dabbled in the oldest conspiracy theory of them all, a belief that Jews control the world.

Over the past decade or so, pernicious lies about Jewish villainy have drifted into the mainstream of American life. That’s a fact Trump acknowledges when he talks about his plans to “defend Jewish citizens in America.” But he tends to focus on the problem at college campuses, which constitutes an incomplete diagnosis. It allows Trump to ignore his own complicity in unleashing the worst wave of anti-Jewish sentiment in generations.

In his first administration, Trump provided rhetorical cover for supporters who blared hateful sentiments—those “very fine people,” Kanye West, and others. This time, he’s placing them in the line of presidential succession. If confirmed, this crew would comprise the highest-ranking collection of White House anti-Semites in generations.

Take Matt Gaetz, Trump’s nominee for attorney general. He is a fierce opponent of the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would curtail federal funding for institutions of higher education that fail to address the hatred of Jews when it flourishes on their campuses. There are principled reasons for rejecting the bill. But in the course of arguing against it, Gaetz revealed himself. He asserted that the legislation’s definition of anti-Semitism would penalize the belief that the Jews killed Jesus. This wasn’t a point Gaetz made in the spirit of protecting free speech. He fervently believes it himself. “The Bible is clear. There is no myth or controversy on this,” he posted on X. This is the canard from which the whole Western tradition of anti-Semitism flows, a belief officially repudiated by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council nearly 60 years ago.

And it wasn’t a stray expression. In 2018, Gaetz invited Charles Johnson, a notorious figure on the alt-right, to attend the State of the Union address as his guest. Johnson is a textbook example of a Holocaust denier. He insists that only 250,000 Jews died—and only of typhus—during World War II. In a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” session, he wrote that he agreed with a commenter “about Auschwitz and the gas chambers not being real.” When confronted with Johnson’s record, Gaetz admitted that he hadn’t properly vetted Johnson before extending him an invitation. Even so, he told Fox Business that Johnson is “not a holocaust denier.” That defense, given all the evidence about Johnson presented to him, is tantamount to an endorsement.

The essence of conspiracism is the description of the hidden hand, the ubiquity of all-powerful evildoers. That is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s overriding intellectual habit. He believes that the CIA killed his uncle, and he attributes autism to vaccines. In 2023, he was caught on video suggesting that COVID-19 might be a bioweapon. Espousing such a theory should be disqualifying for the job of running America’s public-health system. But he went further. He said that the disease was designed to attack Caucasians and Black people. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” (In case it needs saying, this is false.) As a well-practiced conspiracist, he knew to append his theory with a disclaimer, adding, “We don’t know whether it was deliberately targeted or not,” as if he were merely asking an innocent question. And when confronted with his own words, he denied any ill intent: “I haven’t said an anti-Semitic word in my life.”

[Read: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

But his insinuation echoed the medieval Christian libel that Jews had poisoned the wells of Europe, unleashing the Black Death. Kennedy’s winking accusation also mimics a strain of white-supremacist pseudoscience, which asserts that Ashkenazi Jews are a distinct race from Caucasians. According to this bizarre, and bizarrely prevalent, theory, that’s what makes Jews so pernicious: They can pass for white people while conspiring to undermine them.

Not so long ago, these sorts of comments would have rendered a nominee unconfirmable—or at least would have necessitated an excruciating apology tour. But anti-Semitism is no longer taboo. And it’s telling that Trump has adopted Elon Musk as a primary adviser, because Musk is a chief culprit in the lifting of that taboo.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he reversed a ban imposed by the company’s previous regime that kept anti-Semites and Holocaust deniers off the platform. Under his ownership, anti-Jewish voices became unavoidable fixtures on the site, broadcasting their bigoted theories without any fear of consequences.

One reason they have little to fear is that Musk has displayed sympathy for their worldview. Like them, he harps on the wickedness of George Soros, whom he once likened to the comic supervillain Magneto, a mutant who plots to wipe out humanity. (Like Soros, Magneto is a Holocaust survivor.) This comparison almost explicitly admits its exaggeration of Jewish nefariousness. And if the thrust of his sentiments wasn’t clear enough, he emphatically endorsed a tweet claiming that “Jewish communities have been pushing … dialectal hatred against whites.”

For a time, Musk refuted his critics by smearing them. He accused the Anti-Defamation League, the nation’s leading Jewish civil-rights group, of orchestrating a campaign to destroy him. Eventually, to fend off an advertiser boycott, he apologized, visited Auschwitz, and called himself “aspirationally Jewish.”

The presence of these conspiracists doesn’t suggest that Trump will pursue policies that provoke Jewish suffering. His support for Israel might even win him the approval of a growing segment of organized Jewry. Instead, the danger posed by his appointees is that their mere presence in high office will make American anti-Semitism even more permissible; they will make conspiracies about Jews socially acceptable. Indeed, that might already have happened. Trump just proposed the most anti-Semitic Cabinet in recent history, and that fact has barely elicited a peep.

My immigrant parents—my father especially—are ardent Christians. As such, my childhood seemed to differ dramatically from the glimpses of American life I witnessed at school or on television. My parents often spoke of their regimented, cloistered upbringings in Nigeria, and their belief that Americans are too lax. They devised a series of schemes to keep us on the straight and narrow: At home, we listened to an unending stream of gospel music and watched Christian programming on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. The centerpiece of their strategy, however, was daily visits to our small Nigerian church, in North Texas.

I quickly discerned a gap between the fist-pumping, patriotic Christianity that I saw on TV and the earnest, yearning faith that I experienced in church. On TV, it seemed that Christianity was not only a means of achieving spiritual salvation but also a tool for convincing the world of America’s preeminence. Africa was mentioned frequently on TBN, but almost exclusively as a destination for white American missionaries. On-screen, they would appear dour and sweaty as they distributed food, clothes, and Bibles to hordes of seemingly bewildered yet appreciative Black people. The ministers spoke of how God’s love—and, of course, the support of the audience—made such donations possible, but the subtext was much louder: God had blessed America, and now America was blessing everyone else.

In church, however, I encountered an entirely different type of Christianity. The biblical characters were the same, yet they were evoked for different purposes. God was on our side because we, as immigrants and their children, were the underdogs; our ancestors had suffered a series of losses at the hands of Americans and Europeans, just as the Israelites in the Bible had suffered in their own time. And like those chosen people, we would emerge victorious.

Over time, I learned that Christianity is a malleable faith; both the powerful and the powerless can use it to justify their beliefs and actions. This is, in part, the message of Scholastique Mukasonga’s Sister Deborah, which was published in France in 2022 and was recently released in the United States, in a translation by Mark Polizzotti. Set in Rwanda in the 1930s, the novel spotlights a group of recently arrived African American missionaries who preach a traditional Christian message about a forthcoming apocalypse, but with a twist: They prophesize that “when everything was again nice and dry, Jesus would appear on his cloud in the sky and everyone would discover that Jesus is black.” These missionaries are a destabilizing influence in a territory dominated by another version of Christianity, established and spread by the colonizing Belgians, that emphasizes the supremacy of a white Jesus.

[Read: A family story about colonialism and its aftereffects]

The most vital force in the novel is Sister Deborah herself. She is the prophetic, ungovernable luminary of the African American contingent, and possesses healing powers. Over the course of her time in Rwanda, she develops a theology that centers Black women; as a result, she is eventually castigated by her former mentor, Reverend Marcus, a gifted itinerant preacher who serves as the leader of the missionaries. Sister Deborah is a novel about the capaciousness of Christianity but also the limits of its inclusivity—particularly for the women in its ranks.

Those limits are evident throughout the novel. The first section is narrated by a woman, Ikirezi, who recalls her childhood in Rwanda. She’d been a “sickly girl” who required constant attention, yet her mother had avoided the local clinic: She had “no confidence in the pills that the orderlies dispensed, seemingly at whim.” Ikirezi’s mother eventually determines that her child’s chronic illness comes “from either people or spirits.” So, in a fit of desperation, she decides to take her to Sister Deborah. She doesn’t know much about this American missionary except that she is a “prophetess” who possesses the gift of “healing by laying on hands.” Upon learning of his wife’s plans, Ikirezi’s father explodes:

You are not going to that devil’s mission. I forbid it! Didn’t you hear what our real padri said about it? They’re sorcerers from a country called America, a country that might not even exist because it’s the land of the dead, the land of the damned. They have not been baptized with good holy water. And they are black—all the real padri are white. I forbid you to drag my daughter there and offer her to the demon hiding in the head and belly of that witch you call Deborah. You can go to the devil if you like, but spare my daughter!

Through Ikirezi’s father’s outburst, Mukasonga deftly sketches the two opposing Christian camps in the novel—one that depends on the Bible to protect its status, and the other that uses the Bible to attain status. The white padri (priests) seek to maintain their spiritual control of the local population by labeling the African American missionaries as evil interlopers. The missionaries, for their part, have positioned themselves as an alternative religious authority, and they begin to attract many followers, especially women, who are drawn to their energetic services and Sister Deborah’s supernatural abilities.

Ikirezi’s mother defies her husband and takes Ikirezi to see Sister Deborah. They arrive at the American dispensary, where Sister Deborah holds court “under the large tree with its dazzling red flowers, sitting atop the high termite mound that had been covered by a rug decorated with stars and red stripes.” She asks the children who are gathered before her, Ikirezi among them, “to touch her cane while she lay her hands on their heads.” Afterward, Ikirezi recalls “that under the palms of her hands, a great sense of ease and well-being spread through me.” Ikirezi’s depiction of Sister Deborah remains more or less at this pitch through the rest of this section: deferential and mystified, studied but also somewhat distant. As time passes, Ikirezi’s reverence for Sister Deborah only grows, forming a scrim that obscures the healer in a hazy glow.

The novel then pivots to Sister Deborah’s point of view; she expands on and revises Ikirezi’s portrait of her life. As a child in Mississippi, Sister Deborah discovered that she had healing powers. Her mother pulled her out of school, dreading “people’s vindictiveness as much as their gratitude” for her daughter’s gift. Shortly afterward, Sister Deborah is raped by a truck driver, which shifts the trajectory of her life dramatically. She has a profound religious experience when she visits a local church, and soon after falls in with Reverend Marcus.

Reverend Marcus initially sees Sister Deborah as a tool to advance his own ambitions. He is concerned about the suffering of Black people around the world: “the contempt, insults, and lynchings they endured in America; the enslavement, massacres, and colonial tyranny forced upon them in Africa.” His theology is focused not only on their salvation but on their ascendancy as well.

Sister Deborah begins to perform healings during Reverend Marcus’s revival services, and eventually, he brings her along on a missionary trip to Rwanda. There, the reverend and Sister Deborah initially work in harmony, attracting devoted new converts. But their partnership begins to fray when a divine spirit informs Sister Deborah that a Black woman, not a Black Jesus, will save them. Reverend Marcus’s response is both a warning and a prophecy: “If we follow you in your visions and dreams, we step outside of Christianity and venture into the unknown.”

Although the reverend initially accepts Sister Deborah’s “vision” of female power, he eventually uses it to undermine her, condemning her as a witch. Even within his progressive and radical theology, Reverend Marcus believes that women must serve men; in Mukasonga’s telling, he is a man whose shortsightedness and thirst for power eventually overwhelm his generally good intentions. His behavior reflects a reality that many Christian women have experienced, Black women in particular. In Rwanda, Sister Deborah is contending with a caste system that installed white men at the top and placed Black women at the bottom. Sister Deborah’s claim that the savior is a Black woman undermines that status quo. And the reverend’s response reveals a contradiction that many Black Christian women have faced: They are encouraged to seek spiritual freedom but are still expected to remain subservient.

[Read: Why did this progressive evangelical church fall apart?]

What Reverend Marcus doesn’t realize, however, is that his warning about “ventur[ing] into the unknown” has also given Sister Deborah a route for her own liberation. Like the women in Mukasonga’s prior work—a collection of accomplished memoirs, novels, and short fiction—Sister Deborah explores and then occupies unfamiliar realms. Unfamiliar, that is, to men, who create hierarchies in which they can flourish and then mark any territory beyond their reach as benighted. Yet it is in those benighted spaces, Sister Deborah comes to believe, that Black women can thrive. A group of women begins to follow her, and she changes her name to Mama Nganga. Little girls collect “healing plants” for her. She treats local sex workers, and invites homeless women to stay with her. She constructs an ecosystem of care and protection for women and proudly claims the label that Ikirezi’s father placed on her at the beginning of the novel: “I’m what they call a witch doctor, a healer, though some might say a sorceress,” she declares. “I treat women and children.” For Sister Deborah, Reverend Marcus’s Christianity is inadequate because it prioritizes dominance over service. She abandons that approach in favor of pursuing the true mission of Jesus: to uplift and care for the most vulnerable.

Mukasonga’s slim novel is laden with ideas, but perhaps the most potent and urgent is her assertion that sometimes, Black women cannot achieve true freedom within the confines of Christianity. By exposing how even progressive interpretations of the faith can uphold patriarchal norms, Mukasonga invites her reader to question the limitations imposed on marginalized believers. In Sister Deborah, real liberation lies in eschewing conformity to any dogma, even the Bible. But the novel is more than a critique of religious institutions: It is a call to redefine faith, perhaps even radically, on one’s own terms.

When you hear that thousands of writers have signed a petition, you can already guess what they are calling for: What other than boycotting Israel could generate such enthusiasm among the literati?

A staggering 6,000 writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter to address “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.” They are calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. The letter says that these institutions have played a crucial role in “normalizing … injustices” and that cooperating with them harms Palestinians—the implication being that withholding cooperation will help Palestinians. Signatories include some of the best writers alive. If you like to read, chances are a favorite of yours is on here. Among the best-known are the novelists Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Annie Ernaux. Some of my own favorites include the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, and the British critic Owen Hatherley.

[Read: The cowardice of open letters]

Predictably, the letter has led to a backlash. Almost 1,000 writers issued a counter-letter. They include the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet, the essayist Adam Gopnik, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and the Nobel laureate Herta Müller. My favorite signatory on this one is another Nobel laureate, the fiery left-wing feminist Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, known for her 1983 masterpiece The Piano Teacher.  

I am as horrified as anyone by Israel’s brutal and criminal war in Gaza and its decades-long regime of occupation. As a writer, my primary solidarity is with the dozens of journalists killed in the conflict in the past year, the majority of whom were Palestinian. But I also have no doubt as to which side of this literary civil war I am on.

I’ve never joined a cultural boycott of any country—not Israel, not Russia, and not Iran, my own country of birth. The latter informs my outlook on the issue.

I grew up in one of the most culturally isolated countries on Earth. Our case was of course very different from Israel’s. Iran’s isolation was partly the doing of its own government, which banned foreign cultural products that violated its religious and political strictures—meaning most of them. Cinemas hardly ever showed newly released foreign films (rare exceptions included Michael Moore’s Sicko and Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile). The censors constrained what foreign literature Iranian publishers could translate and publish.

But our isolation also owed to the international sanctions on Iran that made any financial exchange with foreign entities into a potentially criminal affair. For example, we might have accessed banned foreign literature by ordering copies in original languages from abroad—except that this was not so easy in a country that had no credit cards, partly because international banks faced legal penalties for transacting with anybody inside it. When I was a teenager, my mom once helped me order a copy of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation through Amazon, using a prepaid card we went to some trouble to obtain from Dubai. The ordering process was labyrinthine, and even then, the book took six months to arrive. (My Palestinian friends in the occupied West Bank tell me of similar travails, because their post is sometimes held by Israel for months.) In 2002, Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was exposed, and the United States imposed a progression of sanctions that effectively blocked even this circuitous route. Today, many such simple exchanges between Iran and Western countries are close to impossible.

Some opponents of the Iranian regime abroad have reinforced Iran’s isolation by equating cultural exchange with an unwanted “normalization” of the regime. They have protested the inclusion of Iranian films at festivals and the travel of Western cultural figures to Iran. I left Iran in 2008, but I have never supported such efforts, because I saw for myself how cultural isolation served Iran’s oppressors. Many of us in Iranian society wanted nothing more than to find allies, counterparts, and inspiration abroad, and our regime wanted nothing less for us. Boycotting the country simply advanced the cause of our adversaries—namely, to cut the Iranian population off from influences that could bolster its courage and expand the reach of its solidarity.

That the Iranian people yearned for such contact was evident to those Western thinkers who did manage to visit. Jürgen Habermas, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Ignatieff, and Richard Rorty were among those who traveled to Iran and were treated like pop stars, filling meeting halls and taking part in enthusiastic exchanges with Iranians. Sadly these visits have dwindled in recent years, not just because of the regime's restrictions, but also because sanctions make any such exchange a tremendous hassle and a potential violation of U.S. law. (Foreign visitors also fear coming, because of the regime’s grim track record of taking Western citizens hostage.) That Iranians can still enjoy a good deal of foreign literature in Persian translation owes entirely to the courage and persistence of Iranian publishers, many of whom have tangled with both the censors, who determine what is permissible, and the sanctions, which make dealings with publishers around the world difficult.

When I hear of boycotts on Israeli writers, I think of those Israeli writers who have been published in Persian translation regardless of these obstacles. I ask myself who would benefit if fewer Iranians could read Amos Oz’s enchanting fairy tale, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, rendered in Persian by the Marxist poet Shahrouz Rashid. The book tells of two children in an unnamed village who decide, against the advice of their parents, to seek out a demon that has taken all the animals away. Some critics saw this story as an allusion to the Holocaust. I remember discussing it with friends in Tehran and finding within it our own meanings and references. We dreamed of meeting Oz, who died in 2018, and of sharing our interpretations with him. What good is served by severing such cross-cultural exchange?

Some supporters of boycotts will address these concerns by saying that their means are selective, that they punish only those writers or other artists who are linked, financially or ideologically, with states engaged in objectionable behavior, and that doing so has a track record of success in changing state behavior. But the question of which artists to tar as complicit with their governments’ policies is not a simple one, and boycotts are a blunt instrument at best.

For instance, the writers’ petition explicitly calls for sanctioning only those Israeli cultural institutions that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights” or “have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” Any Israeli cultural institution that has had to rely on state funding, in any form or at any point, could conceivably fall afoul of this criterion. Perhaps this explains why LitHub, the outlet that first published the letter, has done away with niceties and simply headlined it as a “pledge to boycott Israeli cultural institutions,” as have most other outlets.

[Read: When writers silence writers]

Since it was founded in 2005, the Palestinian-led movement for boycotts, sanctions, and divestment (BDS) against Israel has shown that it likes to paint with a broad brush, censuring organizations that promote contact between Palestinians and Israelis on the grounds that they “normalize” Israel: In the past, BDS has boycotted the Arab-Jewish orchestra started by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said; one of its most recent targets was Standing Together, a courageous group of anti-war Israeli citizens, both Jewish and Palestinian, whose leaders and members have faced arrest in their long fight against Israel’s occupation. A similar zeal seems to animate those who have promoted a boycott of Russian culture following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Many of those who advocate cultural sanctions point to South Africa as the shining example of boycott success. As is often the case with politicized appeals to history, the purpose here is to draw a strong moral injunction: Who could possibly stand on the side of the apartheid regime, which was triumphantly brought down in the 1990s and replaced by a multiracial democracy? But the history of the boycott movement against South Africa is more complicated than those analogizing it commonly acknowledge.

Started in 1959 following a call by the African National Congress, the movement encompassed pledges not to work with South African universities or publishers and not to perform in South African venues. Several major U.S. publishers refused to provide books to South African libraries. The boycott’s proponents included not only fiery left-wingers but liberal doyens, such as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the American Library Association (ALA), which refused to work with any publisher that traded with South Africa. In 1980, the United Nations General Assembly voted to back the boycott and asked member states to “prevent all cultural, academic, sports, and other exchanges with the racist regime of South Africa.” When apartheid finally collapsed in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela proudly proclaimed the return of his country to the international community.

But for all that they may have achieved, the boycotts were far from uncontroversial, even among opponents of apartheid. Many South African trade unions and social movements were in favor of them, but the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the main workers’ organization that helped bring down the regime, was concerned that divestment could lead to the loss of jobs and pensions. Parts of that group embraced selective boycotts instead of a blanket ban.

Sanctions were even more contested in the art world. In 1975, Khabi Mngoma, the legendary principal of Johannesburg’s African Music and Drama Association (AMDA), which had produced stars such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, visited New York to campaign against the boycott movement. “We feel isolated inside South Africa,” he told The New York Times, “and we also feel isolated by the outside world.”

Mngoma was especially incensed that Black Americans were boycotting his country. “The students in our school, for example, would gain tremendously simply by being exposed in seminars and other classes to the expertise of black American artists,” he said. “By staying away, blacks here do us a great disservice.” But the zealots of the boycott movement didn’t listen to the likes of Mngoma. In 1972, Muhammad Ali was scheduled to compete in South Africa, but a vociferous campaign dissuaded him from doing so.

Mngoma believed that engagement could be more constructive than sanction. On an earlier trip to New York, in 1968, he met with theater personalities and tried to persuade them to perform in South Africa instead of boycotting; they could tax white audiences and channel the money to Black theater. That strategy had some successes. The Broadway musicals Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof were performed in South Africa and contributed tens of thousands of dollars in royalties to AMDA. Later, the American playwright Arthur Miller agreed to stage his plays in South Africa, but only for desegregated audiences. The singer Paul Simon recorded his Graceland album in South Africa in 1986, insisting on the importance of working with Black artists in the country. A year later, he headlined an enormous anti-apartheid concert in Zimbabwe with Makeba and Masekela. That same year, boycott proponents picketed his concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall and denounced him.

Just how important a role the boycotts played in ending apartheid is disputed. Mattie C. Webb, a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Yale, tells me they were significant, “but they were only one factor in a broader movement that also included internal social movements against apartheid. The sanctions themselves were limited, and frankly came rather late in the broader struggle against apartheid.” Lior Sternfeld, an Israeli American historian of Iran at Penn State, put a finer point on this, telling me: “I have tried in vain to find any empirical evidence that the boycott movement helped topple the South African regime.”

Sternfeld has taken an interest in the question because of his work involving Israel and Iran. He is a critic of Israeli policy—both the occupation and the conduct of the war in Gaza—and he makes no brief for Israeli universities, which he says have tried “to get cozy with the government.” He does favor some sanctions—for example, kicking Israel out of the FIFA World Cup and other sporting events, as has been done to Russia. But he believes that cultural boycotts will primarily hurt Israeli intellectuals, who are already demonized by their government.

“I have always believed that activism is about engagement, whereas BDS is articulated as a call for disengagement,” he told me. “I oppose the boycotts because it is important to have some sort of a bridge to Israeli intelligentsia.”

Sternfeld’s position, like mine, is informed by observing the results of sanctions against Iran. He points specifically to How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, a book published earlier this year by four Iranian American scholars, which argues that isolation has had adverse effects on Iran’s political culture and has counterproductively strengthened the regime’s repressive apparatus. The Iranian scholar Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an outspoken opponent of the sanctions on Iran, has raised questions about boycotting Israel for similar reasons, to the ire of some on the left.

Lately Iran and Israel have found themselves ever more dangerously at odds, and the lack of people-to-people contact between the two countries doesn’t help. That’s one reason Sternfeld accepted a surprising overture in September: The Iranian mission to the United Nations invited him to attend an interfaith meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This encounter made Pezeshkian the first post-revolutionary Iranian president to knowingly and openly meet with an Israeli citizen. Iranian hard-liners attacked him for it relentlessly. As for Sternfeld, some critics of the Iranian regime in the United States denounced him for taking the meeting, even as hard-liners in Tehran called him a Zionist infiltrator.

Iran bans its citizens from visiting Israel, but numerous Iranian writers and artists in exile have traveled to the country anyway in recent years. Their visits have helped show Israelis, used to hearing of the “Iranian threat” from their government, a more human side of the country.

The filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a guest of honor at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013. Makhmalbaf was once an Islamist revolutionary; he spent four and a half years in prison before the 1979 revolution. But he went through a remarkable metamorphosis in the 1990s, becoming an anti-regime dissident and winding up in exile in Paris.

“I am one of the ambassadors for Iranian art to Israel, and my message was of peace and friendship,” he told The Guardian of his trip at the time. “When I flew to Israel last week, I felt like a man flying to another planet, like a man flying to the moon.” Makhmalbaf criticized the logic of boycotters, saying, “If I make a film in Iran, and you come to my country to watch it, does it mean you confirm dictatorship in Iran and you have no respect for political prisoners in Iran?” he asked rhetorically of his critics. “If you go to the US, does it mean you confirm their attack on Afghanistan and Iraq?"

Orly Cohen, a Tehran-born scholar who has lived in Israel most of her life, has helped organize the trips of several Iranian artists to the country. Now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Haifa, she has also translated the work of Iranian poets into Hebrew.

“In the Israeli news, all Israelis hear of Iran is war,” she told me by phone. “They don’t know about Iran’s culture and how much beautiful art is made in the country today.”

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel–but they can’t stop it]

Cohen translated a book of poems by Mehdi Mousavi, known in Iran as the “father of postmodern poetry,” and facilitated his visit to Israel last year for its publication. He was the subject of a cover story in Haaretz, and he struck up a relationship with a well-known Iraqi-born poet, Ronny Someck. “He was seen as a bridge of friendship,” Cohen told me. “For the first time,” she said of Mousavi’s Israeli audience, “they saw Iran through Iranian, not Israeli, eyes.”

Cohen also helped organize an exhibition about Iranian feminist movements at Jerusalem’s Museum of Islamic Art. Israeli feminists took an interest, but what surprised Cohen more was the feedback from religious Jews, some of whom were inspired by the example of Iranian women standing up to religious repression.

Boycotts preclude such experiences and connections. In the years since 2005, when the Palestinian movement adopted BDS, the tenuous links that once allowed Israeli and Palestinian scholars and artists to be in contact have been cut one after another. Israeli peace activists used to travel frequently to the West Bank and speak at events there. But in 2014, Amira Hass, Haaretz’s correspondent in Ramallah and a vociferous critic of the Israeli occupation, was kicked out of an event at Bir Zeit University by two professors.

Some boycotters do seem concerned about punishing people like Hass, hence the guidelines that carve out ostensible exceptions for those who are critical of the policies of the boycotted state. But I don’t see how any freedom-loving writer can embrace such a position. What distinguishes us from authoritarians and censors if we impose ideological litmus tests to decide which writers can present their work at festivals—if we ask them to declare their opposition to a political regime before they are allowed to speak?

This world is full of walls that divide peoples, and of regimes that impose ideological purity tests on writers. If writers are to use our collective powers, it should not be to add to them.

A close friend—someone whom I’ve always thought of as an optimist—recently shared his theory that, no matter what time you’re living in, it’s generally a bad one. In each era, he posited, quality of life improves in some ways and depreciates in others; the overall quotient of suffering in the world stays the same.

Whether this is nihilistic or comforting depends on your worldview. For instance, plenty of Americans are currently celebrating the outcome of the recent presidential election; many are indifferent to national politics; many others are overwhelmed with anger and despair over it. Looking at the bigger picture, I think the upsides of contemporary life—antibiotics, LGBTQ acceptance, transcontinental FaceTime—outweigh the horrors more often than not. I’ll also concede that this decade comes with a continuous drip of bad news about ghastly acts of violence, erosion of human rights, and climate disaster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2023 Gallup poll found that rates of depression in the United States have hit a record high.

What can people turn to when the itch to burn everything down, or to surrender to hopelessness, feels barely suppressible? I agree with the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge that there is power in “naming reality”—in telling, and writing, the truth about what’s happening around us. For those who are despondent about Donald Trump’s victory and feel unable to make a difference, reading might be a place to start. This doesn’t necessitate cracking open textbooks or dense political tracts: All kinds of books can provide solace, and the past few decades have given us no shortage of clear-eyed works of fiction, memoir, history, and poetry about how to survive and organize in—and ultimately improve—a broken world.

Reading isn’t a panacea. It’s a place to begin and return to: a road map for where to go from here, regardless of where “here” is. Granted, I am perhaps more comfortable than the average person with imperfect solutions. As a clinical pharmacist, I can’t cure diabetes, for example, but I can help control it, make the medications more affordable sometimes, and agitate for a better health-care system. Similarly, these seven books aren’t a cure for rage and despair. Think of them instead as a prescription.

Which Side Are You On, by Ryan Lee Wong

Wong’s novel opens with a mother picking up her son from the airport in a Toyota Prius, her hands clutching the wheel in a death grip. Wry, funny moments like this one animate Wong’s book about the dilemma of trying to correct systemic problems with individual solutions. It’s 2016, and spurred by the real-life police shooting of Akai Gurley, 21-year-old Reed is considering dropping out of Columbia University to dedicate himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. Reed wants nothing more than to usher in a revolution, but unfortunately, he’s a lot better at spouting leftist talking points than at connecting with other people. Like many children, Reed believes that his family is problematic and out of touch. His parents, one a co-leader in the 1980s of South Central’s Black-Korean Coalition, the other a union organizer, push back on his self-righteous idealism. During a brief trip home to see his dying grandmother, Reed wrestles with thorny questions about what makes a good activist and person. Later, in the Prius, Reed’s mother teaches him about the Korean concept of hwabyung, or “burning sickness”—an intense, suppressed rage that will destroy him if he’s not careful—and Reed learns what he really needs: not sound bites but true connection. Wong’s enthralling novel is a reminder that every fight for justice is, at heart, a fight for one another.

Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca Solnit

Solnit’s short manifesto about the revolutionary power of hope is a rallying cry against defeatism. She begins by critiquing the progressive tendency to harp on the bleakness of societal conditions, insisting that despair keeps oppressive systems afloat. Hope and joy, by contrast, are essential elements of political change, and celebrating wins is a worthy act of defiance against those who would prefer that the average person feel powerless. Originally published in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and updated in 2005 and 2016, Hope in the Dark provides modern examples of gains on race, class, environment, and queer rights. That said, this is not a feel-good book. It does not sugarcoat, for instance, the fact that we are headed toward ecological disaster. And if you look up the latest figures on the gender wage gap, you’ll find that they’ve hardly budged from those cited by Solnit years ago. Still, her deft logic and kooky aphorisms (“Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it”) have convinced me that to give up hope is to surrender the future. Fighting for progress can be exhausting and revelatory, full of both pain and pleasure. Solnit insists that doing so is never a waste.

[Read: Trump won. Now what?]

Women Talking, by Miriam Toews

The inspired-by-true-events premise of Toews’s seventh novel is literally the stuff of nightmares. In a remote Mennonite colony, women who have suffered mysterious attacks in the night learn that they’ve been drugged and raped by several men from their community. One woman is pregnant with her rapist’s child; another’s 3-year-old has a sexually transmitted infection. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the discovery, just after the men have been temporarily jailed. They are set to be bailed out in two days, and the colony’s bishop demands that the victims forgive them—or else face excommunication and be denied a spot in heaven. The women meet in secret to decide what to do: Comply? Fight back? Leave for an outside world they’ve never experienced? Even against this harrowing backdrop, Toews’s signature humor and eye for small moments of grace make Women Talking an enjoyable and healing read. The women’s discussions are both philosophical (they cannot read, so how can they trust that the Bible requires them to forgive the men?) and practical (if they leave, do they bring their male children?). Any direction they choose will lead to a kind of wilderness: “When we have liberated ourselves,” one woman says in a particularly stirring moment, “we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”

Good Talk, by Mira Jacob

Jacob’s graphic-memoir-in-conversations took major guts to write. It begins like this: The author’s white in-laws throw their support behind Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and her otherwise loving family toes the edge of collapse. Good Talk is a funny and painful book-length answer to questions from Jacob’s 6-year-old son, who is half Jewish and half Indian, about race, family, and identity. Jacob, who was raised in the United States by parents who emigrated from India, gorgeously illustrates her formative experiences, touching on respectability politics, colorism within the Indian community, her bisexuality, and her place in America. She refuses to caricaturize the book’s less savory characters—for example, a rich white woman who hires Jacob to ghostwrite her family’s biography and ends up questioning her integrity and oversharing the grisly details of her 2-year-old’s death from cancer. Jacob’s ability to so humanely render the people who cause her grief is powerful. My daughter is too young to ask questions, but one day, when she begins inquiring about the world she’s inheriting, I can tell her, as Jacob told her son, “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”

[Read: Hope and the historian]

The Twenty-Ninth Year, by Hala Alyan

Startling, sexy, and chaotic, The Twenty-Ninth Year is a collection of poems narrated by a woman on the verge—of a lot of things. She’s standing at the edge of maturity, of belonging as a Palestinian American, of recovery from anorexia and alcoholism. It’s a tender and violent place, evoked with images that catch in the throat. The first poem, “Truth,” takes the form of a litany of confessions: “I broke / into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar”; “I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.” That Alyan is a clinical psychologist makes sense—her poems have a clarity that can’t be faked. Dark humor softens the blow of lines such as “I starved myself to starve my mother” and “Define in, I say when anyone asks if I’ve ever been in a war.” She reckons with the loneliness of living in exile and the danger of romanticizing the youthful conviction that there is something incurably wrong with you. A shallow read of the collection might be: I burned my life down so you don’t have to. But I return to the last line of the book: “Marry or burn; either way, you’re transfiguring.” There is always something to set aflame; more optimistically, there is always something left to salvage. The Twenty-Ninth Year is, in the end, a monument to endurance.

Riot Baby, by Tochi Onyebuchi

If you’re sick of books described as “healing” or “hopeful,” look no further than Riot Baby. Onyebuchi’s thrilling 2020 novella asks just how far sci-fi dystopias are from real life. Kev, a Black man born during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, California, spends much of his 20s in prison after a botched armed robbery. His sister, Ella, has more supernatural problems: She sees the past and the future and, when fury takes over, can raze cities to the ground—yet she could not protect her brother from the violence of incarceration. When Kev is paroled and a new form of policing via implantable chips and pharmaceutical infusions brings “safety” to the streets of Watts, Ella understands that the subjugation of her community is not a symptom of a broken system; rather, it is evidence of one “working just as designed,” as Onyebuchi put it in an interview. Ella must make a wrenching choice: fight for a defanged kind of freedom within such a system or usher in a new world order no matter the cost. In real life, too often, you cannot control your circumstances, only your actions. But you may find relief in reading a book that reaches a different conclusion.

[Read: When national turmoil becomes personal anxiety]

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, by Sarah Schulman

This 700-plus-page history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s New York chapter is, I promise you, a page-turner. Schulman and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard, who were both in ACT UP New York, interviewed 188 members over the course of 17 years about the organization’s work on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS—“a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments,” Schulman writes. Part memoir and part oral history, Let the Record Show is a master class on the utility of anger and a historical corrective to chronicles that depict straight white men as the main heroes of the AIDS crisis. In reality, a diverse coalition of activists helped transform HIV into a highly manageable condition. “People who are desperate are much more effective than people who have time to waste,” Schulman argues. ACT UP was known for its brash public actions, and Schulman covers not just what the group accomplished but also how it did it, with electrifying detail. There can be no balm for the fact that many ACT UP members did not survive long enough to be interviewed. There is only awe at the way a group of people “unable to sit out a historic cataclysm” were determined to “force our country to change against its will,” and did.

It’s become one of the most important rites of passage in the book-publication process—more meaningful to some writers than a book party or book-cover reveal. For many authors, in fact, no book deal is complete until they’ve posted it.

It is the Publishers Marketplace book-deal social-media post, a screenshot of the charmingly retro-looking blurb from a publishing-industry trade website that announces the details of an author selling their book.

Search for “Publishers Marketplace” on Instagram or X or Threads and you’ll find hundreds upon hundreds of examples. The authors who are sharing deal announcements represent almost every genre: children’s lit, grown-up thrillers, BookTok-influencer bisexual rom-coms, and all points between. Some posts are pretty minimal—the screengrab, a caption, perhaps a touch of winking irony to deflect from appearing too braggy. Others are unabashedly earnest in their enthusiasm, comporting the anachronistic typeface of Publishers Marketplace into new-media forms: dancing around it enthusiastically in a TikTok green screen, posting it alongside baby photos of themselves. (“My entire life has been about reaching my unreachable dreams,” reads one.)

Authors have built their own galaxies of exalted cultural meaning out of the Publishers Marketplace deal-announcement screengrab—perhaps even more now, in an environment where anyone can self-publish independently. A significant number of Americans claim that they someday want to write a book. A commonly cited New York Times opinion piece from 2002 pegs it at upwards of 80 percent; more recent polling found that “more than half” of Americans have an idea for a novel. A deal is irrefutable evidence of the closest thing to employment that a would-be author can achieve. It’s proof that the novel they’ve been working on for years hasn’t just been a hobby; now it’s officially a job (though sometimes a job barely begun—deals can be made on the basis of a sample chapter).

Once the rarefied air of authorial status has been attained, today’s “Publishers Marketplace Official” writers (that’s the going phrase on social media) can safely perform the ad hoc public role of The Author online. Some even share their own Publishers Marketplace–themed fan merch. Custom mugs seem especially popular; at least one publishing company, Avid Reader (a division of Simon & Schuster), offers a Publishers Marketplace–screengrab mug as part of its new-author welcome package.

Social media is ostensibly a form of publicity, a way to generate buzz for a book. But the deal post likely does very little to move copies. David Black, the founder of the eponymous New York literary agency known for representing hundreds of authors across genres, points out that many publication dates are usually years away from deal announcements. “In terms of sales,” he told me, “the impact is not great.” The post, instead, has become the visual icon of the modern literary era, an illustration of the anxieties, expectations, and terminal onlineness of being an author today.

Publishers Marketplace has been in business since the early 2000s, a literary-world counterpart to trade publications such as Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, which have covered film- and TV-industry business dealings for the past century or so. Today, the Bronxville, New York–based book-market site, billed as “essential” daily reading, operates with a modest crew of just five full-time employees. Every year, it announces about 14,000 unique book deals, which can be accessed using a $25-a-month membership model (popular with professionals in the field, such as agents and editors, who use it to monitor the publishing industry in real time), or a $10 “Quick Pass” that lasts 24 hours—ideal for those who just want to access and screenshot their own deal announcement once.  

Every book deal—whether the humblest indie or the industry-shaking eight-figure multibook contract with international rights—is formatted the same way: The book’s title is listed in a large font on top, followed by the name of the author(s), the publisher, and then a single paragraph containing essential information about the book in question, including the names of the agent and acquiring editor. Industry professionals are fluent in its secret language, which can include terms such as good deal and very good deal to indicate the range of dollar amounts offered for each book as an advance payment. As with a tombstone in the mergers-and-acquisitions business, there is an insider lingua franca that casual followers wouldn’t know.  

[Read: How to write a book without losing your mind]

For many authors and their social-media followers, such nuances matter less than the fact that a deal was secured at all. In the early days, typically agents with a Publishers Marketplace subscription would take a screenshot and share it with authors, who would place it on Facebook or what was then Twitter. Today, Instagram appears to be the dominant platform (despite Publishers Marketplace itself having no active presence on the app). Michael Cader, who founded Publishers Marketplace, said the staff is aware of the importance the site has gained on social media. In 2020, the company even started offering a ready-made “screengrab” click option that produces a version of a deal-announcement image for posting with a single click. “We know some authors think of it as a mark of arrival,” he told me, “and we are honored to be able to help them memorialize and share their achievements.”

I spoke with multiple writers working in diverse genres about the phenomenon, and they were, let’s just say, a bit reticent about describing posting habits. Asking writers about what they do on social media is like asking someone whether they color their hair or are taking Ozempic—the details can feel embarrassing, even if the behavior itself is commonplace.  

One of the top posts I saw on Instagram for Publishers Marketplace is this one by June CL Tan, an international best-selling author of contemporary young-adult fantasy novels, including Darker by Four. She told me that “Publishers Marketplace Official” really does have meaning as the first time that a book enters the public sphere. Trying to sell a book can take years, and the timing varies from author to author, project to project—and “many, if not most, authors suffer from imposter syndrome,” she said. “Seeing the screengrab or the announcement on Publishers Marketplace does feel more official, as it can act as evidence that the deal is really happening.” The journalist Jason Diamond, who announced the sale of his first novel in April, told me the post also externalizes what otherwise can feel like an isolating endeavor. “I don’t want to sound like a sad bastard,” he told me, “but being a writer can be a very lonely profession.”

Deep down—or not even that deep down—people also see the post as a kind of status symbol, a “club jacket,” as various people told me. “Writing a book is really fucking hard,” Black said. “For some people, this kind of announcement is helpful because it carves out their place in the world.”

[Read: The authors who love Amazon]

I’m convinced that the website itself, largely unchanged since the early 2000s, is the secret sauce to this whole thing: The naive, disarming, Web 1.0 charm of the Publishers Marketplace screengrab cuts through the ambient friction of our extremely online 21st-century lives, arriving as something rare, authentic, and complete. Though verily the modern publishing industry is changing—and self-publishing on Amazon and other platforms is thriving—many authors are still attached to the markers of success that they remember from the pre-digital era. They’re chasing the feeling they get the first time they see their very own book at the library, in airport bookshops, on newspaper best-seller lists—things that they remember about the books they grew up reading. The post’s old-fashioned look is a dopamine hit to an author’s heart: What could be more tethered to tradition than the act of writing a novel, an art form that first became broadly popular in the 19th century?

The post is, of course, also a utilitarian initiation into what it means to be an author online—that is, self-promotional. Today’s writers are ever more expected to turn themselves into brands. Noah Galuten, a James Beard Award–winning cookbook author (we share an agent), told me that he finds something “very performative” about the post. Yet it’s also, simply, what is required in today’s market. “Cynically, if I see someone posting that, I don’t know—it seems a little thirsty,” Galuten said. “But if I do know you, then I’m happy for you … Like, what else am I supposed to post? A picture of myself cheering or signing a contract like an athlete?” Though the Publishers Marketplace post may not directly correlate to sales, it is a practical place to start the self-marketing journey, to make consumers out of followers.

Which gets at what really makes the post such a big deal: So many people claim to be working on a book, but getting paid for it matters. It’s what turns a writer into an author.

Or so authors like to think. “After you make this post, what then?” Black, the agent, said. “You still have to do the work.” After all, once the deal’s procured, the book must still be edited; sometimes it hasn’t been finished yet. But even if that next great American novel you so cheekily shared via screengrab fails to materialize—well, you might have to pay back the advance. Online, though, you’ll still always be Publishers Marketplace Official.

Amazon (AMZN), Walmart (WMT), and Target (TGT) are racing to capture the attention – and wallets – of budget-conscious shoppers as Black Friday and Cyber Monday quickly approach.

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With Black Friday right around the corner, now is an ideal time to begin making plans to shop for holiday gifts — especially big ticket items that might be out-of-budget splurges during the rest of the year.

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In 1991, only one album into its career, De La Soul tried to pull off an unusually audacious move. The hip-hop trio’s 1989 debut, 3 Feet High and Rising, was a dense but accessible bricolage of dad-rock samples and flip-it-and-reverse-it nursery-rhyme syntax, establishing the group as innovators with commercial muscle. Two years later, De La Soul publicly renounced the album, dumping everything that made it an instant classic in an act of self-nullification from which the band never really recovered.

The follow-up album, De La Soul Is Dead, sounds like an insecure crew taking wild swings at perceived enemies—Vanilla Ice, MC Hammer, the West Coast gangster-rap insurgency—and missing badly. The beats are sluggish, and 3 Feet High’s sample surprises (Hall & Oates! Steely Dan!) are absent, giving the record a thin, attenuated feel. It begins inauspiciously, with a skit involving a kid finding a copy of 3 Feet High in a trash can, and falls further into dispirited score-settling. It is also entirely too long, and both jokey and humorless. And worst of all, it squanders the group’s only opportunity to chart an alternative path for hip-hop at a moment when its adversaries were poised to usurp the genre.

In High and Rising, his new book about De La Soul, the music writer Marcus J. Moore unpacks this baffling decision. De La Soul Is Dead, he argues, was a “bleak and acerbic response to the industry and the band’s mounting frustrations” with music-business chicanery, and with being told they were just one thing when they were confident that they contained multitudes. Moore is a passionate defender of De La Soul Is Dead, which he feels was misunderstood and quickly forgotten, a “ripple” crashing into the “tidal wave” of gangsta rap; N.W.A had released the subgenre’s urtext Straight Outta Compton in 1988. He’s not wrong about the timing of the record, but it is the tenor of De La Soul Is Dead—its blithe disregard for 3 Feet High, and its reactionary swipes at the competition—that didn’t sit well. It still doesn't.

3 Feet High came out of nowhere—to be more specific, from Amityville, Long Island. The 24-track gem from Kelvin “Posdnuos” Mercer, David “Trugoy the Dove” Jolicoeur, and Vincent “Maseo” Mason was conceived an hour-long train ride away from the center of New York’s hip-hop culture, and the distance was crucial; De La Soul could innovate in relative isolation. Working with the producer “Prince Paul” Hutson, the group reinvented how hip-hop was constructed, stacking samples and beats over, under, and around its intricate conversational flow, the lyrics hovering within some golden mean between fractured fairy tales and the loopy logic of P-Funk’s George Clinton. “It felt distant yet alluring,” Moore writes of the trio’s debut, “a new masterpiece from a bygone era of Black experimentation.”

[Read: The untold stories behind Hip-Hop’s greatest albums]

The album also felt like the start of something larger than the trio itself. Having found common ground with East Coast mavericks such as A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, and Jungle Brothers—artists who also fused Afrocentrism with jazzy beats and whip-smart lyrics—De La Soul brought them under their big tent. A creative collective they called Native Tongues was born. 3 Feet High’s track “Buddy” was Native Tongues’ statement of intent, a pass-the-mic celebration that included verses from Tribe’s Q-Tip and (on the remix) Queen Latifah. The video for the song, in which various members crowd the frame and joyously egg one another on, felt like the first seedling of a cultural movement.

And then, with De La Soul Is Dead, the group turned its back on the whole thing. “Here is the D.A.I.S.Y. / watching it die, see?” Posdnuos declaimed on “Pass the Plugs,” in a not-so-subtle dig at the first album’s flowery artwork and the notion of De La Soul ushering in a “Daisy Age” of comity and community. (D.A.I.S.Y. was in fact an acronym for “Da Inner Sound Y’all.” The second album cover depicted an overturned pot of limp daisies.)

The album covers, left to right, of “3 Feet High and Rising” and “De La Soul Is Dead.” (Reservoir Media)

Moore, after first chalking up the renunciation to industry frustration, throws out broader theories: The band bristled at being labeled “psychedelic rappers” in the press, and dismissed its public branding as a lure for casual hip-hop fans—in other words, white people. He develops a more layered hypothesis later on. “It’s better to last forever than to exist for a minute,” Moore writes. “De La played the long game.” By this point in the story, in the mid-’90s, the group had been cut down to the size of a cult act. But it hadn’t wanted overnight success; it had wanted a career. Moore rightly argues that, with its second album, De La Soul was trying to steer clear of the trap that has snared so many artists who have had to contend with being “held captive by the music they made as teenagers.” De La Soul Is Dead was the trio’s fast-track bid for respect as mature musicians, but it was protesting too much, too soon.

The second album sold well, but not as well as 3 Feet High, and that wasn’t entirely the group’s fault. It’s hard enough for any popular artist to pivot without shedding listeners; harder still for an act working within hip-hop, a historically conservative genre that tends to tuck its outliers into the margins. The debut had been an avant-garde record with mainstream appeal, but according to Moore, De La Soul was wise enough to know that its fresh commercial sound could quickly grow stale. So the group decided to trash it first.

However legitimate the trio’s outrage may have been, it failed to channel anger into effective art. De La Soul Is Dead took a bulldozer to the debut’s glorious garden. De La Soul’s lightness of touch was muscled aside in favor of churlish criticism of hip-hop’s new turn toward vulgarity, which for the trio was a kind of minstrelsy. But instead of flowing above the fray, De La Soul fell into the petty snipery of the scene—the big dis, the character assassination. 3 Feet High’s Day-Glo grin had twisted into a dyspeptic scowl. The group had given up the high ground, ceded the terms of the debate to its rivals. It was Dre and Snoop’s world now, and De La Soul had sunk into it.

[Read: Did the decline of sampling cause the decline of political hip-hop?]

This heel turn not only blew up the first incarnation of De La Soul; it tore apart the utopian idea that hip-hop’s balkanized turf wars could be set aside in favor of creative fellowship. The trio began to feel rudderless, and the Native Tongues went their different ways. A Tribe Called Quest created its masterpiece, 1993’s Midnight Marauders, while Queen Latifah stopped making hip-hop records after she became a crossover superstar.

Having thrown down the gauntlet at the feet of hip-hop’s stars, De La Soul tried calling a truce with 1993’s Buhloone Mindstate, an album that split the difference between goofy ebullience and acrid critique. The tracks “Ego Trippin’ (Part Two)” and “Eye Patch” hinted at a return to 3 Feet High’s technicolor schoolyard. But there was also “I Am I Be,” which, Moore writes, showed De La Soul “holding [itself] and [its] collaborators accountable for letting the [Native Tongues] collective falter due to egos.” When Posdnuos decried the “tongues who lied and said ‘We’ll be natives to the end,’” it felt like an elegy for a lost cause.

By the time De La Soul released Stakes Is High, in 1996, hip-hop had been commandeered by what Moore calls the “shiny-suit” era of Sean Combs and Notorious B.I.G., all gangster posturing and clunky, bottom-feeding beats. Stakes Is High, which featured the newcomers and future trailblazers Common and Mos Def, received tepid reviews and was largely ignored, much to the dismay of Moore, the superfan. “Quietly,” he writes, “De La reassembled their own vision of what a Native Tongues collective could look like in the ’90s with … MCs who were just kids when the first iteration took shape.” That may be so, but it takes a nation of millions to recognize a movement, and the audience had moved on.

The consignment of a promising musical coalition to oblivion was compounded by a tragic and deeply ironic debacle: The same elements that made 3 Feet High and Rising so innovative sent the album into perilous legal limbo. Because De La Soul’s label, Tommy Boy Records, hadn’t accounted for some sample clearances and the band’s contract was outdated, the album was blocked from streaming services. And so, in the 2000s, the group that had denounced its debut had to spend years trying to secure a foothold for its catalog in the digital world. That finally happened in 2023. 3 Feet High is by far De La Soul’s most streamed album, and by any standard the band’s greatest achievement. But to listen to it now, within the context of De La Soul’s oeuvre, is to be painfully reminded of the road not taken—and of how a musical revolution can be scuttled from within.

In his 2023 Netflix comedy special, Selective Outrage, Chris Rock identified one of the core contradictions of the social-justice era: “Everybody’s full of shit,” Rock said, including in the category of “everybody” people who type “woke” tweets “on a phone made by child slaves.”

I was reminded of that acerbic routine while reading Musa al-Gharbi’s new book, We Have Never Been Woke. Al-Gharbi, a 41-year-old sociologist at Stony Brook University, opens with the political disillusionment he experienced when he moved from Arizona to New York. He was immediately struck by the “racialized caste system” that everyone in the big liberal city seems to take “as natural”: “You have disposable servants who will clean your house, watch your kids, walk your dogs, deliver prepared meals to you.” At the push of a button, people—mostly hugely underpaid immigrants and people of color—will do your shopping and drive you wherever you want to go.

He contrasts that with the “podunk” working-class environment he’d left behind, where “the person buying a pair of shoes and the person selling them are likely to be the same race—white—and the socioeconomic gaps between the buyer and the seller are likely to be much smaller.” He continues: “Even the most sexist or bigoted rich white person in many other contexts wouldn’t be able to exploit women and minorities at the level the typical liberal professional in a city like Seattle, San Francisco, or Chicago does in their day-to-day lives. The infrastructure simply isn’t there.” The Americans who take the most advantage of exploited workers, he argues, are the same Democratic-voting professionals in progressive bastions who most “conspicuously lament inequality.”

[Read: The blindness of elites]

Musa sees the reelection of Donald Trump as a reflection of Americans’ resentment toward elites and the “rapid shift in discourse and norms around ‘identity’ issues” that he refers to as the “Great Awokening.” To understand what’s happening to American politics, he told me, we shouldn’t look to the particulars of the election—“say, the attributes of Harris, how she ran her campaign, inflation worries, and so on,” but rather to this broader backlash. All of the signs were there for elites to see if only they’d bothered to look.

One question We Have Never Been Woke sets out to answer is why elites are so very blind, including to their own hypocrisy. The answer al-Gharbi proposes is at once devastatingly simple yet reaffirmed everywhere one turns: Fooled by superficial markers of their own identity differences—racial, sexual, and otherwise—elites fail to see themselves for what they truly are.

“When people say things about elites, they usually focus their attention on cisgender heterosexual white men” who are “able-bodied and neurotypical,” al-Gharbi told me, in one of our conversations this fall. Most elites are white, of course, but far from all. And elites today, he added, also “increasingly identify as something like disabled or neurodivergent, LGBTQ.” If you “exclude all of those people from analysis, then you’re just left with this really tiny and misleading picture of who the elites are, who benefits from the social order, how they benefit.”

Sociologists who have studied nonwhite elites in the past have tended to analyze them mainly in the contexts of the marginalized groups from which they came. E. Franklin Frazier’s 1955 classic, Black Bourgeoisie, for example, spotlighted the hypocrisy and alienation of relatively prosperous Black Americans who found themselves doubly estranged: from the white upper classes they emulated as well as from the Black communities they’d left behind. By analyzing nonwhites and other minorities as elites among their peers, al-Gharbi is doing something different. “Elites from other groups are often passed over in silence or are explicitly exempted from critique (and even celebrated!),” he writes. And yet, “behaviors, lifestyles, and relationships that are exploitative, condescending, or exclusionary do not somehow become morally noble or neutral when performed by members of historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups.”

When al-Gharbi uses the word elite, he is talking about the group to which he belongs: the “symbolic capitalists”—broadly speaking, the various winners of the knowledge economy who do not work with their hands and who produce and manipulate “data, rhetoric, social perceptions and relations, organizational structures and operations, art and entertainment, traditions and innovations.” These are the people who set the country’s norms through their dominance of the “symbolic economy,” which consists of media, academic, cultural, technological, legal, nonprofit, consulting, and financial institutions.  

Although symbolic capitalists are not exactly the same as capitalist capitalists, or the rest of the upper class that does not rely on income, neither are they—as graduate students at Columbia and Yale can be so eager to suggest—“the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” The theorist Richard Florida has written about a group he calls the “creative class,” which represents 30 percent of the total U.S. workforce, and which overlaps significantly with al-Gharbi’s symbolic capitalists. Using survey data from 2017, Florida calculated that members of that creative class earned twice as much over the course of the year as members of the working class—an average of $82,333 versus $41,776, respectively.

Symbolic capitalists aren’t a monolith, but it is no secret that their ruling ideology is the constellation of views and attitudes that have come to be known as “wokeness,” which al-Gharbi defines as beliefs about social justice that “inform how mainstream symbolic capitalists understand and pursue their interests—creating highly novel forms of competition and legitimation.”

Al-Gharbi’s own path is emblematic of the randomness and possibility of membership in this class. The son of military families on both sides, one Black and one white, he attended community college for six years, “taking classes off and on while working,” he told me. There he was lucky to meet a talented professor, who “basically took me under his wing and helped me do something different,” al-Gharbi said. Together, they focused on private lessons in Latin, philosophy, and classics—subjects not always emphasized in community college.

Around that time he was also going on what he calls “this whole religious journey”: “I initially tried to be a Catholic priest, and then I became an atheist for a while, but I had this problem. I rationally convinced myself that religion was bullshit and there is no God, but I couldn’t make myself feel it.” Then he read the Quran and “became convinced that it was a prophetic work. And so I was like, Well, if I believe that Muhammad is a prophet and I believe in God, that’s the two big things. So maybe I am a Muslim.” Soon after, he changed his name. Then, just when he was getting ready to transfer out of community college, his twin brother, Christian, was killed on deployment in Afghanistan. He chose to go somewhere close to his grieving family, the University of Arizona, to finish his degree in Near-Eastern studies and philosophy.

The same dispassionate analysis that he applies to his own life’s progress he brings to bear on America’s trends, especially the Great Awokening. He traces that widespread and sudden movement in attitudes not to the death of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown, nor to Black Lives Matter or the #MeToo movement, nor to the election of Donald Trump, but to September 2011 and the Occupy Wall Street movement that emerged from the ashes of the financial crisis.

“In reality, Occupy was not class oriented,” he argues. By focusing its critique on the top 1 percent of households, which were overwhelmingly white, and ignoring the immense privilege of the more diverse symbolic capitalists just beneath them, the movement, “if anything, helped obscure important class differences and the actual causes of social stratification.” This paved the way for “elites who hail from historically underrepresented populations … to exempt themselves from responsibility for social problems and try to deflect blame onto others.”

[Read: The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy]

Al-Gharbi is neither an adherent of wokeism nor an anti-woke scold. He would like to both stem the progressive excesses of the summer of 2020, a moment when white liberals “tended to perceive much more racism against minorities than most minorities, themselves, reported experiencing,” and see substantive social justice be achieved for everyone, irrespective of whether they hail from a historically disadvantaged identity group or not. The first step, he argues, is to dispel the notion that the Great Awokening was “some kind of unprecedented new thing.”

Awokenings, in al-Gharbi’s telling, are struggles for power and status in which symbolic capitalists, often instinctively and even subconsciously, leverage social-justice discourse not on behalf of the marginalized but in service of their own labor security, political influence, and social prestige. He does not see this as inherently nefarious—indeed, like Tocqueville and many others before him, he recognizes that motivated self-interest can be the most powerful engine for the common good. Al-Gharbi argues that our current Awokening, which peaked in 2021 and is now winding down, is really the fourth such movement in the history of the United States.

The first coincided with the Great Depression, when suddenly “many who had taken for granted a position among the elite, who had felt more or less entitled to a secure, respected, and well-paying professional job, found themselves facing deeply uncertain futures.”

The next would take place in the 1960s, once the radicals of the ’30s were firmly ensconced within the bourgeoisie. “The driver was not the Vietnam War itself,” al-Gharbi stresses. That had been going on for years without protest. Nor was the impetus the civil-rights movement, gay liberation, women’s liberation, or any such cause. “Instead, middle-class students became radical precisely when their plans to leave the fighting to minorities and the poor by enrolling in college and waiting things out began to fall through,” he argues. “It was at that point that college students suddenly embraced anti-war activism, the Black Power movement, feminism, postcolonial struggles, gay rights, and environmentalism in immense numbers,” appropriating those causes for their own gain.

If this sounds familiar, it should. The third Awokening was smaller and shorter than the others, stretching from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, and repurposing and popularizing the Marxist term political correctness. Its main legacy was to set the stage for the fourth—and present—Awokening, which has been fueled by what the scholar Peter Turchin has termed “elite overproduction”: Quite simply, America creates too many highly educated, highly aspirational young people, and not enough high-status, well-paid jobs for them to do. The result, al-Gharbi writes, is that “frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants [seek] to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” It is one of the better and more concise descriptions of the so-called cancel culture that has defined and bedeviled the past decade of American institutional life. (As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, political purges often serve as jobs programs.)  

The book is a necessary corrective to the hackneyed discourse around wealth and privilege that has obtained since 2008. At the same time, al-Gharbi’s focus on symbolic capitalists leaves many levers of power unexamined. Whenever I’m in the company of capitalist capitalists, I’m reminded of the stark limitations of the symbolic variety. Think of how easily Elon Musk purchased and then destroyed that vanity fair of knowledge workers formerly known as Twitter. While some self-important clusters of them disbanded to Threads or Bluesky to post their complaints, Musk helped Trump win the election. His PAC donated $200 million to the campaign, while Musk served as Trump’s hype man at rallies and on X. Trump has since announced that Musk will be part of the administration itself, co-leading the ominously named Department of Government Efficiency.

Al-Gharbi’s four Great Awokenings framework can sometimes feel too neat. In a review of We Have Never Been Woke in The Wall Street Journal, Jonathan Marks points out a small error in the book. Al-Gharbi relies on research by Richard Freeman to prove that a bust in the labor market for college graduates ignited the second Awokening. But al-Gharbi gets the date wrong: “Freeman’s comparison isn’t between 1958 and 1974. It’s between 1968 and 1974”—too late, Marks argued, to explain what al-Gharbi wants it to explain. (When I asked al-Gharbi about this, he acknowledged the mistake on the date but insisted the point still held: “The thing that precipitated the massive unrest in the 1960s was the changing of draft laws in 1965,” he said. “A subsequent financial crisis made it tough for elites to get jobs, ramping things up further.” He argued it was all the same crisis: an expanding elite “growing concerned that the lives and livelihoods they’d taken for granted are threatened and may, in fact, be out of reach.”)

Despite such quibbles, al-Gharbi’s framework remains a powerful one. By contrasting these periods, al-Gharbi stressed to me, we can not only understand what is happening now but also get a sense of the shape of wokenesses to come. As he sees it, “the way the conversation often unfolds is just basically saying wokeness is puritanism or religion,” he explained. “They think Puritanism sucks, or religion sucks,” he continued. But just saying that “wokeness is bad” is not “super useful.”

Indeed, one of the primary reasons such anti-woke reactions feel so unsatisfactory is that wokeness, not always but consistently, stems from the basic recognition of large-scale problems that really do exist. Occupy Wall Street addressed the staggering rise of inequality in 21st-century American life; Black Lives Matter emerged in response to a spate of reprehensible police and vigilante killings that rightfully shocked the nation’s conscience; #MeToo articulated an ambient sexism that degraded women’s professional lives and made us consider subtler forms of exploitation and abuse. The self-dealing, overreach, and folly that each of these movements begat does not absolve the injustices they emerged to address. On the contrary, they make it that much more urgent to deal effectively with these ills.

[Musa al-Gharbi: Police punish the ‘good apples’]

Any critique of progressive illiberalism that positions the latter as unprecedented or monocausal—downstream of the Civil Rights Act, as some conservatives like to argue—is bound not only to misdiagnose the problem but to produce ineffective or actively counterproductive solutions to it as well. Wokeness is, for al-Gharbi, simply the way in which a specific substratum of elites “engage in power struggles and struggles for status,” he said. “Repealing the Civil Rights Act or dismantling DEI or rolling back Title IX and all of that will not really eliminate wokeness.”

Neither will insisting that its adherents must necessarily operate from a place of bad faith. In fact, al-Gharbi believes it is the very sincerity of their belief in social justice that keeps symbolic capitalists from understanding their own behavior, and the counterproductive social role they often play. “It’s absolutely possible for someone to sincerely believe something,” al-Gharbi stressed, “but also use it in this instrumental way.”

Having been born into one minority group and converted to another as an adult, al-Gharbi has himself accrued academic pedigree and risen to prominence, in no small part, by critiquing his contemporaries who flourished during the last Great Awokening. He is attempting to outflank them, too, aligning himself even more fully with the have-nots. Yet his work is permeated by a refreshing awareness of these facts. “A core argument of this book is that wokeness has become a key source of cultural capital among contemporary elites—especially among symbolic capitalists,” he concedes. “I am, myself, a symbolic capitalist.”

The educated knowledge workers who populate the Democratic Party need more of this kind of clarity and introspection. Consider recent reports that the Harris campaign declined to appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast in part out of concerns that it would upset progressive staffers, who fussed over language and minuscule infractions while the country lurched toward authoritarianism.

Al-Gharbi’s book’s title is drawn from Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, which famously argued for a “symmetrical anthropology” that would allow researchers to turn the lens of inquiry upon themselves, subjecting modern man to the same level of analytical rigor that his “primitive” and premodern counterparts received. What is crucial, al-Gharbi insists, “is not what’s in people’s hearts and minds.” Rather the question must always be: “How is society arranged?” To understand the inequality that plagues us—and then to actually do something about it—we are going to have to factor in ourselves, our allies, and our preferred narratives too. Until that day, as the saying about communism goes, real wokeness has never even been tried.