Book Review: Elite Capture by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

Táíwò, Olúfẹmi O. Elite capture: How the powerful took over identity politics (and everything else). Pluto Press, 2022.

Elite Capture, Deference Politics, and Constructive Politics

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) is a deft study of the history of identity politics that pushes current political discourse forward. Today, identity politics is often a target for both praise and critique amongst political groups. Táíwò illustrates this polarization but believes that "many criticisms [of identity politics] target ideas that are not essential to identity-based movements or…misconstrue their basic goals entirely"(9). In the status quo, both critics and supporters ultimately misread identity politics.

For Táíwò, these distortions happen through “elite capture”. It is an umbrella term that describes when "a small group of people… have power over a larger group of which they are part, usually without direct responsibility to that larger group, and often without their knowledge or consent" (22). More precisely, it occurs “when the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims” (22). Through invisible control and siphoned resources, elite capture is incredibly violent in the context of identity politics because it obstinately dresses the privileged as facilitators of progress when that “progress” merely reinscribes their power.

If elite capture was a toolbox, then one of the utensils inside of it would be labeled “deference politics”. Táíwò focuses on deference politics as a specific strategy that social elites use to facilitate elite capture. Deference politics refers to “an etiquette that asks people to pass attention, resources, and initiative to those perceived as more marginalized than themselves,” (12) which, ultimately, “meant that the conversation stayed in the room, while the people most affected by it stayed outside” (71). Today, gestures like “passing the mic” or “centering voices” are popular and undeniably important. However, deference politics often manipulate our conversations because it frames decorum as progress when it is genuinely the bare minimum. When elites pass attention to someone more marginalized, it may seem like power is redistributed inside the space , but that does not mean power is redistributed outside of it.

In order to paint deference politics, Táíwò gestures to Progressive Era scholar Carter Woodson’s book “The Miseducation of the Negro”. Woodson details how the academy (specifically his alma mater, Harvard University) constructs an “imperial classroom” (49). Here, politics are fruitfully discussed, but conversations don’t leave it. It can feel easy to blame individual students for perpetuating elite capture in this setting; however, they often do so without knowing it. Instead, the discursive norms in the classroom, assembled by elites, create a common ground that assumes polite gestures can be weighed as systematic shifts in power.

Although Táíwò addresses elite capture’s many deceiving tactics, he believes it is inevitable in light of the current moment—elite capture is "everywhere." Nonetheless, he urges us to equip an alternative toolkit to dismantle it. That toolkit is “constructive politics”, a frame that places particular emphasis on applying our conversations outside of the room.

To grasp the importance of constructive politics, Táíwò points to Paulo Freire's influential book, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed." Here, Freire identifies harms within the normalized “banking model of education,” or when “teachers view poor students as passive, empty receptacles to be filled with the information they, the teachers, possess”. (86) To deconstruct the banking model, Freire’s develops an alternative educational theory called “conscientização” (critical consciousness) that “would begin by acknowledging the knowledge students and teachers both bring into any situation,” undoing “the distinction between elites and non-elites entirely” (87).  It would flatten pedagogies that operate on an assumption that the teacher is the all-knowing and students are powerless. Through constructive politics, students are granted power through a presumption that they do have knowledge, which places both parties on the same plane. The result: Freire’s pedagogy created a “mutual liberatory project” that gave students the gumption to point out political fallacies and create intercommunal resistance to Portuguese colonial oppression.

Elite Capture in the Progressive Era

While elite capture is theorized according to the modern identity politics, it can also be applied to historical moments. As such, America’s Progressive Era was an incredibly potent time for elite capture. It is perhaps ironic that in the Progressive Era, the plea for political movement is often articulated by reinscribing conservatism, rendering institutions as targets for elite capture.

For Táíwò, elite capture is perhaps clearest at the “multinational level, where weighty decisions about economic possibilities are made by large global institutions without even the pretense of democratic accountability” (27). As such, Taiwo’s framework can complicate President Theodore Roosevelt's international relations strategy. Roosevelt's call that “our army needs complete reorganization--not merely enlarge--and the reorganization can only come as the result of legislation."[1], is predicated upon his personal interest to revitalize the nation’s perception as “weak”. To resolve this, he conflates nationalism and militarism en masse to imagine the nation as constitutive of hypermasculine, patriotic men. While Roosevelt's demands reflects a drive to poliferate American Empire, elite capture becomes an explicit issue when he steers legislative power to fulfill imperial interests. Considering the historical archive, Roosevelt's policy was another step to increase American global hegemony and statecraft by utilizing the legislative apparatuses to warrant military expansion and erasure of populations marked as worthy for colonization and uplift. In Táíwò's frame of reference, Roosevelt fulfilled the narrow desires of social elites in high government positions who sought to see America as the de facto global hegemon. More simply, the American Progressive Era government used elite capture by deceptively melding militarism and nationalism, delineating imperial expansion as a method to “save masculinity” and create a gendered modality of progress.

While the Progressive Era may feel like a time buried in elite capture, there were still moments reflecting Táíwò’s constructive politics. In New York City, underground queer communities picture moments of quotidian resistance to elite capture by assembling communities of care. In an interview, Mabel Hampton Lewis, a lesbian activist during the Harlem Renaissance, is asked “How did women help each other through the hard times?”. In response, Lewis describes how “they worked together. They worked. They lived together and they worked. When someone got sick the friend would come and help them, bring food, bring money and help them out.” [2]By providing material support for those in their most immediate spaces, a constructive politic emerges. Like Freire, Mabel Hampton Lewis’ community of care collapses Cartesian dualisms and power strucutres. Instead, they acknowledge the resources each community member has available and allocate them according to the needs of other community members. Supplies are assigned directly to those who need them most, which ensures problems are solved. Ultimately, in the Progressive Era, pragmatic material organizing appears in the everyday lived experience of the marginalized, revealing sites where constructive politics begin to blossom.

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In Elite Capture, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò presents a sobering analysis and a necessary complication of our current political discourse. By describing how identity politics itself is not a problem but rather that elite capture twisted identity politics, Táíwò offers an important model that reveals how power imbalances stain political movements. But to go further, Táíwò’s frame can also create a better understanding of how power operates in historical events. In the Progressive Era, elite capture illustrates how the socially privileged such as President Roosevelt often resorted to providing band-aid solutions that reinscribe bourgeous goals under the garb of “progress”. 

Under a broader scope, Táíwò’s illustration of elite capture, deference politics, and constructive politics can act as a novel filter to run our status quo through because it exposes how power operates in both international and local scopes. Today, considering the complex manifestations of colonial violence and racialized capitalism in a post-January 6th America, deferring attention to the marginalized can be a first step to dismantling the oppressor’s tools, but it cannot be the only step. Like Mabel Hampton Lewis’ community of care, Táíwò reminds us that “if the point is to change it” then the onus lies on us to embrace constructive politics by combining our conversations with pragmatic material organizing. Whether our class discussions, essays, and readings serve any utility depends entirely upon how we apply our findings to spaces outside of the classroom.