Táíwò examines "elite capture", a phenomenon where elites, a small but influential subgroup of a community, advocate for policies and narratives that benefit themselves, frequently at the expense of the broader group's interests. Central to Táíwò's discourse is the evolution of the term "identity politics." Originally popularized by the Combahee River Collective, a group of queer Black socialist women, the term was a radical assertion of their complex identities. However, the concept has been co-opted by elites who have betrayed its original intent. Táíwò delves into the illustrative dynamics within different communities such as African Americans, post-colonial Africans, and queer Americans. The term "elite capture" is traced back to E. Franklin Frazier's controversial work "Black Bourgeoisie," which analyzed how the Black middle class in the U.S. constructed a world of "make-believe" to cope with racial oppression. Frazier critiqued the strategy of racial uplift via a separate Black economy in the USA, pointing out how it failed to challenge the fundamental systems of oppression. >Not only would building a national Black economy be mathematically almost impossible, Frazier asserted; the attempt would also be politically naive. Such an economy would have to be bootstrapped out of the present political reality, which would make it vulnerable to outside influence—despite being a response to that very vulnerability. Even if people are successfully persuaded to “buy Black,” Frazier argued, if they’re doing so with dollars earned from their job at the Ford plant, then we haven’t yet created a Black economy. Frantz Fanon's analysis of the African middle classes during national independence movements in Asia and Africa is compared to Frazier's work, highlighting how these classes often undermined anti-imperialist struggles for their own gain. Táíwò points out how the queer community within the USA began with radical aims which eventually decayed into assimilationist reforms— culminating in gay marriage and sterile, palatable figures like American politician Pete Buttigieg. In Táíwò's view, the weakening of liberal democracy, attributed to its entanglement with monopoly capitalism and technocratic governance, has created conditions ripe for elite capture. Under the influence of elite capture within liberal democratic frameworks, identity politics can become a tool for the elites. >This way of casting the conversation about power and governance has been integral to the framing that links “freedom” and “capitalism” in the ideals and practices of liberal democracy: a country’s freedom need only be found at its ballot boxes rather than in, say, its workplaces. Thus, if one believes in liberal democracy, they may believe that imbalances of power everywhere could be fixed by instituting arrangements like the “rules-based international order,” “democratic elections,” and “formal political representation.” In a nutshell, if the right ideals are embodied in the right formal systems, then the outcomes of those systems are justified. >In the absence of the right kind of checks or constraints, the subgroup of people with power over and access to the resources used to describe, define, and create political realities—in other words, the elites—will capture the group’s values, forcing people to coordinate on a narrower social project that disproportionately represents elite interests. When elites run the show, the interests of the group get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top, at best. At worst, elites fight for their own narrow interests using the banner of group solidarity.