“Massive changes often unfold on large time scales,” philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò told The Drift in 2022. But if the past three years have shown us anything, it’s that they can also happen pretty quickly. Just three years ago, corporations proudly touted their DEI commitments, and a program of climate reparations seemed, if not imminently achievable, at least worth discussing concretely. But the topics we covered in our last conversation — climate justice, the relationship between race and class, how we should talk about power — are still as stubbornly relevant as ever, as are Táíwò’s insights into the sources of and remedies for social stratification.

Táíwò is a Georgetown professor, the author of Elite Capture (2022) and Reconsidering Reparations (2022, paperback edition 2025), and one of our foremost thinkers on race, class, climate, and international relations. We talked about woke capitalism (and its demise), the mainstreaming of the term “elite capture,” the social costs of economic disruption, how the U.S. impedes global cooperation, and more.

We last talked at the beginning of 2022, when Biden was president, and our tone was perhaps a little bit more optimistic — we discussed the possibility of climate reparations and gains made by social movements. How did we get from there to here?

[Laughs.] That’s the question of our generation, I suppose, or at least one of them. There’s a lot to reflect on in the postmortem of the right’s resurgence over the last few years. I’m not of the opinion that the retreat from cultural issues that some have been championing in response reflects the correct diagnosis of the problems. But I do think that we overestimated the extent to which progressive politics had deep cultural support, and we underestimated the role of what you could call the material basis of communicative politics. The control of major communications platforms like Meta and Twitter by right-wing figures was a five-alarm fire that we didn’t treat as one. The parallel destruction of local news outlets and of third spaces was a crisis that we did not treat as a crisis. Insofar as there’s room for introspection, I think it’s on that side of things.

Is there anything that we could have done to avoid the backlash that DEI is facing now, or was something like this inevitable?

I think backlash to social progress on any level is inevitable. Politics is conflictual. There is no consensus worth seeking between segregationists and transphobes and homophobes and the people that want rights and justice for the groups of people targeted by all of those particular kinds of bigotry. The question in front of us is: should the backlash have taken this form? Was it inevitable or was it evitable that the champions of this backlash would end up in the White House with the nuclear launch codes and the full coercive apparatus of the state, including the Department of Homeland Security, which is currently launching agents in plainclothes to abduct people at will? That, I think, was evitable. There’s a long list of people we could blame and counterfactual stories we could tell about why that particular development happened, but I don’t think it was a necessary conclusion of the fact that people had to attend some workplace seminars about not touching Black women’s hair and using people’s pronouns. I don’t believe that that was a necessary response, historically speaking.

It feels like the era of “woke capitalism” has come to a close, or the idea has at least gone into hibernation. In our last interview, you called it “a substantive victory of the left and the forces of justice,” and we were compelled by your defense of it in a time when many on the left were dismissive. How do you look back on that phenomenon now?

I feel fairly vindicated about that. Some on the left, including myself, hoped that the alternative to woke capitalism was socialism — or at the very least, a version of capitalism that represented meaningful, substantive improvements toward justice and democracy in the workplace. That hope is obviously worth having, but I don’t think it was very serious, three years ago, to look out at the constellation of forces and think that the alternative to woke capitalism was going to be a progressive worker state. The alternative was open-air apartheid. We could have just consulted what the world was like thirty years before that and thirty years before that, and we would have seen the alternative to “woke capitalism” that has always had the most institutional force behind it. And if we lost sight of that, we were deluding ourselves, and we should be honest about that.

What might we have done differently if we were seeing that with clear eyes?

We could have done more to push for unionization. Obviously, the worker’s movement has never forgotten about that, but they need more support than they’re getting. Or we could have advanced a bigger push against capital’s control over communications infrastructure and toward meaningful public and nonprofit versions of those things — local news, more non-billionaire-funded social platforms. On the organizing side of things, we could have taken a more base-building approach, rather than one centered on mobilization and fundraising asks, powered by endless email blasts to get people out to events, but not actually, democratically involving them as empowered political subjects. Just to be clear, you will find people who have been beating this drum for decades and who have been trying to save or revitalize local journalism and save or extend the power of unions. I’m not saying anything that those people haven’t been saying, but now hopefully we can see how many more people need to be saying it, and how many more dollars and hours need to go in that direction. 

So you’re less concerned with finessing the language and messaging.

Yes, that is accurate. We should take stock of what we just lost to. They didn’t have the best, most clever, most inclusive messaging. They passed out “mass deportation now” placards at the Republican National Convention. You don’t win by being perpetually afraid of saying anything that people outside of your group will not respond well to. You win by winning. And they won. They said what they were for. They also lied about what they were for, but in a much more chaotic way, and a much less fearful way, than the Democrats and people to their left lie about what they’re for. The idea that all of this happened because, like, twelve professors at Berkeley used “Latinx” on their syllabi is just detached from reality, from my point of view.

You published the book Elite Capture right after we last talked to you, and that phrase has since become ubiquitous on the left. What do you hope readers take from the concept? Have you seen it be misapplied or misinterpreted, or are you on board with a more capacious usage?

I’m definitely on board with a capacious usage of it. The point of Elite Capture wasn’t to say: here is a hyperspecific political perspective on exactly who the powerful groups really are. The point of Elite Capture is to say we should be having more serious conversations about intragroup power dynamics. Within any given movement, or among marginalized groups, what are the different social positions, and how are they affecting the struggle for progress for that political agenda or social group and what other people outside the group think its political agenda is? Elite Capture promotes having those conversations in a way that is more intentional and legible. To the extent that people are picking up the term because it’s useful for that, I’m glad to hear it. I myself am just another person who picked up the term because it was useful. I’m not its inventor; economists and sociologists have been talking about elite capture.

I do find myself seeing people use “elite capture” as both a description and a prescription rather quickly. So they’ll say, this issue seems like the major issue, but that’s because of elite capture. If it weren’t for elite capture, we’d be talking about this other thing. And they seem to conclude that what they see as the elite capture version of the issue isn’t worth supporting. I’ll use a somewhat anodyne example, just so no one yells at me. Imagine thinking about climate politics in some region, and they’re saying, Well, the climate politics here has been all about solar panel improvements for homeowners, and that’s elite capture, because the people who have it worst are renters. And so the proposal to make it easier to get solar panels on homes that people own is bad and should be opposed. I don’t know that the second point really follows. Obviously, there’s a question of political priorities, and you can’t win every battle at once, and so maybe there is a reason to switch to some other battle. But if you could push a button and put solar panels on houses, that would be a net positive. People overcorrect and oppose political issues and policies that are associated with elite capture. I think we can move a little more slowly from a diagnosis that elite capture is at play in some political area to a decision about what we should do about it.

How should we be thinking about the elite in general, especially as the target of populist, or faux-populist, anger on both the right and the left?

One of the things that originally motivated me to write Elite Capture was to try to get people to be more precise. Elite in terms of what? To use the previous example, lots of low-income people are homeowners. They may be elite relative to renters of a similar or lower income level, but I don’t know that they are “the elite” in terms of the Illuminati secretly controlling the capital flows of the entire globe. First of all, there is no elite like that. Second, we are often confused by relative advantage. You see this in terms of the politics of marginalized groups. People will lay blame at the feet of the Black political elite, for instance, who certainly may have powers at the city level that not everyone has, but who also exist within state governments they may or may not control, and within a federal policymaking apparatus. Whatever critiques we may have of the people who are comparatively advantaged, we do have to separate those from the question of why the system is the way that it is, and how we can actually get housing to work differently, or how we can change state laws so that polluters pay for the effects of climate disasters.

Speaking of the elite, we’d like to talk about higher education. What has your experience been in academia this past year? Have recent developments changed your view of universities? As Trump takes aim at them, what’s worth defending?

Apparently, I’m lining up at the barricades with Harvard now. I wouldn’t have guessed that three years ago, but here we are. I’ve come to think of higher ed as more central to the broader struggle for democracy and freedom of speech of all kinds than I would have a few years ago. The amount of credibility that these institutions were willing to burn — and the jeopardy they were willing to put their own institutions in — to prevent students from protesting a genocide really says to me that their perception, at the very least, is that something real is at stake here. We know that the other side is desperately afraid that students and faculty members and staff will do their own thinking about what politics they do or do not support, and will communicate their views to other people. And they are correct to be afraid. That is dangerous to them. It’s a problem if there’s a center of people willing and able to do their own thinking without immediate threat to their lives or livelihoods. And so we have to defend that thinking. Campus politics is not a distraction from “real” politics. The right doesn’t think so. And I don’t think so either.

You’ve written about the social consequences of NAFTA. As we weather Trump’s tariffs and other economic disruptions, what social costs do you see coming alongside the financial and economic ones?

Regardless of the specifics — which are increasingly hard to calculate or even make guesses about because of the lack of commitment of the current administration to the things that it says — I can imagine both consumer and investor confidence cratering in the U.S. Downstream of that are a lot of bad things, economically speaking, but I imagine inequality will increase as a result, because there will likely be higher prices for many goods. There will be more uncertainty about the economic future, and that generally tends to tilt things in the direction of the people who are able to save and moderate their decision-making. I think people will feel a lot more vulnerable to the people around them, and a lot more vulnerable in personal relationships. People will leave bad relationships less often. People will leave parts of the country that are bad for them, or people like them, less often. I think you’re going to see a lot of cultural conservatism in the sense of people living less exploratory lives, taking fewer chances, and resigning themselves to levels of abuse and worse working conditions than they might have otherwise. And I think this is the design. Those kinds of interpersonal vulnerabilities, even more than the economic benefits of selling our Social Security numbers to Russia or whatever, is the kind of domination the people in our government crave.

Do you see throughlines between the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests that have emerged around the genocide in Gaza?

I think there are definitely throughlines. The comparison people make more often, with some justice, is to the campaign against apartheid South Africa, but I think it would be impossible not to see the imprint of BLM on the student movement for justice in Palestine. If I were to say what it seems like the students fighting for Palestine took from BLM, I would guess that their communicative tactics, like how the issue of justice is framed, owe a lot to the progressive culture that had been built among younger folks. Tactically, Occupy was probably also a major influence on the students. 

What do you make of the state of protest and activism more generally, as something that liberals and centrists have pulled back from, relative to Trump’s first term?

It depends how you measure it. I think what we’re seeing seems more like a decentralization of protests than a real recession of protests. There were lots of people at the Tesla takedown protests. There were lots of people at the Hands Off protests. And I think there’s a widening of the base of protests; people maybe feel similarly empowered, but less coordinated about the what, where, and how. I haven’t seen anything on the scale of, say, the mobilization around the Muslim ban during Trump 1.0, but I live in D.C., so every other week I’m seeing a lot of protesting and organizing, particularly around the fired federal workers, and I think time will tell whether it’s more or less effective this way. I have a sense that it’s actually a move for the positive: more fronts of struggle will probably be useful this time around. But that is a guess.

Coordinating any kind of federal or international response to climate change now feels like a pipe dream. Do you see any reason to hope? Where do you think that we — not only in the United States but around the world — should be directing our energies?

I see one big reason for hope. I’ve started being less shy about using that word these days. I don’t know why people are so bent out of shape about hope. Hope is great. One bright spot is that it seems as though the recession of the U.S. from global centrality has made certain kinds of internationalism more likely to succeed. Maybe most notably from the climate perspective, the International Maritime Organization passed essentially the first global carbon tax just days after the U.S. pulled out of it. I suspect it won’t be the last victory of this sort. The U.S., even by the standards of the right, is particularly intransigent under the present circumstances. It may just leave the rest of the world actually able to coordinate on what space there is for overlapping consensus on climate change. The difficult thing to explain has always been how we weren’t able to move from interest convergence to something at least approaching global cooperation, given that we all do have just the one planet. As much as we might fuss about the details, four degrees Celsius of warming will be bad for everyone. The U.S. has been a uniquely toxic actor in that space, and the isolationist tendencies of the present administration might actually work to the global advantage in the long view — if, and only if, we prevent Trump from pursuing wars and territorial expansion and global interference, like militarily occupying the Panama Canal and claiming Greenland as a colonial prize and disrupting military alliances that help forestall wars. The end result of that kind of destabilization will not be global cooperation. We can only solidify the carbon tax wins in the long term by defeating this administration. But if we do, then we might be able to make those short-term gains in climate politics permanent, and that would be good for the planet and everyone on it.

After World War II, much of the left opposed aspects of the Marshall Plan and American programs for distributing aid abroad. Now, as our foreign aid apparatus is dismantled, is there an opportunity to imagine an alternative to the system that developed? In other words, do you think the decimation of the post-1945 international order creates any productive openings?

The disintegration of the post-1945 order communicates effectively, in terms that state managers understand, the need for the kind of multilateral cooperation that was originally envisioned by Pan-Africanists and Third Worldists, the kind that’s currently being championed by groups like the Progressive International, which is calling for states in the Global South to form blocs around resource management. If, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and similar states decided to organize around the mineral resources they have, could they use that leverage over the global economic system to chart out a fairer, more equitable path of development? Maybe. Just as we were talking about on the domestic front, and just as we were talking about in terms of woke capitalism versus apartheid capitalism, the space opening up for something new is also the space opening up for something worse. The question will be: which version of a new order — or new orders, plural — will win resources and people most quickly and most effectively? And that is a question we have to answer with our organizing.