PUBLIC CHOICE THEORY EXPLAINS ALL: “The idea of elite capture has been around for decades and typically describes how the most advantaged people in a group take control of benefits that are meant for everybody. Táíwò’s innovation is applying this idea to identity politics, the concept devised in 1977 by the Black radical feminists of the Combahee River Collective. He argues that their project has been hijacked. ‘We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity,’ they wrote, because organizing around what was good for people at the bottom of social hierarchies would be good for all oppressed people. But rather than using personal identity as an entry point to building radical coalitions, as these innovators intended, elites are using it as a tool to advance their own narrow interests.”

Well, that’s what elites do.