Elite capture should be better thought of as a kind of thermometer than an on and off switch.

So of course, in any society, at least any society, this side of, you know, a extremely

wide-ranging change to how societies work, any society is going to respond more to powerful

people than it does to less powerful people.

But how much more, right? How sensitive is society to elite interests versus non elite interests?

You know, you probably noticed that there is, well, I've said this before in the podcast

so we're living right now as I speak to you in a very reactionary moment. You can feel

reactionary moments, there's backlash towards movements towards equality, social justice,

movements to upend existing hierarchies, and then a backlash happens to them. We're living

through one of those backlash moments. It feels it profoundly and I've lived through a number,

I'm 43 years old. I've lived through a few of them, 2010 was one of them, as was the

wake of 9-11 was an intensely reactionary moment. It's almost like a weather feeling,

you could feel it in the air. And one of its sort of consistent themes of that, I think,

in reaction to particularly the movement for Black Lives and racial justice around the

aftermath of George Floyd's murder is a sort of backlash to what people on the right

have appropriated for their own terms, the idea of being woke. I don't use that term

because it's been stretched out by overuse to essentially be meaningless, but in the kind

of derogatory way in which the right uses it, right? It's this sort of like precious,

persnickety out of touch obsession with difference and political correctness. And it's sort of

insidious towards all forms of kind of traditional values, but also just like the normal carrying

on of conversation. There's people in the center left who kind of have been critiqued

in the same way. And there's this whole now discussion about this, right? Often the other

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