The Emma LaRocque Reader: On Being Human. Elaine Coburn (ed.). University of Toronto Press. 2026.

To justify their political existence, all nations tell origin stories. The founding myths of the world’s most powerful states, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, tell of heroic Europeans discovering lands that were empty but for primitive peoples, the “Indians” or “Aboriginals”.  Colonial oppressors characterised Indigenous peoples as savages who deserved to be wiped out, unworthy of a future, or doomed to disappear, given their primitive “race” or culture unsuited to modernity.

The myth of manifest destiny

Tomorrow was reserved for European peoples, who brought civilisation to a wild land. The oppression and massacre of Indigenous peoples was justified as part of the inevitable “march of progress”, known in America as manifest destiny; “the right”, as the Representative of Massachusetts claimed in 1846, “to spread over this whole continent.” These founding myths uphold capitalist relations, redefine the land as private property to be bought and sold, justify colonial power structures, and overwrite Indigenous peoples’ governance practices. Today, Donald Trump’s efforts to “restore truth and sanity to American history” by removing exhibits from the Smithsonian museums that are critical of white supremacy exemplify the dangers of the authoritarian control of historical narratives.

But myths are not reality. Indigenous peoples did not die out, and they are reclaiming their histories, their voices, their lands. Vine Deloria Jr, Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, and Audra Simpson, and many more scholars and intellectuals are speaking back to empire. Among the most striking contemporary contributions to this demythologising literature is the writing of a Cree-Métis intellectual and poet, now gathered together for the first time in The Emma LaRocque Reader: On Being Human. Born in 1950 in Lac La Biche, in northeastern Alberta, Canada, LaRocque grew up Métis in a “Cree oral literature language and worldview” that together made up a “richly woven cultural life” (145). From the vantage point of her own culture and the experience of “colonialism lived” (251), she mobilises her powers as a scholar and poet to challenge foundational myths of the most powerful nations in the world.

The myth of terra nullius

The first myth she debunks is that the lands were empty, or at least empty of any meaningful civilisation, before the Europeans arrived. LaRocque gives testament to the many original peoples in the Americas who had their own histories, traditions and attachment to the land. For her part, she grew up with a rich cultural life, in a log cabin built by her resourceful father. In characteristically vivid prose, LaRocque recalls her childhood:

I was born into a world of people whose roots of pride, independence, industriousness and skills go back to the Red River Métis, back to the Cree. I was born into a world of magic, where seeing and hearing ghosts was a routine occurrence, where the angry Pehehsoo (thunder-bird) could be appeased by a four-directional pipe chant, where the spirits danced in the sky on clear nights and where tents shook for people to heal (48).

.With particular intensity from the late 19^th century onwards, colonisers deliberately disrupted the lifeworlds of Indigenous peoples, including LaRocque’s Métis people, through violent repression but also through forced religious instruction, residential and public schooling

Colonising Europeans interrupted self-determining Indigenous civilisations for their own gain. With particular intensity from the late 19^th century onwards, colonisers deliberately disrupted the lifeworlds of Indigenous peoples, including LaRocque’s Métis people, through violent repression but also through forced religious instruction, residential and public schooling (c.1890 to 1996), and adopting Indigenous children into White families. Despite efforts at erasure, Indigenous peoples have persisted, remembering their histories on lands filled with the stories of their ancestors.

The myth of the prehistoric “Indian”

Indigenous peoples are often considered purely historical, consigned to the past. Against this myth, change is part of every living culture, LaRocque emphasises, including Indigenous civilisations. The Métis practiced adaptable economies, rooted in land-based and wage labour, and their participation has been central to the development of contemporary nations like Canada and the United States:

Métis have been the labouring backbone of this country, serving first as portaging and fur packing coureur de bois, defining the buffalo industry with their organization and technologies, then on to building railroad lines and roads, clearing fields for farmers or fighting fire for forestry (98).

Today, LaRocque emphasises that artists, writers, poets and political and social commentators are revitalising and renewing Indigenous lifeways and knowledges.

Despite tendencies to imagine Indigenous peoples as consigned to a “primitive past” (131), their cultures have been fluid and changing. If forced change is oppression, some change is chosen. “Like the rest of humanity” LaRocque writes, Indigenous peoples are “facing and adapting to change” (xxxi, italics in original), participating in a world in movement.

The myth of the “Vanishing Race”

As LaRocque documents, Indigenous peoples, including Cree-speaking Métis like her own family, were deemed incapable of “civilisation,” hence doomed to vanish as too savage for the present or future. This myth was popularised by the 19^th and early 20^th century photographer Edward Curtis, who stripped his Indigenous subjects of any sign of modernity and then labelled them, “The Vanishing Race”. Too primitive and too pure to survive the wicked world, they were destined to disappear in the face of the “progress” brought by European colonisers. This myth lives on in contemporary re-tellings, from The Last of the Mohicans to coffee-house artbooks, like Jimmy Nelson’s infamous Before They Pass Away. In reality, “the Métis were systematically coerced from their land” (8) by civil servants, priests, police, surveyors and settlers. European settler success, never total, was a contingent fact of struggle, rather than a result of the necessary march of history. Today, LaRocque emphasises that artists, writers, poets and political and social commentators are revitalising and renewing Indigenous lifeways and knowledges (269).

The myth of the savage

Colonial oppressors created dehumanising stereotypes about Indigenous peoples to justify their oppression, which linger today. One frames them as ignoble savages, “grunting and bloodthirsty” (32), hence deserving of elimination by a more civilised European colonial culture. Recalling the first cowboy and Indian movie she watched, LaRocque writes:

I was riveted, revolted, and terrified. I was perhaps eight years old. I do not remember the name of the movie; I only remember “the Indians”: grotesque, wild-eyed, lurking creatures with painted bodies and hideous faces, tomahawks on hand, howling and whooping, crouching like animals across the screen, preying on beautiful white people on their way west to bring law and order (122).

LaRocque urges us to relate to each other as more than the “sum of our colonial parts” (xxiv); this is key to challenging oppression.

Alternatively, “Indians” are figured as noble savages, wise, kind and close to nature. LaRocque laments that the noble savage trope, for instance, the ecologically attuned Indigenous person, acts as a “prop for the conscience of a morally lethargic corporate world” (133). The noble savage is a normative ideal, not a fully realised person. Rejecting these fictions, LaRocque reminds us that Indigenous peoples are, simply, human: “People who can laugh, cry, hate and love” (xxxi). The response to demands for the “authentic Indian” (130), whether in the ignoble or noble variant, must be an insistence on Indigenous humanity. This requires the direct, honest appraisal of “the good, the bad and the ugly” (xxxvi).

Beyond myths to the human

In her scholarship and poetry spanning a half a century, LaRocque has appealed to our “will for justice” (133) to writings remind us of the imperative to dismantle dangerous, obfuscating political mythologies, and that recognising each other’s humanity:

I am ethically committed to the vocation of humanization, that is, both to the ending of injustice and oppression, whether social or intellectual, and at the same time, to the reconstruction of Indigenous humanity. And ultimately, all humanity (227).

LaRocque urges us to relate to each other as more than the “sum of our colonial parts” (xxiv); this is key to challenging oppression. We can begin by telling the truth about the lands that we are on and the original peoples who have lived here, not as ciphers representing good or evil, but as human beings filled with hopes and dreams, foibles and failures, strengths and weakness. In an era where truth is a casualty of national mythmaking this is a special challenge; but only then can we begin to build right relations for a future together.

Note: This essay gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Bing Wen on Shutterstock.

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I always have mixed feelings when I make the journey from London to my second hometown of Gainesville, FL. But for a native Floridian, you never really leave the Sunshine State; it’s just too sticky. When I do go back, it’s exciting to see what’s new and what will (hopefully) stay the same in a city that carefully balances nature, culture, and college students.

Gainesville sits in North Florida, caught between the Deep South and the rest of the state, and that in-between feeling shows up in the raw, rebellious arts scene circling the University of Florida.

The wildlife is buzzing: lizards scrambling at your feet, woodpeckers hopping from tree to tree, and, of course, alligators. The culture seeps in slower, but its roots run as deep as the mossy live oak trees. Gainesville sits in North Florida, caught between the Deep South and the rest of the state, and that in-between feeling shows up in the raw, rebellious arts scene circling the University of Florida.

Just south of town, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (1896–1953) wrote about rural Florida without softening it, focusing on work and survival in a landscape that pushes back. That refusal to romanticize the state continues with contemporary authors like Lauren Groff, who describes Florida as “an Eden of dangerous things.” The music carries the same attitude, from culturally disruptive legends like Bo Diddley to the punk of Against Me!, where art emerges from discomfort and defiance, and residents keep DIY-ing when systems and structures fail them.

Happily, a place where DIY culture and political resistance intersect is ripe for good reading material!

The Lynx Books

The Lynx Books opened after I left town, so naturally I was suspicious of it – it offered me not a shred of nostalgia. But, what a delight. Opened in 2024 by Lauren Groff and her husband, The Lynx bills itself as a general-interest bookstore with a focus on books currently challenged or banned in Florida, alongside work by BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and Florida writers.

I visit independent bookshops often and read a lot of contemporary fiction, but I’m easily bored by seeing the same handful of titles everywhere I go, so it’s refreshing to walk into a small-city shop and find shelves full of books I’ve never heard of. As a tourist in my own hometown, I’m immediately pulled toward the Florida authors section, where I find everything from university press publications and natural history guides to oral histories of local scenes, poetry – both new and republished classics. There’s also plenty of books by emerging writers, many of whom have signed their own books. A full run of Groff’s own work is there too, naturally.

True to Gainesville fashion, The Lynx pairs literature with action: it also operates a nonprofit, The Lynx Watch, Inc., which collects donated banned books and distributes them to local educational organisations serving young people.

Book Gallery West

Book Gallery West (opened in 1983) is an unassuming local essential, tucked into a shopping centre alongside a post office, grocery store, and pet shop. It’s not flashy from the outside, but it’s nearly impossible to walk past the outdoor bargain shelf without stopping in, if only to see what unexpected paperback has been left out in the Florida heat.

What sets Book Gallery West apart is its thoughtful, varied collection. The shelves are organised by theme and category, but within each section new and old titles sit comfortably side by side, encouraging browsing and rewarding a deeper dive with the occasional recent release at a bargain price.

For locals, there’s also the option to sell books back to the shop for store credit, which keeps the inventory circulating. It’s less about chasing trends (although their  new political nonfiction section was on point) and more about sustaining a long-term community staple, making Book Gallery West feel less like a bookstore you visit occasionally and more like one you pop into on the way to buy more orange juice.

Friends of the Library Booksale

In Gainesville, the semi-annual Friends of the Library Book Sale might as well be a citywide holiday. If you’re planning a visit, it’s well worth timing your trip around one of these five-day sales (and bringing an empty suitcase).

The sale began modestly in October 1954, held in a temporary location and raising just $80 for what is now the Alachua County Library District. In 1989, Friends of the Library, together with the Junior League of Gainesville, purchased its first permanent (and still current) home, where the sale now features more than 500,000 items per event. It has grown into one of the largest book sales of its kind in the southeastern United States, complete with a giant map at the entrance to help you navigate the stacks as you get your first hit of that unmistakable used-book smell.

The only thing better than the sheer range of materials – everything from rare maps to joke books – is the pricing. Books run from 25 cents to 4 dollars during the first three days, drop to half-price on day four, and on the final day, everything left is a glorious ten cents. True fans know that attending on the last day is non-negotiable: I left the sale laden with treasures I had to redistribute before moving abroad. It was worth the effort to support a sale that not only encourages reading and makes for a fun day out but also supports the important work of local libraries!

Note: This bookshop guide gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image credit: Sean Pavone on Shutterstock.

Do you know a place with great bookshops? As part of a regular feature on LSE Review of Books, we’re asking academics and students to recommend their favourite bookshops in a particular city or town to share with our book-loving community of readers the world over.

Bookshops could be academic, alternative, multilingual, hobby-based, secret or underground institutions, second-hand outlets or connected to a university. We’d like to cover all world regions too and are particularly keen to feature cities outside of Europe and North America.

If something comes to mind, we’re looking for a brief introduction about the city, a selection of three or four bookshops with around 150 words per bookshop, detailing why each one is a must-see. Our editorial team can then find suitable photos and links to accompany the piece, though you’re welcome to supply these too.

Email us if you’d like to contribute: lsereviewofbooks@lse.ac.uk

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Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Jacob Silverman. Bloomsbury Continuum. 2025.

Trump’s U-turn on Big Tech 

In Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, American journalist Jacob Silverman pieces together the story of how a disparate group of tech billionaires came together to change history. Just a few years ago, Donald Trump and the CEOs of “Big Tech” seemed stuck in a hate-hate relationship. Trump talked of breaking up the Big Tech monopolies and raged against being “de-platformed” by social media firms. The generally Democrat-leaning CEOs of Silicon Valley showed little fondness for the former President in return. Their companies were leading lights in movements such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and ESG (Environment, Social and Governance). Many of their even more radical staff were vocal proponents of Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ rights. Even the minority of Tech billionaires with right-wing libertarian leanings such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk seemed highly ambivalent about Trump. Suddenly, in the summer of 2024, everything changed. 

The book describes how, after a failed assassination attempt, it started to look as though Trump would win the presidential election. Two days later, Trump selected JD Vance, a protégé of Thiel as his running mate who had previously described Trump as “America’s Hitler”. Other members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia” (founders of the international payments company) lined up behind Vance, including Elon Musk and David Sacks. Money started to pour into the Trump campaign including from the disreputable cousin of Big Tech, Big Crypto. Other parts of Silicon Valley started to support Trump or become much quieter in their liberalism. At the time of writing, Trump now loves Big Tech, particularly if related to AI or Cryptocurrencies, “woke” is severely out of fashion in Silicon Valley and even former liberal Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg is advocating more “Masculine Energy”. 

Peter Thiel and the libertarian influence 

The story is far from being a linear one of smart tech folk executing a clever plan. The philosopher-king of radical big tech is clearly Thiel, a long-time libertarian and democracy sceptic. Thiel wrote books and papers about his beliefs and spent years supporting various Republican politicians. It was Thiel, who in December 2016, first attempted to bring together Donald Trump and leaders of Big Tech. That first attempt had little impact, according to Silverman. Even Musk continued to describe himself as moderate and focused his efforts on Tesla, whose electric vehicles were then favoured by environmentally conscious liberals. 

Resentment against the established elite was a key area of common ground with Donald Trump. That resentment combined with Libertarian fervour to do things outside the normal rules of the state.

The “Rage” of the title came to the boil in early 2020s, the era of COVID-19, lockdowns, Black Lives Matter and online culture wars. The various personalities described had a common resentment towards the “oligarchic elite ruling class”. In spite of their great wealth, many of them felt like outsiders. According to Silverman, they either believed they deserved political power commensurate to their wealth or that they should not be constrained by politicians and laws. Two to three years, they began to make a more determined effort to influence the political system, starting in California and then spreading to other states. The feeling of resentment against the established elite was a key area of common ground with Donald Trump. That resentment combined with Libertarian fervour to do things outside the normal rules of the state. The most prominent of these was support for cryptocurrencies and the efforts of that industry to build a parallel financial system beyond government control. 

Musk’s Twitter storm and the crypto bubble 

The “rage” apparently afflicted Musk, whose self-proclaimed moderation quickly disappeared in a tirade of angrier and stranger tweets, many focused on fighting what he called the “woke mind virus”. Silverman details Musk’s obsession with and eventual purchase of Twitter and its ruthless transformation into X. Though Musk claimed he was driven by a desire to protect freedom of speech, the book describes the involvement of investors who are not obvious promoters of free speech. Twitter, now X, eventually became a platform to support Trump’s re-election campaign. 

The irony Silverman lays out regarding Musk’s shift to the radical right was how it conflicted with the commercial reality of his businesses. Musk has grown rich from government subsidies and contracts. His rocket company, SpaceX, literally got off the ground due to large contracts with NASA, and Tesla only achieved profitability due to large subsidies to electric vehicles. Yet Trump opposed electric vehicles and wanted Musk to lead large-scale cuts in public spending. Other parts of Big Tech, despite initial distrust of the state and particularly the military and security sectors, had become enthusiastic suppliers. Notable among these were Google and various parts of Thiel’s investment portfolio. 

The failure of the authorities to prosecute Bankman-Fried for alleged campaign finance violations made further attempts to buy politicians seem free of legal consequences.

It took a convicted fraudster to demonstrate how to really convert money (not his own) into power. Sam Bankman-Fried, the then-CEO of crypto exchange FTX demonstrated that all it took to win a high degree of influence in the Democratic Party was throwing vast amounts of money at the right people. Silverman points to the failure of the authorities to prosecute Bankman-Fried for alleged campaign finance violations. This made further attempts to buy politicians seem free of legal consequences. Trump transformed from a critic to a passionate advocate of crypto, especially when crypto money poured into his re-election campaign and the Trump family made huge profits from their own crypto ventures. 

What motivates billionaires to support Trump? 

This is not the first book about the rightwards ideological turn by parts of the Silicon Valley elite, and it will not be last. In a 1996 essay called “CyberSelfish,” Paulina Borsook described the strength or Libertarian belief in Silicon Valley, which later evolved into a book. Tech columnist Michael S. Malone wrote about the potential rise of “Technofascism” in 1998. Books about key libertarian believers in the tech industry like Thiel, Musk and Sacks abound. 

It could be argued that the tech billionaires have as much right to their political opinions as anyone else – Silverman writes from a left/liberal perspective, and makes no attempt to hide that leaning. Why should Silicon Valley be inclined towards liberal values? In 2018 several Google employees launched a class action against Google claiming “workplace bias against women and men with views perceived as conservative; men; and Caucasian/Asian people who work at Google”. This followed the dismissal of programmer James Damore for writing an essay attacking what he described as Google’s “Ideological Echo Chamber”. 

Across that group of tech billionaires, there are many whose support of Trump seems to come from fear or greed rather than ideology.  

But despite his opposing political views, the book’s great strength is Silverman’s objective, thorough account of how a politically incoherent coalition came together in an amazingly short period of time to win Trump’s re-election. That incoherence rapidly came to a head: the Musk-Trump bromance only lasted six months. The economic policies of the second Trump administration and the financial interests of Big Tech seem to regularly go out of alignment. Even across that group of billionaires, there are many whose support of Trump seems to come from fear or greed rather than ideology.

Like all good books, Gilded Rage answers some questions but leaves the reader pondering over others. Are regular complaints about the polarisation of politics and society simply a reflection of black-and-white thinking endemic to much of the tech industry? (Perhaps perceived “technofascism“ and “the woke mind virus” are just two sides of the same coin.) Has the huge concentration of power and wealth in the tech industry destroyed nuance? Has the toxic interaction of money and power always been like this, and the tolerance for bad behaviour, as long as it’s “authentic”, merely made it more visible? Have we entered a new era of unaccountable oligarchs, like those who accumulated immense wealth and power after the fall of the Soviet Union? And what might be the most uncomfortable question: what comes next?

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Molly Riley for The White House on Flickr.

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Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results. Iris Bohnet & Siri Chilazi. Harper Collins. 2025.

Almost immediately after it coming to power in January 2025, the Trump administration 2.0 began instituting a wave of long promised policy reforms which directly attack Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Among these was an executive order was signed to ban federal DEI programmes with immediate effect as Trump called the programmes “dangerous, demeaning and immoral”. Published the same month, Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results makes a timely intervention into the topic. Its authors, Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi agree: most DEI initiatives are not fit for purpose and a reassessment based on principles of meritocracy is urgently needed, they claim. 

Issues with existing approaches to workplace DEI 

However, unlike Trump’s, the authors’ criticism of standard DEI approaches is primarily based on the inefficacy of individualistic training models and the over-reliance on an individual’s capacity to change their thinking. To tackle these failures, the authors present a toolkit for businesses to address inequality at work through actionable techniques backed up by robust data.  

Pay gaps and poor working conditions have been evidenced to compound for people holding multiple marginalised identities, for example disability or race.

Similar investigations into the failures of DEI programs have been conducted by journalists and researchers. For example, Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloane Management Review feature multiple articles which support data-driven solutions to issues of inequality in the workplace. In this landscape, Make Work Fair provides a consolidation and expansion of widely evidenced conclusions about DEI approaches and possibilities for alternatives. By leading the reader through key sites of bias in business scenarios (the hiring process, in career progression, work arrangements and childcare), backed up by extensive quantitative data, they provide an accessible roadmap to reduce inequality at work. 

Bohnet and Chilazi are both based in the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School. Both of their work centres around advancing gender equity in organisations, corporations and governments on a global scale. Due to this focus of the authors’ expertise, the book largely concentrates on issues of gender inequality. The authors declare this openly, and they argue the same approach supports the equality of other marginalised groups in the workplace. However, there is a lack of detail as to how intersectional identities interact with issues of gender inequality, leaving the work at risk of only providing an argument for women with relative privilege. Pay gaps and poor working conditions have been evidenced to compound for people holding multiple marginalised identities, for example disability or race. 

In many ways, the book is presented convincingly: each chapter offers the reader a problem and a solution, alongside multiple examples: when creating their DEI programme in 2017, Uber discovered gaps in its diversity data when looking beyond a North American context, leaving them unable to create change across the 70+ countries in which it operates. Their response was to commit to data-driven decision-making. By presenting case studies like this, the authors contextualise issues in real workplaces and presents solutions that others have already begun to action: they argue that if Uber can do it, other corporations can too. 

Inequality driven by corporate exploitation 

Where the argument falls short, however, is in its failure to address inequality driven directly by corporate exploitation of workers and resources. Uber may very well be improving its gathering and analysis of diversity data, but it has repeatedly failed to address the calls of drivers for better pay and conditions, leaving the majority of workers at the sharp end of precarious employment. 

Bohnet and Chilazi make an early distinction between ideology and evidence-based approaches. Their justification for this hinges on a desire for the book to speak to those across the political spectrum, including “the activist working to limit DEI” (xiii). However, this depoliticisation of their work invisibilises important conversations about labour, marginalised identities and social and economic justice. Despite their claims to the contrary, the interventions which the authors offer are thereby likely to affect the symptom of inequality rather than its root. 

Without recognition of the intersectional ways in which inequality is reproduced and reinforced (through marginalised identity as well as class), DEI initiatives risk being tokenistic and passive.

This is exemplified by the inclusion in the book’s introduction of a quote from JPMorgan Chase CEO, Jamie Dimon, speaking on fairness in the workplace. The authors use this to support their evidence-backed approach to de-bias business systems. What they do not do, however, is make the much-needed critique of Dimon’s billionaire status. Billionaire wealth hoarding has been shown to rapidly advance global inequality, particularly across lines of gender, race and between the global north south. Therefore, the uncritical inclusion of several billionaire figures throughout the book as legitimate voices on fairness seems hypocritical. 

With most insights suggesting company-wide policy change, the audience of the book is primarily senior leadership at large multinationals, going little way to deepen democracy at work, or to empower the working class. Ash Sarkar (author of Minority Rule, 2025) and John Narayan (Head of the Institute for Race Relations) argue that DEI often fails to address the class elements instrumental to workplace oppression. Without recognition of the intersectional ways in which inequality is reproduced and reinforced (through marginalised identity as well as class), DEI initiatives risk being tokenistic and passive.  

Towards a collective DEI approach 

A more bottom-up changemaking process could easily absorb the other systems-based techniques which the authors suggest, whilst increasing the autonomy of the most precarious workers. For example, the authors offer a practicable solution in advocating for remote and flexible working arrangements. This serves to not only increase equality at work but also impact wider social inequalities around gender and caregiving by increasing workers’ choices when it comes to family arrangements. These types of solutions, in conjunction with more horizontal decision-making, would embed values of fairness in a more far-reaching and long-term way.

A key route for this would be through increased Union presence and activity in the workplace. Many of the corporations which are referenced in the book are well known for employing union-busting tactics. While the authors encourage us to “follow in the footsteps of Amazon and take a closer look at our data to investigate whether bias could have crept into our performance assessments” (196); they must also advocate for the fights against exploitation which Amazon warehouse unions have been engaging in. In a study conducted in 2024, warehouse workers detailed consistent examples of oppression, with one worker saying: “I pray before going to work, because they treat you like you’re not human.” Data-driven DEI approaches will not suffice unless the most precarious workers are given a voice.  

Whose equality is left out of the book? And can we achieve equality without redistribution of power and wealth?

Bohnet and Chilazi’s argument is largely convincing for the corporate America audience. They position the book well to offer an alternative “systems-based” toolkit which is readily actionable and more effective than current DEI approaches. But there are several examples where the argument is incomplete, begging the questions: whose equality is left out of the book? And can we achieve equality without redistribution of power and wealth? The sweeping changes to DEI programmes under the Trump administration have contributed to a cultural shift in the US on issues of equality. The authors would be well-placed to continue the project in this context, updating case studies as initiatives are rolled back in many corporations. However, unless this next step treats workers as collective powerholders rather than focusing on individual leaders, the work will continue to support entrenched power dynamics which foster inequality.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Mary Long on Shutterstock.

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A traipse through Toronto’s snowy flurries can simultaneously be a stroll in the warming footsteps of literary greats. John Irving, that verbose titan of storytelling, lives in the city, using it as a backdrop to his 1989 book A Prayer for Owen Meany. Margaret Atwood, visionary dystopian, studied here and perhaps glimpsed Gilead between Downtown’s sparkling high-rises. Rohinton Mistry emigrated here in the 1970s, studied at the university, and wrote the monumental A Fine Balance (1995) while looking back across the oceans at India. Then there’s Michael Ondaatje, Miriam Toews, Anne Michaels. So many footsteps, so many tales. 

Bakka-Phoenix Books – 84 Harbord Street 

And where might those intriguing footsteps take us? Our first stop is the Bakka-Phoenix sci-fi emporium in Harbord Village, clutching the fringes of the University of Toronto’s august campus. Once sharing a building with Glad Day (see below) and claiming to be the most ancient of sci-fi booksellers, Bakka-Phoenix has more spicy Frank Herberts, more Clarkean odysseys, and more cheerless Tchaikovskys than you can shake a lightsabre at. The atmosphere is rarified, the clientele cerebral, the collection significant.  

A requested recommendation for a local visionary led me, via William Neuromancer Gibson (a Vancouver resident transplanted from America) and Margaret Atwood, to A E Van Vogt, a Canadian contemporary of Isaac Asimov. Giddy, exhilarating, troubling and obtuse, his stories feature horrifying extra-terrestrials and hair-pin twists that left me confused and amused. 

And where might those intriguing footsteps take us? Our first stop is the Bakka-Phoenix sci-fi emporium in Harbord Village, clutching the fringes of the University of Toronto’s august campus. Once sharing a building with Glad Day (see below) and claiming to be the most ancient of sci-fi booksellers, Bakka-Phoenix has more spicy Frank Herberts, more Clarkean odysseys, and more cheerless Tchaikovskys than you can shake a lightsabre at. The atmosphere is rarified, the clientele cerebral, the collection significant.  

A requested recommendation for a local visionary led me, via William Neuromancer Gibson (a Vancouver resident transplanted from America) and Margaret Atwood, to A E Van Vogt, a Canadian contemporary of Isaac Asimov. Giddy, exhilarating, troubling and obtuse, his stories feature horrifying extraterrestrials and hair-pin twists that left me confused and amused. 

BMV Books – 471 Bloor Street West 

Just two blocks north, on pullulating Bloor Street West, is the cavernous BMV Books. A daunting den of literature old and new, used and pristine, it’s a place to dive in and embrace the seemingly chaotic collection. Academic architectural studies rub spines with ribald graphic novels and well-thumbed thrillers – this is a place to lose yourself and discover the Turkish historical fantasy romance you never knew you were looking for. Fair warning, all three Toronto BMVs are time black holes, and a whole afternoon can easily disappear, along with a fair few Canadian dollars. You won’t regret it though.

A Different Booklist – 779 Bathurst Street 

Out we go, briefly into the snow and round the corner to the resolutely political and progressive A Different Booklist, which stocks “the rich literature of the African and Caribbean diaspora and Global South” as well as a multitude of talented Indigenous writers. A perusing of its groaning shelves will take in sports biographies, historical analyses, impassioned political treatise, and some eye-opening novels. There’s room for anti-establishment blockbusters like The Hunger Games and – inevitably – The Handmaid’s Tale here, but I picked up In the Upper Country (2024) by Kai Thomas, which reveals the harsh realities of Canada’s place at the end of the Underground Railroad, and the bravery and sacrifice that sustained growing communities there.

Little Ghosts – 930 Dundas Street West

Back on the treacherously icy sidewalks again, we head south through the soul-warming miasma of Little Italy to the quirky horror repository of Little Ghosts. A resolutely independent and friendly little store, its shelves are of course haunted by (Stephen) King and (Dean) Koontz, (Shirley) Jackson and (M.R.) James. They also display a fine line in homegrown, eerie classics. Half an hour of perusing the shelves with the well-informed clerk saw me taking home novels by Nick Cutter (The Troop, 2014), Regan McDonnell (Black Chuck, 2018) and Ian Reid (I’m Thinking of Ending Things, 2017). An offer to take home a second copy of David Cronenberg’s dense and worrying Consumed (2015) was deftly side-stepped.

And if you uncover a local novelist who you fall in love / fear with, there’s a fair chance they’ll appear at one of Little Ghosts’ regular, well-attended community events, where the curious and the convinced gather to share their passion for the supernatural. For the ghosthunters in your life, there are spooky cards and gifts. 

Back on the treacherously icy sidewalks again, we head south through the soul-warming miasma of Little Italy to the quirky horror repository of Little Ghosts. A resolutely independent and friendly little store, its shelves are of course haunted by (Stephen) King and (Dean) Koontz, (Shirley) Jackson and (M.R.) James. They also display a fine line in homegrown, eerie classics. Half an hour of perusing the shelves with the well-informed clerk saw me taking home novels by Nick Cutter (The Troop, 2014), Regan McDonnell (Black Chuck, 2018) and Ian Reid (I’m Thinking of Ending Things, 2017). An offer to take home a second copy of David Cronenberg’s dense and worrying Consumed (2015) was deftly side-stepped.

And if you uncover a local novelist who you fall in love / fear with, there’s a fair chance they’ll appear at one of Little Ghosts’ regular, well-attended community events, where the curious and the convinced gather to share their passion for the supernatural. For the ghosthunters in your life, there are spooky cards and gifts. 

Glad Day Bookshop – 32 Lisgar Street 

Once more into the chilly air, and a bracing walk south through the idyllic Trinity Bellwoods Park, the final shop where I stomped snow off my shoes is the oldest LGBTQ+ bookstore in the world – Glad Day Bookshop. Once the heart of the cacophonous Church and Wellesley gay district, and now settled into its new home in artsy West Queen West, Glad Day is a chimera formed from community needs – so much more than a repository of literature. For over 50 years it has been a place for physical (and intellectual) nourishment, a political epicentre, and even a great spot to find a date and make new friends. It has survived movements physical and social, and even prosecution, and its copious collection covers a spectrum of queer experience in Canada, and far beyond. 

On friendly and insightful advice, I picked up David Kingston Yeh’s Ontario-set YA novel The Boy at the Edge of the World (2017), a dizzying coming-of-age tale that skips and jumps joyously through Toronto’s gay community. One might happily browse the curated-with-pride collection of local authors’ work, or dive into one of the regular drop-ins for – and with – neighbourhood writers and join a thriving, ribald and ambitious literary scene. 

And now we’re done for the day. This colourful meander between some of Toronto’s many friendly, inspiring bookstores can fill an afternoon, though it could just as easily take up a full day, with time set aside for coffee, poutine and maybe a little bit of reading too. And the next day, those footsteps are there for you to follow all over again.

Note: This bookshop guide gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image credit: Elena Berd on Shutterstock.

Additional uncredited photos by Greg Taylor.

Do you know a place with great bookshops? As part of a regular feature on LSE Review of Books, we’re asking academics and students to recommend their favourite bookshops in a particular city or town to share with our book-loving community of readers the world over.

Bookshops could be academic, alternative, multilingual, hobby-based, secret or underground institutions, second-hand outlets or connected to a university. We’d like to cover all world regions too and are particularly keen to feature cities outside of Europe and North America.

If something comes to mind, we’re looking for a brief introduction about the city, a selection of three or four bookshops with around 150 words per bookshop, detailing why each one is a must-see. Our editorial team can then find suitable photos and links to accompany the piece, though you’re welcome to supply these too.

Email us if you’d like to contribute: lsereviewofbooks@lse.ac.uk

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The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip. Stephen Witt. The Bodley Head. 2025.

Anna D’Alton (AD): Your book, The Thinking Machine, is a deep dive into the titan tech company, Nvidia and a detailed profile of Jensen Huang, its co-founder and CEO. Why did you think it was important to examine Huang and Nvidia at that granular level?

Stephen Witt (SW): He’s the most successful businessman of our era, and there really hadn’t been much written about him. I first came across Nvidia 20 years ago when it was a manufacturer of video game equipment. It was a choppy affair; a lot of people were shorting the stock, they didn’t believe in Huang. And for 10 or 15 years, the stock basically didn’t do anything, so I stopped paying attention.

Then in 2022, I started experimenting with Midjourney and ChatGPT, these incredible generative AI models, and I was blown away. I wanted to write about it, but OpenAI was a very crowded story, so I was looking for another way in. I came back to Nvidia, and found that a minor manufacturer of video game accessories had transformed itself into the producers of the hardware for all the AI that was running, making that technology possible.

As I researched it, I remembered Huang, but assumed he would be gone by now. It had been 30 years since he’d taken on the role of CEO, when the company was founded in 1993. But, to my surprise he was still there, and is the single longest-serving tech CEO in the S&P 500. I thought that was a fascinating story. Huang completely re-engineered Nvidia to make it the most valuable company in the world – in history, by some measures.

AD: Thinking about the scale of the technological transformation Nvidia was part of and the microchips they produce, how did Huang’s understanding of, approach to, graphics processing units (GPUs) change the game?

SW: Huang and his co-founders, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, entered the dawning GPU market in the early 90s because it looked promising. They were somewhat naive at the outset: they had 50 or 60 competitors, each one vying for the market, which led to a fight to the death! Within six or seven years, Nvidia emerged as the winner, but Huang was scarred, and disinclined ever to participate in such a crowded marketplace again. He had these successful graphics circuits that powered computer graphics and image processing in the gaming industry, and he started looking for other, more niche arenas where his company might grow.

Even if you are the big, established incumbent player, you have to deliberately lower your profit margins and build products for niche customers that don’t seem profitable to your shareholders.

He saw that scientists were taking the circuits in the graphics cards and repurposing them for scientific computing applications, like quantum physics or weather forecasting. He decided to build a tool for them, knowing he wouldn’t have competition there because it was such a small market. He built a software platform called CUDA that essentially allowed you to flip a switch and transform the graphics card from a toy for video games into a real scientific tool. This attracted a whole host of new users, including, eventually, AI developers – a turn of events Huang and his team hadn’t predicted. Once he saw that AI was turbo-charging the company as the sector began to take off in 2013 or 2014, he pivoted Nvidia overnight from gaming to AI, and that gamble paid off.

AD: And that was quite a wild leap. What are the qualities, choices or insights that led Huang to achieve such astronomical success with Nvidia?

SW: Huang is an engineer. He has taken risks, mostly informed risks, some of them more outlandish. Nvidia will sometimes come out with a product or do something mystifying, but Huang’s perspective is this, and I agree with it: that there is more risk in not taking risks. If you look at the history of computing and the semiconductor industry, the pattern is that small, marginal companies move into tiny markets, which the big guys ignore because they’re low-profit and low-margin, so they’re happy to cede that business to a small player. But then the small player leverages that small market, grows it, and raids the industry from below, ultimately eliminating and usurping the large player. This is known as disruption, a phrase coined by the management consultant Clayton Christensen, who had observed this happen in the hard drive market, and wrote a book about it called The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997).

The lesson here, which is very hard to learn, is that even if you are the big, established incumbent player, you have to deliberately lower your profit margins and build products for niche customers that don’t seem profitable to your shareholders. It’s very hard to do, and it disgruntles your shareholders. But this is what Huang was doing with CUDA. He absorbed the lesson of disruption early, and leveraged it to build a successful company.

AD: How would you describe the speed and scale of the gains in computing power in the last decade or two?

SW: I don’t know the exact figures, but it’s on the order of millions and billions of times faster, and that’s just at the level of the individual microchip. When we think about scaling it up to the level of the data centre, which is basically a giant barn full of Nvidia microchips, it’s totally unprecedented. Huang has described this ramp-up as “the new industrial revolution”, and I think he’s right about that, both in terms of the amount of capital that’s being deployed to build these systems and the scale of impact it’s going to have on productivity and society.

There are extremely smart teams of people inside Google, Amazon and other companies, and their only objective is to destroy Nvidia.

AI has turned out to be a heavy industry, and that was not something people anticipated when they were experimenting with these systems 10 years ago. That’s arguably been the biggest surprise. AI’s capabilities increase in a direct fashion with scale, and that has proven to be quite a profitable equation for Nvidia.

AD: Looking at competitors, with Google and Huawei now producing advanced chips, do you think there are any real challengers to Nvidia?

SW: Yes, Google especially. Google just built a world-class AI. Recent independent evaluations of AI suggest that Google Gemini is at the top of the pack. And Gemini was not trained on Nvidia chips; they use their own in-house chip called the Tensor Processing Unit. This poses a huge threat to Nvidia. To cope with competition, Huang has become a confidante of Donald Trump. This has enabled him to remove restrictions on exports to China, which is a huge AI market. But the Chinese authorities have discouraged internal use of Nvidia hardware because they’re trying to build their own stack. So that’s another huge threat. Other companies like AMD and Broadcom are certainly trying to drive Nvidia’s profit margin down. I don’t think they’ve yet been successful. But as Huang himself says, there are extremely smart teams of people inside Google, Amazon and other companies, and their only objective is to destroy Nvidia.

AD: Today AI is so dominant and there’s such fanfare about it. But some have spoken about an AI bubble, questioning whether it is as stable and sure a bet as we think, or whether there’s over-investment. What are your thoughts on that?

SW: This is a transformative technology – you can’t argue otherwise. There are 800 million people using ChatGPT every week. It’s transforming society. Having said that, the railroads transformed society, as did the internet. And there were still investment bubbles related to it. Something can be the real deal and still have an investment bubble form around it; in fact, it possibly makes it more likely.

The question is not so much what AI can do, but whether the timing of cash flows will pay off. We have to prove pretty quickly, given the scale of investment, that all this money being dumped into these data centres is going to produce a useful product pronto.

The question is not so much what AI can do, but whether the timing of cash flows will pay off. We have to prove pretty quickly, given the scale of investment, that all this money being dumped into these data centres is going to produce a useful product pronto. And if there turns out to be some kind of ceiling there, if we turn out to plateau with this current approach of scaling, that could trigger a cascade of disappointed Chief Financial Officers pulling Capital Expenditure – the funds companies allocate to buy, upgrade and maintain essential physical assets like property, technology, or equipment – away from this sector. And if that were to happen, Nvidia’s stock price would drop significantly, and the whole stock market could follow.

I can’t quite tell if we are living in that world or not – both the bubble side and the non-bubble side make great points. Certain sectors of the tech economy are more clearly unstable to me: quantum computing is in an obvious bubble right now, in my opinion. Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were a bubble. AI doesn’t quite fit or feel like that because we are, in fact, in the middle of a real paradigm shift, a real technological revolution. And the companies involved, for the most part, are extremely well capitalised and run by smart people.

Note: This interview gives the views of the person interviewed and the interviewer, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image: FotoField on Shutterstock.

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We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Musa al-Gharbi. Princeton University Press. 2025 (paperback). 2024 (hardback).

Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke offers a provocative explanation of social, cultural and moral contradictions of the contemporary elites and their relation to reproduction of inequality via a discourse of equality. This work expands Shamus Rahman Khan’s work on elites’ formation in the premier universities through the discourse of self-made, and Pierre Bourdieu’s work on symbolic capital and its role in producing inequalities. Musa al-Gharbi combines both, describing “symbolic capitalists” who live by producing, managing and legitimising discourses and narratives in the backdrop of growing symbolic economy. He argues that social justice discourse serves as a means to signal the elite status and becomes a form of domination rather than emancipation. He analyses the hypocrisy of the symbolic capitalists’ “egalitarian” values that coexist with lifestyles premised on exploitation and exclusion, particularly focusing on American context. 

The immateriality of wokeness 

The book’s aim is to demonstrate that “wokeness” functions as the ruling ideology of the elites that aid in legitimising their socio-economic position even as it claims to oppose inequality (33). The central proposition of this work – “we have never been woke” is a critical reflection on post-2010 periods with heightened social justice mobilisations (like Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, March for Science and March for Social Justice) but without any real improvements in the material condition of marginalised groups. It signals the expansion of elite anxiety and intra-elite competition. The author argues that both the wokeness and anti-wokeness of symbolic capitalists allow them to reconcile egalitarian claims and discourse with their exploitative and exclusionary practices.  

Al-Gharbi documents how symbolic capitalists focus on symbols, ideas, rhetoric, cultural wars issues rather than “bread and butter” struggles, in other worlds, fetishising cultural politics at the expense of class politics.

Al-Gharbi proposes multiples ways in which identity politics are leveraged by symbolic elite interests to legitimise class domination. They achieve this by concealing elite privilege and actively shifting the public attention away from it. The book excels in revealing how the critique of the system is transformed, by symbolic capitalists (ranging across left, centre and right spectrums of ideology) into a form of ideological reproduction. Al-Gharbi engages with science, knowledge and technology (SKAT) studies, political economy of symbolic professions, to develop a sociological critique of elite forms of domination in contemporary American society. 

A reflexive sociology of power 

The book is composed of six dense chapters unpacking the idea of wokeness as a form of elite ideology. He engages into a reflexive sociology of power that examines the role intellectuals, professionals, journalists, consultants, lawyers and artists play in the reproduction of domination by the very symbolic struggles couched in the language of egalitarianism. Al-Gharbi documents how symbolic capitalists focus on symbols, ideas, rhetoric, cultural wars issues rather than “bread and butter” struggles, in other worlds, fetishising cultural politics at the expense of class politics. (But al-Gharbi doesn’t tell us how the present-day capitalist economy works and reproduces these inequalities either.)   

Through their control over symbolic resources and professions, wealth and power, elites claim ‘victimhood’ by identifying with the poor, ethnic minority and LGBTQ people.

His method involves data analysis of think tank reports, government statistics on demography of occupations, and journalistic accounts, comparing and identifying patterns across US states in different phases of cultural changes along with the rise of symbolic professions, mapping demographic data across income, educational and occupational categories. Following Bourdieu’s insistence on combining mapping social spaces with agents’ practices and dispositions, the author shows that contemporary elites do not suppress the critique, but rather integrate and commodify and the anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-gender-binary movements.  

He explains how the elites who benefit from this structure of inequality come to identify with the people who suffer from inequalities and dominate popular politics today. Through their control over symbolic resources and professions, wealth and power, they claim “victimhood” by identifying with poor, ethnic minority and LGBTQ people. They commodify social altruism and enhance individual mobility and privilege status. 

Symbolic domination in practice 

In chapter three, Al-Gharbi focuses on symbolic capitalists and their symbolic domination practices. They don’t see themselves as elites and rather shift the public attention to the top one per cent. He draws on empirical data to show that the symbolic elite benefits in terms of educational attainment and high-status careers. For instance, in the US, most creative professionals (artists, musicians, actors, filmmakers, writers etc.), are highly educated and disproportionately come from white, affluent backgrounds. Credentials translate into high-income positions, exclusive neighbourhoods and social networks that produce advantages intergenerationally.  And yet these symbolic capitalists claim a discourse of marginalisation and exclusion that is at odds with the hierarchies of power from which they benefit. On the subject of this manipulative victimisation, Al-Gharbi puts forward the concept of “totemic capitalism” or a claimed or perceived membership in historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups” (237-38). His discussion of this subject is interesting, though it could have been developed in more detail.  

Postmaterialist politics and structural inequalities 

On the status of postmaterialist politics, Gharbi uses demographic data to connect the rise of symbolic capitalists’ capture of social justice discourse to the battle over language, representation and cultural values. These elites are involved in converting their self-perception and status signalling into a form of political engagement. Symbolic capitalists have over the years clustered in a few specialised urban regions (like the West Coast and Northeast Corridor) which are dominated by industries like finance, consulting, technology and law. And yet these are highly unequal spaces. Despite benefiting from tax breaks, elites have a low rate of donations to charities that focus on poverty alleviation or inequality reduction. They prefer to cause like environmental protection and animal rights or to elite universities, Art museums (186). 

Masking inequalities to perpetuate privilege 

The sixth chapter discusses how inequalities are mystified through social processes. It deconstructs the universalising narrative of privilege (eg “all whites are privileged, or all males are privileged”) which obscures the unique benefits the upper-class elites draw from racialised inequality. It masks the class differences and renders it acceptable to marginalise, subordinate the white poor for instance since they do not talk about their “privileges”. It shows how the “awareness and confession of privilege” does not help in alleviating poverty or even mitigating inequalities (271). 

An impactful, systemic account of the institutional dominance of symbolic elites.

With this book, al-Gharbi has produced an impactful, systemic account of the institutional dominance of symbolic elites. That said, its focus is narrow and could have benefitted from including analysis of economic and political elites’ discourses and practices. This work doesn’t offer any way out of these symbolic discourses loop, produced, circulated and celebrated by symbolic elites; but it does demonstrate where we are stuck. Nevertheless, this is an incisive, significant book that contributes to contemporary cultural and political discourse and how elites relate to it. It will be of interest to scholars, activists and general readers who are interested in understanding dynamics of inequality, identity politics and social justice today.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Ma Di on Shutterstock.

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Beliefism: How to Stop Hating the People We Disagree With. Paul Dolan. The Bridge Street Press. 2025.

The age of polarisation

In the past decade the phenomenon of polarisation – the tendency for differences in opinions to become more extreme – has affected societies regardless of their level of economic, political or technological development.  It has resulted in dysfunctional governments, fractured societies, and citizens’ weakened trust in the state. Amid these dangerous implications, scholars and policymakers have proposed ways to mitigate polarisation by bridging divides and building a consensus on contentious policy questions, including immigration reforms and climate-change policies, that sharply divide the public.

His project is not about reducing polarisation in views. Instead, Dolan addresses a specific form of polarisation that is characterised by hostility or negative emotions induced by differences in views – what he terms ‘beliefism’.

In Beliefism: How to Stop Hating People You Disagree With, behavioural scientist Paul Dolan sets himself apart from such efforts, emphasising that his project is not about reducing polarisation in views. Instead, Dolan addresses a specific form of polarisation that is characterised by hostility or negative emotions induced by differences in views – what he terms “beliefism”. But Dolan argues that people can suffer extreme positions without mutual disdain. He invites readers to shift their perspective from what people believe to how they feel about those who hold different beliefs. This focus on affect, rather than substantive disagreement, distinguishes Dolan’s contribution from more conventional approaches to polarisation.

Mitigating feelings of hostility, not the views themselves

Dolan’s contention that we can reduce feelings of hostility without changing the extremity of beliefs has an underlying assumption: extremity of views does not constitute a necessary condition for affective polarisation. This perspective considers that ideological polarisation (policy disagreement) and affective polarisation (emotional hostility) are separate phenomena and are not interlinked. This assumption is important because agreeing or disagreeing with it would point to divergent interventions to mitigate affective polarisation. Dolan adopts the view that affective polarisation is primarily driven by group identity ratherthan substantive policy differences.

However, this assumption is non-trivial and not uncontroversial. Evidence indicates that ideological polarisation significantly contributes to affective polarisation. Experimental research suggests that the description of political candidates as moderate or extreme influences voters’ emotions towards candidates. In addition, recent work has found that people care more about substantive policy positions than partisan loyalty when the two come into conflict. With the rise of extreme positions, policy differences become more pronounced and moralised. Individuals perceive higher stakes and formulate affective evaluations, which transform disagreements into moral boundaries of right and wrong.

Ways to foster cross-belief interaction and empathy

Dolan’s assumption about the origins of affective polarisation informs his framework for reducing emotional hostility. He proposes increasing tolerance towards opposing viewpoints through micro-level interventions, instead of taking steps to influence the media environment and elite polarisation that could directly affect policy differences. He encourages individuals to consider situational factors when evaluating others, to learn from their mistakes, to highlight commonalities, to support their positions with compelling evidence, to manage their emotional responses to disagreement, to ensure the diversity of experience in decision-making, and to spend time with people who hold opposing beliefs. These strategies – underpinned with evidence from behavioural studies about their efficacy – aim to increase cross-belief interaction and empathy. However, Dolan does not consider environmental barriers, such as algorithmic bubbles created by personalized content feeds and highly polarized elite rhetoric, which may make it difficult for individuals to apply these behavioural changes.

Democratic institutions and polarisation

While highlighting the role of situational factors in relation to policy issues, Dolan argues that the legitimacy of the policymaking process can help reduce beliefism. As he puts it, “If the processes in the environment are legitimate, then we expect to see less beliefism. […] In liberal democracies, most people appreciate that competing beliefs are put to the test at the ballot box” (80). Importantly, Dolan’s point is not about how democratic institutions may help narrow policy differences, but about their capacity to make opposing positions more acceptable. This reflects an optimistic view of the relationship between democratic practices and affective polarisation. The Brexit referendum in the UK was a democratic exercise, yet the vote deepened social and territorial fractures.

Dolan’s reliance on reason and evidence as remedies for beliefism also warrants scrutiny. He suggests that encouraging rational engagement with facts can soften hostility. Yet research in cognitive psychology and political communication consistently demonstrates that people rarely change their minds in response to new information.  When individuals are invested in their beliefs due to their extremity, they engage in motivated reasoning, accepting information that aligns with their group and discounting or distrusting information that does not.

The limits of empathy in persuading certain groups

In environments of extreme positions, evidence from the “other side” is not merely rejected; it is viewed with suspicion. For example, the policy differences on mandating COVID-19 vaccine led to personal insults against scientists in attempts to discredit the scientific evidence. Thus, Dolan’s emphasis on rational discourse underestimates the power of cognition driven by policy positions. And the widening of policy differences due to extreme positions is likely to enhance the use of motivated reasoning in interpreting information and evaluating evidence.

For individuals or groups whose identities are marginalised or historically devalued, engaging with opposing beliefs can entail significant psychological and social costs, especially when the other side’s viewpoint may deny their basic rights or humanity.

Moreover, Dolan’s appeal to empathy and perspective-taking, while commendable, contains an implicit asymmetry. The act of borrowing the other side’s perspective assumes that all parties enter dialogue on a relatively equal footing. Yet for individuals or groups whose identities are marginalised or historically devalued, engaging with opposing beliefs can entail significant psychological and social costs, especially when the other side’s viewpoint may deny their basic rights or humanity. Asking such individuals to empathise with hostile perspectives carries the risk of reinforcing inequities under the guise of civility. In such cases, appeals to tolerance are not neutral and instead place a disproportionate burden on those already compelled to defend their dignity or existence. This tension brings to view the limits of behavioural prescriptions: empathy and engagement, though valuable, cannot substitute for justice or equality in social relations.

The optimism underlying Dolan’s approach underestimates the extent to which affective responses may be rooted in ideological disagreements that have widened by social media algorithms, income inequality, and elite polarisation. Social media platforms, driven by the motive of increasing user engagement, promote extremist content. Further, research suggests that rising income inequality contributes to the uptake of extreme positions by political parties. While acknowledging the role of the “digital realm” in triggering emotional responses, Dolan urges individuals to manage emotional responses while leaving the online environment intact. However, without addressing the media environment that fuels polarisation and narrowing socio-economic disparities, efforts to cultivate civility would risk treating the symptoms rather than the sources of animosity. To achieve the goal of reducing beliefism, we must pair behavioural insights with institutional reforms that influence incentives for media platforms in promoting partisanship, and that help to reduce economic inequality.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Lightspring on Shutterstock.

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The post How do we stop hating the people we disagree with? first appeared on LSE Review of Books.

Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood. Jennifer Mather Saul. Oxford University Press. 2024.

Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism. Tamar Mitts. Princeton University Press. 2025.

Extremist political rhetoric as strategy 

Facing waning support and platform bans, the American far-right political movement QAnon decided in 2020 to extend its conspiracy theory narrative to include claims of a global child trafficking ring, supposedly led by US liberal elites. It did this by hijacking the #SavetheChildren hashtag, used in a legitimate anti-trafficking campaign by an organisation of that name, and turned it into covert extremist messaging – a devious appropriation that, for QAnon, yielded an energising membership spike.  

[These two] books on hate and manipulation in political discourse provide a multidisciplinary perspective on how extremist rhetoric, despite social and institutional guardrails, succeeds both offline and online.

To philosopher of language Jennifer Mather Saul, this tactic resembles the increasingly common manipulative uses of harmful political speech that flout norms against falsehoods in public discourse. For political scientist Tamar Mitts, who studies hate speech in social media, the #SavetheChildren example illustrates how extremist groups strategically shift their online messaging to skirt content moderation. Considered together, these views, offered in their respective recent books on hate and manipulation in political discourse, provide a multidisciplinary perspective on how extremist rhetoric, despite social and institutional guardrails, succeeds both offline and online. In doing so, Saul and Mitts collectively underscore the urgency of this challenge as well as the complexity of addressing it. 

Weakened norms and hateful speech 

For Saul, examining political rhetoric in Dogwhistles and Figleaves: How Manipulative Language Spreads Racism and Falsehood, this urgency stems not solely from the sharp upswing in harmful political speech, but from the degree to which that rhetoric has become normalised. This normalisation, she argues, has resulted from a shift in the social expectations that have long constrained actors from openly expressing racist beliefs and false ideas. And it’s the weakening of these norms, she claims, that facilitates political manipulation – particularly of malleable groups that, though they may accept these norms, can nevertheless be convinced to support political actors who spread lies and espouse racist ideologies. It’s a problem, of course, that matters beyond deceptive vote-getting: once “the unsayable becomes sayable,” as Saul reminds us, history has shown that “increasingly hateful language is often a precursor to violence and even genocide” (2).  

Dogwhistles and figleaves

Though Saul examines a range of falsehoods, from conspiracy theorist hashtags and emojis to compliance lies and political bullshit, her primary focus is on dogwhistles and figleaves. Dogwhistles, she explains, are strategic communicative acts comprising two layers of meaning:  one is understood broadly by an out-group, and the other targets an in-group for whom the secondary layer conveys a coded message that activates their political or racial biases. (Think, for instance, how the term inner city, to the general population, would refer to an urban space while to racists it covertly references the marginalised groups that historically have lived in those spaces.) Often a dogwhistle is paired with a figleaf, which, as its name suggests, “provides cover for another utterance that [otherwise] would be recognised as racist” (71) – for instance, calling a racial slur, once spoken, a joke or attaching to extremist insinuations the tag phrase or that’s what people are saying. Used together in political discourse, dogwhistles and figleaves, Saul argues, form “a powerful mechanism for changing standards of acceptable utterances” (86), one that makes it easier for false and racist language to circulate and thus “play an important role in dividing the populace and inflaming divisions” (104).  

The digital resilience of hate groups 

Such speech, we’ve come to know, readily proliferates on social media. Platforms, in response, have upped their efforts to remove such content and, in egregious cases, de-platform those who propagate it. Yet, as Mitts explains in Safe Havens for Hate: The Challenge of Moderating Online Extremism, militant and hate groups like the Islamic State and the Proud Boys have shown remarkable digital resilience, subverting content moderation policies to continue spreading hate and attracting support. Studying the online behaviour of such groups, she shows how they leverage divergences in content moderation across platforms to thrive online. Mitts couples these insights with threshold analyses of content moderation frameworks, implemented across platform sizes, regime types, and geographical contexts, to argue that “militant and hate organisations’ online success centres on their ability to operate across many platforms in parallel – a phenomenon not well captured by current legislation” (5).  

Critical to this success, Mitts shows, are three communication tactics: migrating, mobilising, and messaging. First, when militant organisations get banned from one social media platform, many simply move to another. Though seemingly arbitrary, these migrations are in fact careful calculations in which organisations, exploiting the differences in content moderation policies across platforms, weigh the trade-off between two key communication goals: authenticity and impact. That is, they accept operating on a platform with a smaller audience and reach – Gab or Parler, for instance, instead of Facebook or YouTube – if that platform’s more lenient moderation policies allow them to retain more of their violent, hateful, and thus for them, authentic content.

According to her analysis, large-scale governmental interventions like the EU Digital Services Act have shown limited effectiveness in removing harmful content, as have efforts, predominantly in the US, to incentivise social media platforms to self-regulate.

Having moved to smaller platforms, these groups then seek to mobilise supporters similarly drawn to less moderated spaces. It’s a calculus in which what’s lost through migration in audience size is gained from access to individuals more susceptible to extremist propaganda – typically those aggrieved over narratives of political animus and cultural displacement. Alternatively, to remain on highly moderated platforms, extremist organisations will simply shift their messaging. Whether softening their content away from violence towards, as in the case of the Taliban, governance and civilian affairs or using covert language of the type Saul documents, this shift allows extremist groups to elude moderation and thereby reach larger audiences – or simply steer them to a less-moderated space. In the case of the Islamic State, Mitts shows how they have even hidden propaganda in appropriated content or added digital noise to text and images to throw off the artificial intelligence moderation algorithms deployed by large platforms. 

The challenges of content moderation 

To fight such sophisticated and formidable resilience, Mitts sees convergence – inter-platform cooperation and alignment to moderate content – as a potentially powerful countermeasure. Yet she never fully commits to it as a solution. According to her analysis, large-scale governmental interventions like the EU Digital Services Act have shown limited effectiveness in removing harmful content, as have efforts, predominantly in the US, to incentivise social media platforms to self-regulate. Further, while instances of cross-platform convergence have reduced the official online presence of extremist groups, their unofficial presence, through unaffiliated accounts disseminating their content, remains largely unaffected by moderation.  

Importantly, Mitts also highlights the collateral damage of content moderation and how convergence can compound it. These risks range from the inadvertent removal of non-harmful content – an error which occurs, she notes, at a higher rate for historically marginalised groups – to the misuse of the domestic terrorism classification in moderation policies as a means, by governments, to suppress dissent. These challenges appear to explain Mitts’ support for a public-private approach in which “governments put pressure on platforms and civil society organisations […] make concerted efforts to facilitate collaboration between them” (155). It’s a strategy that resembles certain frameworks for combatting disinformation: pragmatic, institutional, and thus evidencing a persisting belief in liberal rationality. Amid normalised celebrity politics, a splintered public sphere, and a strained social contract, it’s a belief some might see as bullish.   

Political lies in the attention economy

Despite the emergence of the so-called post-truth era, “political lies,” as Saul reminds us, “are nothing new” (116). Nor is it news that political actors, whether from the centre or the extremes, have long used harmful language to galvanise and divide, exploiting existing societal and cultural rifts. Disagreements, for instance, over what even constitutes harmful speech, covert or overt, exacerbate the challenges of moderating it, a problem thus far not readily solved by AI. What’s changed, then, are the incentive structures that, as social and political philosophy scholar Adam Gibbons has argued, make bad language good politics. The harmful content that both Mitts and Saul examine has become so ubiquitous because, to put it bluntly, it trends so well in our emotion-fuelled attention economies. 

Should we continue working to understand those grievances, together with their root causes, or risk validating them in doing so? Do we struggle to shore up not only the rules but also the norms that deter speakers from producing and circulating propaganda?

And given the fragile balance between preventing harm and protecting free speech, as Saul and Mitts in their own ways each reaffirm, it’s little surprise that content moderation has become a partisan issue. Equally unsurprising, but arguably more urgent, is the point that Mitts and Saul, employing diverse methods at differing scale levels, jointly arrive at: that it’s the aggrieved who are most susceptible to propaganda. And so, as the aggrieved increasingly manifest their resentments beyond language through violence, the ways that Saul and Mitts multiply attend to the intersections between harmful speech and manipulation are among their most timely contributions.  

A turn in the fight against hateful content

But what’s next? Should we continue working to understand those grievances, together with their root causes, or risk validating them in doing so? Do we struggle to shore up not only the rules but also the norms that deter speakers from producing and circulating propaganda? Is the solution to be found, as Saul advocates, in the kind of pre-bunking inoculation strategies that have shown some success in combatting misinformation? Or do we instead, as scholar of philosophy and language Marina Sbisà has suggested, attend to the ethical responsibility of the listener to reject harmful speech? These debates might be as fraught, interminable, and necessary as any the public sphere has thus far afforded – ones that, despite its deep flaws and widening fractures, just might warrant its protection and preservation.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It. Michael Patrick Lynch. Princeton University Press. 2025.

What is truth? Is it a fixed idea of knowledge available to all individuals? Is truth objective, or is it socially constructed? Is it necessary to democratic politics? In the recent monograph On Truth in Politics: Why Democracy Demands It (2025), American philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch considers these lofty questions and attempts to define and rehabilitate the concept of truth in modern political philosophy. 

The book arrives at a critical juncture in modern American history. Since the election of a convicted felon for a second term in office, President Trump has exploited the power of the presidency to extinguish truth for the purpose of expanding executive power in a bid to replace the republic with an authoritarian regime by deceitfully casting the 6 January 2021 insurrectionists as victims of state power rather than violent insurrectionists with the aim of overturning the 2020 presidential election, smearing judges who rule against the administration as “crooked” or “radical left lunatic(s)”, perniciously depicting all undocumented immigrants as criminals and fabricating the existence of a riot in Los Angeles to stifle dissent with heavy-handed Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) raids on immigrants in the city. 

Dewey’s pragmatism versus today’s partisanship 

The author begins by lauding the eminent American philosopher John Dewey as the founding champion of truth in politics and endorses his philosophical paradigm of “pragmatism” – whereby humanistic, scientific and creative education…should be the central goal of any democracy” (xii, 14). An “epistemic infrastructure” in which stated political premises and judgements receive a thorough vetting for accuracy and cogency now seems remote and even quaint. Today, political partisans project views on social media in line with their respective political tribes or, quite often, take views in opposition to another political faction, with little regard for truth or accuracy. According to Lynch, “Twitbookians” neither “speak truth to power” nor “exercise their epistemic agency” (16-17). Rather than considering all ascertainable facts and perspectives, Twitbookians viscerally bolster their causes without accountability to facts or the often-subtle complexities of truth.  

Making sensationalist and unnuanced political judgments that demonise political opponents to win influence and followers through social media has become the norm.

In Chapter Two “The Many Uses of Political Judgment” and Chapter Three “Can Truth Be a Democratic Value”, Lynch defines political truth as “a constitutive norm of belief” and posits that “only beliefs are governed by truth” (37, 41). Yet, making sensationalist and unnuanced political judgments that demonise political opponents to win influence and followers through social media has become the norm. When politics devolves to a base level guided by passion, resentment and false dichotomies, democracy wanes. Where, then, is truth, and can or should it have a functional role in politics? 

Plato, Rawls and Arendt on the meaning of truth 

After briefly discussing and dismissing the ancient Greek view of Plato that “’ those who know should rule,’” Lynch resurrects the oft-debated, somewhat opaque writings of twentieth-century political philosopher John Rawls (especially his 1971 volume A Theory of Justice). For Rawls, a standard of “reasonableness” of thought and judgment should guide politics rather than truth per se. Yet, is acknowledging truth not a constitutive element of “reasonableness”? Lynch argues that it is, and he also rejects the dichotomy of factual and rational truth as espoused by Hannah Arendt – the author of seminal study The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Under the subheading “Truth as a Democratic Value”, the author frames the question as being “whether societies engaging in democratic politics have a reason…to encourage and promote believing what’s true as such” (66-78). 

Theories of truth from Habermas to Rorty 

In response to the “consensus theory of truth” developed by German social theorist Jurgen Habermas, Lynch questions the relationship of consensus to both truth and politics and again endorses the philosophical pragmatist approach by quoting Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) in his assertion “The point is that true opinions are those that would survive the fires of experience.” (112-119). Hence, measurable realities eclipse theory in defining and ultimately arriving at truth.  

 How can a democratic society prevent one party from wilfully denying or suppressing truth to take and maintain power?

In Chapter Five “Truth as Normative: From Quietism to Pluralism” and Chapter Six “Political Truth as Concordance,” Lynch refutes the notion that truth neither possesses a functional value nor a role in political theory – as maintained by pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty and metaphysical “deflationists” and “quietists” by asserting that truth significantly factors into both norms and beliefs. In engaging in critical thought to arrive at a correct belief or a “good” for society, truth cannot be absent in any political, intellectual equation. (129-140). For a political proposition to achieve validity, it should be expected to attain “supercoherence” and ultimately “concordance” with related logical ideas, experiences and evidence both inside and outside the realm of politics. By comparison to the often non-cogent diatribes of Twitbookians, democratic politics requires a structured, measurable and rational discourse with rigorous standards (170-184). Ultimately, Lynch condemns “intellectual arrogance,” asks for a return to humility to thwart/end “epistemic corruption” and to consider the merits of his truth-infused pragmatism as a model for democratic politics (203-208). 

Defending the case for truth in democracy 

As the US now straddles the line between democracy and autocracy (as argued by former President Barack Obama), Lynch has provided a timely and thoughtful re-examination of the role of truth as a vital component in democratic practice. Hopefully, it will spark a debate on overdue repairs to the intellectual architecture of American politics. His admirable study, however, seems to raise an even larger question. How can a democratic society prevent one party from wilfully denying or suppressing truth to take and maintain power? And if a political faction can wilfully dissolve truth, should this not also reignite debate on the instrumental role of ethics in government? 

In his landmark work After Virtue (1981), the late Scottish-American philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre decried the emergence of “value neutrality” and moral relativism devoid of a shared vision of “the good” – and declared a “new dark ages [were] already upon us.” As many of the core ethical and political principles of democratic society (from tolerance of dissent to government accountability) are flagrantly flouted under Trump’s presidency, history appears to have proved MacIntyre right, and the survival of both truth and democracy in the US now hangs in the balance.

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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