This meant legacy wealth and relationships/social networks might confer an advantage if you were a real hustler, but the doors of opportunity had been opened a crack to everybody. And merely having a certain tribal affiliation was no longer guarantee of first shot at anything.
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Everywhere in the world neoliberalism went with its set of new rules, the same thing happened: institutionally sanctioned asymmetries in looting privileges were replaced with a free-for-all model, and suddenly, affirmative action for cultural majorities everywhere vanished.
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This is important. Pre-neoliberalism, there was a pretense of "impersonal" institutions, but they weren't really. They systematically advantaged the local cultural majority in subtle/not-so-subtle ways. That's the real affirmative action, except we never called it that.
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What we instead called "affirmative action" was efforts to take nominal "impersonal" institutional missions seriously and release them from de facto clientelistic capture by cultural majorities. But even best efforts of the left could't match how well neoliberalism achieved it.
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The thing is, neoliberalism recognized that the real thing to make impersonal was the foundational looting structure of clientelistic politics (invented in the US in the 1830s, now the global standard, see Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay).
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By contrast, the LBJ great society model (and similar things worldwide) made the mistake of trying to make the aspirational, de jure, positive mission of institutions more impersonal/equal, rather than the de facto expropriation/looting mission.
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Here's another way to think of it: "spoils" come from war. And war is basically at least half the institutional landscape, and every institution has a "peace" (aspirational, de jure, welfare mission) and "war" (expropriational, de facto, looting mission) side to it.
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There is no point trying to make the peace side more truly impersonal if you leave the war side alone. There is no point in university admissions affirmative action if you don't equalize the "spoils of degrees" post-graduation ecosystem. Neoliberalism managed it.
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We are now seeing the effects of that. Around the world, the global ethnonationalist wave is a result of 20-30 years of dismantlement of institutional affirmative action for local cultural majorities by the democratized looting/expropriation regime of neoliberalism.
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Replying to @vgr
Vast swathes of majorities in Western countries were cared for and catered to by politicians. The rise of "free market" economics was hugely disruptive and is being pushed back against. The dogma that everyone benefits from free markets was wrong for "spoils rich" majorities.
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"Spoils-rich majority" is a good term.
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