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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      The American spoils system is vast, deep, and society-scale, but it is a weak shadow of its past now. Comparable things in the developing world are simply called "corruption" or "nepotism". They are definitely not legitimized by design as here.

      1 reply 1 retweet 10 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      Now what does this have to do with being forgotten? To be "forgotten" in a political sense has a very specific meaning: to be on the "winning" team, but *denied a share of the institutional spoils.*

      1 reply 0 retweets 13 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      Ironically, you could consider this Reagan's great egalitarian legacy: through deregulation, he kinda dismantled the spoils system. There was no such thing as "dibs" and first right of looting. But he retained the culture of expropriation/looting-based public-private relations.

      1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      Though those with a historic accumulated advantage still had a head start, they didn't have an institutionally sanctioned looting advantage. Now looting itself became a meritocratic game. Neoliberalism in a hostile nutshell: meritocratic looting of public resources.

      2 replies 6 retweets 12 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      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.

      1 reply 1 retweet 5 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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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.

      2 replies 2 retweets 7 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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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.

      1 reply 3 retweets 12 likes
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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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.

      1 reply 2 retweets 7 likes
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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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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).

      2 replies 2 retweets 6 likes
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    10. Craig Montuori‏ @craig_montuori 3 Dec 2018
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      I need to read the whole thread, cause it sounds like you're describing the Roman client system, specifically the role of late Republic governors. Andrew Jackson had nothing on the Romans

      1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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      Replying to @craig_montuori

      I'm trusting Fukuyama's distinctions here. He made a good case that Jacksonian spoils was a genuine leap over the Roman model. In part because it played out in the context of urbanization.

      11:28 AM - 3 Dec 2018
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        2. Craig Montuori‏ @craig_montuori 3 Dec 2018
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          Replying to @vgr

          Yeah, the Roman spoils system was mostly precious metals extraction, see: Caesar as governor of Spain with the silver. Separate context, it woulda been interesting if Cermak hadn't been assassinated in Miami '33. First pan-national city political coalition

          1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 3 Dec 2018
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          Replying to @craig_montuori

          I think that makes the Jacksonian V 2.0 much more powerful. There was a lot more to hand out...even if society was a lot more rudimentary at that point.

          0 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
        4. End of conversation
        1. Craig Montuori‏ @craig_montuori 3 Dec 2018
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          Replying to @vgr

          It sounds like he's also applying Mead's sense of the Jacksonian being a 'war party,' vs. the Roman system was much more mutually beneficial within the oligarch system regardless of Optimates v. Populares

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