"Spoils-rich majority" is a good, accurate term. It correlates about 0.9 with "cultural majority" but with some ambiguity at the margins. ht
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If the spoils-rich majority is massively productive (postwar US), the noise of undeserved spoils is lost in the signal of productivity. It's when you get jolts to productivity that things go weird as the noise overwhelms the signal.
For viability, a spoils system needs wealth.
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It's always shocked me just how incredibly paternalistic & "socialistic" Norman Rockwell era America really was. You had a job more or less for life thanks to govt incentives that built factories everywhere. You had access to healthcare. Choice was really low. Imports were few.
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In retrospect it seems amazing that folks thought you could simply rearrange the economy & eliminate all the spoils & comforts of the majority & not see a fierce & even violent backlash.
For all the "rugged individualism" mythos, the USA had a vast, dependent, cosseted majority.
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The "rugged individualism" myth is from the single cowboy decade between end of civil war and closing of the west. Before and after, very collectivist (cf: Tocqueville). Makes sense. Individualism is a characteristic of low-risk civilizational cores, not high-risk frontiers.
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Every Western nation is far more collectivist than they will admit. America, especially, is in deep cognitive dissonance here ("jeez if we're collectivist, then, like, all that prattle about freedom and independence has to be qualified!")
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