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.
Conversation
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.
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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.
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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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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
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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.
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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
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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.

