17. On Being Forgotten 🔗

Just had an epiphany thanks to a comment of @krrishd on another thread. The sense of being "forgotten" by a grand narrative is actually a sense of being remembered culturally, but being forgotten institutionally.

A sense of one's honor being paid lip service, and being acknowledged as somehow "superior" or "better" than others, but not being given any substantive rewards in proportion via institutional means.

This is the sentiment behind "when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression". The privilege there is real privilege, like poor whites being maintained at just a notch of actual material plenty by institutional means than poor blacks (eg. not being redlined)

I think this has a specific historical source: Jacksonian clientelism. A system of spoils-based patronage doled out at the level of groups. The American populace was trained to a) vote in ethnic blocs b) expect rewards in ethnic blocs in the form of institutional spoils

Today's spoils system, even in the aggressively non-merit-based system Trump is practicing at the level of political appointments, is a weak shadow of the system that existed between the 1830s and ~ 1920s, when the increasing role of professionalization and merit diminished it

Broadly understood, "spoils" is a much wider concept, going back to idea of "spoils of war" (victorious armies given legal right to loot conquered peoples). This is the origin of the legitimation of expropriation (public -> private) and outright loot (private -> private)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, it helps to be a cis-white-male to play in the game in the US (and a brahmin male in India and Han in China and Kikuyu in Kenya or whatever), but mainly you have to be willing and skilled enough to play in the Hobbesian meritocratic game of expropriation/privatization.

And predictably, the great worldwide Hobbesian A/B test delivered exactly the result us cynics would expect: people of all races/types are equally good at rising to the top of such games. Just look at the rogues gallery of high-level billion-dollar scammers around the world.

The losers everywhere have been the protected mediocrities with cultural-majority affiliations everywhere, who had gotten complacent in their sense of institutionally validated (and undeservedly rewarded) sense of being "better" as a member of a "state-chosen" people.

So the idea that "when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression", read it as "institutionally advantaged looting/spoils privileges", not lip-service narrative spotlight. For "equality" read "equality of looting/expropriation opportunity" not institutional access.

If you think about it, in a grand narrative sense, the pissed off seething-ressentiment ethnomajoritarian masses were never forgotten. They had continuous claim on being "real" Americans. It just got hollowed out, with real rewards being deregulated for democratic looting.

This ~40 year trajectory is why I'm ultimately not worried about the "SJW" bogeyperson (heh!) threat. They're merely trying to recode old, shrinking spoils system in their favor. What good is control of universities or academic publishing if action has left the building?

Public funding for "impersonal" institutions everywhere is shrinking, and being replaced with equivalent neoliberal equal-opportunity expropriation institution. SJWs are fighting over shrinking old pie. Ethnonationalists are mad about not getting first slice of growing new pie.

SJWs are fighting over the dead carcass of the old world. The amount of damage they can do is fundamentally limited. The ethnonationalist right though, is threatening the living, growing thing. The amount of damage they can do is basically infinite. They might kill golden goose.

Can we do better than neoliberalism? Yeah, sure, We can and we must, since big new challenges like climate change seem out of reach for its institutions (it is powered by tragedy of the commons in the worst case). More critically, it is based on nation states.

I for one would like to eat my cake (impersonal, democratic opportunity spaces) and have it too (spaces that are based on expanding knowledge rather than Hobbesian looting). Unclear how to get there, but that's what I want.