...if the west (and the US in particular) had maintained impartial rule of law and constitutional freedoms.
The US did not have impartial rule of law in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Notably, black Americans in the south were regularly impressed into forced labor, often for the rest of their lives, on the basis of flimsy or even non-existent legal pretext.
(A representative but concocted example: the local sheirf arrests a black man who’s walking through town on charges of “vagrancy”. The man is found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. The sheriff sells the “contact” for hard labor to a local industrialist who owns a mine. (The sherif and the industrialist are buddies, and have done versions of this deal many times before). The man is set to work the mine for the period of his sentence. When he’s near the end of his sentence, he’s accused of some minor infraction as a pretext to add more years to his sentence (if anyone bothers to keep track of when his sentence is served at all.)
What makes you think that impartial rule of law decayed since WWII instead of generally (though not evenly) improving?
That’s a fair point; however, I don’t think it undermines my overall claims very much. I think the lack of rule of law for black Americans was bad in a comparable way to how the lack of rule of law for various European colonies was bad. That is, while it was bad for the people who didn’t get rule of law, they were a separate enough category that this mostly didn’t “leak into” undermining the legal mechanisms that helped their societies become productive and functional in the first place.
That is, while it was bad for the people who didn’t get rule of law, they were a separate enough category that this mostly didn’t “leak into” undermining the legal mechanisms that helped their societies become productive and functional in the first place.
I’m speaking speculatively here, but I don’t know that it didn’t leak out and undermine the mechanism that supported productive and functional societies. The sophisticated SJW in me suggests that this is part of what caused the eventual (though not yet complete) erosion of those mechanisms.
It seems like if you have “rule of law” that isn’t evenly distributed, actually what you have is collusion by one class of people to maintain a set of privileges at the expense of another class of people, where one of the privileges is a sand-boxed set of norms that govern dealings within the privileged class, but with the pretense that the norms are universal.
This kind of pretense seems like it could be corrosive: people can see that the norms that society proclaims as universal actually aren’t. This reinforces a a sense that the norms aren’t real at all (or at least) a justified sense that the ideals that underly those norms are mostly rationalizations papering over the collusion of the privileged class.
eg when it looks like “capitalism” and “democracy” are scams supporting “white supremacy”, you grow disenchanted with capitalism and democracy, and stop doing the work to maintain the incomplete versions of those social mechanisms that were previously doing work in your society?
The US did not have impartial rule of law in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Notably, black Americans in the south were regularly impressed into forced labor, often for the rest of their lives, on the basis of flimsy or even non-existent legal pretext.
(A representative but concocted example: the local sheirf arrests a black man who’s walking through town on charges of “vagrancy”. The man is found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. The sheriff sells the “contact” for hard labor to a local industrialist who owns a mine. (The sherif and the industrialist are buddies, and have done versions of this deal many times before). The man is set to work the mine for the period of his sentence. When he’s near the end of his sentence, he’s accused of some minor infraction as a pretext to add more years to his sentence (if anyone bothers to keep track of when his sentence is served at all.)
What makes you think that impartial rule of law decayed since WWII instead of generally (though not evenly) improving?
That’s a fair point; however, I don’t think it undermines my overall claims very much. I think the lack of rule of law for black Americans was bad in a comparable way to how the lack of rule of law for various European colonies was bad. That is, while it was bad for the people who didn’t get rule of law, they were a separate enough category that this mostly didn’t “leak into” undermining the legal mechanisms that helped their societies become productive and functional in the first place.
I’m speaking speculatively here, but I don’t know that it didn’t leak out and undermine the mechanism that supported productive and functional societies. The sophisticated SJW in me suggests that this is part of what caused the eventual (though not yet complete) erosion of those mechanisms.
It seems like if you have “rule of law” that isn’t evenly distributed, actually what you have is collusion by one class of people to maintain a set of privileges at the expense of another class of people, where one of the privileges is a sand-boxed set of norms that govern dealings within the privileged class, but with the pretense that the norms are universal.
This kind of pretense seems like it could be corrosive: people can see that the norms that society proclaims as universal actually aren’t. This reinforces a a sense that the norms aren’t real at all (or at least) a justified sense that the ideals that underly those norms are mostly rationalizations papering over the collusion of the privileged class.
eg when it looks like “capitalism” and “democracy” are scams supporting “white supremacy”, you grow disenchanted with capitalism and democracy, and stop doing the work to maintain the incomplete versions of those social mechanisms that were previously doing work in your society?