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
Coming back to this a year later...this seems pretty implausible to me, especially when the people in a separate category are physically proximal, for largely for social-psychological reasons.
It seems hard to maintain a trust in the justice of the court system, if a whole class of people is colluding against a disempowered class of people, specifically to keep them disempowered. To believe in the court system while the court system is very evidently subverting its stated ends in that way requires a massive load-bearing blindspot, which seems like it would interfere with your ability to reason about courts and justice. And many people, instead of developing a blindspot, will just (reasonably) loose faith in the justice of the court system.
Coming back to this a year later...this seems pretty implausible to me, especially when the people in a separate category are physically proximal, for largely for social-psychological reasons.
It seems hard to maintain a trust in the justice of the court system, if a whole class of people is colluding against a disempowered class of people, specifically to keep them disempowered. To believe in the court system while the court system is very evidently subverting its stated ends in that way requires a massive load-bearing blindspot, which seems like it would interfere with your ability to reason about courts and justice. And many people, instead of developing a blindspot, will just (reasonably) loose faith in the justice of the court system.