Traditional cultures are exactly that—organized around very strong and well understood traditions that divvy up everything according to clan, tribe, social class, and birthplace, among other factors.

Western societies were just like that, and some still are, a few centuries ago. All the misgivings and hostility now emerging in the developing nations is a recapitulation of the very same antagonisms towards these cultural styles that were often voiced in the development phase of Anglo societies—violation of class norms, racial or religious impropriety, disturbance of settled methods and markets, and, most importantly for many, the gradual fading out of much of the “secure” niches and status that families, clans, and other groupings had built up over the centuries.

It is not the case, after all, that there is some form of uncritical reverence for either democratic principles or free market economics in western societies. The last several centuries as these values have come to the fore have been times of immense turmoil, violence, and continual dislocations. Several of the most powerful political and economic ideologies in the west, esp. in Europe, have been specifically anti-democratic and anti-capitalist, and these theories are still influential around the world.

As a thumbnail sketch, most human cultures are combinations of fraternal and feudal associations. Various social, religious, economic, and class positions are parcelled out by the rules of the system, and people’s positions within the closed universe are clear and well understood.

Capitalism and democratic processes SEEM to violate and overturn these revered processes. It is not until later in the process of a society operating under these new ideas that it becomes very clear that all that has happened is that one set of structured, feudalist arrangements have been replaced by another.

Granted, the strata are more fluid, and the hierarchies are determined by less hereditary and more meritocratic standards, but the inherent human tendency to construct understandable social structures always seems to mean that, eventually, form follows function.

If the function is the operation of a social mechanism, either political or economic, a form most comfortable and reasonably familiar will eventually emerge. The reason some minority social units thrive in the anglosphere’s petri dish, and others do not, is that they are pre-adapted to the new medium.

But in much of the world, identity/ethnic solidarity is so strong that the majority would accept worse outcomes just to spite a successful minority. While Madison, et al. worried about majoritarian redistribution, they did not focus greatly on the sort of mindset where envy dominates individual self-interest. Identity politics has helped to revive and strengthen such frictions even in the liberal West, while denying the right to such ethnic pride to dominant white elites, especially in the Anglosphere.

I’m not sure I would lump whites in the American Southern states in with the others. They certainly were not an market-dominant minority being (1) firmly in the majority and (2) not terribly productive. The south’s long resistance to widespread democracy, even for poor whites had more to do with maintaining the south’s deeply hierarchal almost feudal social and political system.

Otherwise, I think Chao is on to something. It’s simply to tempting to believe that someone who has bested you cheated than it is to believe you need to improve your own game.