As I first started listening to Jeff Broxmeyer’s account of “spoils democracy”, on the New Books Network I thought about the Thailand that I knew in the 1990s, very much a patronage-based society, but where often people needed the modest spoils they got from that to survive.
But it was impossible also to not think of how much of a circle we’ve come in – just the sums have got much larger and the distribution much narrower – whether it is Trump family businesses or the UK’s crony-based distribution of Covid-19 (so extreme it attracted the attention of the New York Times).
About