When people have no historical understanding of the transition from feudal monarchies to the democratic state and liberal capitalism. When monarchies started getting dissolved and governments democratized, aristocrats and royalty-adjacent people were at severe risk of losing their position in society, and sought to find a new way to preserve their status. The people of feudal aristocracy who formulated this movement were literally the origin point of "conservatism", as in conservation of the aristocratic hierarchies within a society that was transitioning out of its previous basis for those structures. When they no longer had the appeal to autocratic leadership to substantiate their high placement in social hierarchy, they moved to the next best thing, which was money, profit, and private property as vehicles to wield influence over people lower in the social strata.
When you understand all that, Robin Hood works just fine as a character of anti-capitalist, or at least capitalism-critical, sentiment, because the same power structures that the rich and powerful used in feudal times were laundered into the capitalist framework via the profit motive and private property.
I genuinely believe that a lot of liberals just don't have a connection between vast property ownership and the nefarious amounts of influence that gives a person in society. Like, they see a Bezos or a Gates hoarding ludicrous amounts of land and only regard it as an investment vehicle scaled to massive wealth earned elsewhere, to preserve their wealth on that very individualistic level. They don't have the framework to connect the sheer mass of perpetual wealth that such land ownership entails and the amount of power a person holds over society because of it.
Most liberals see property ownership as "having a private home and maybe a few acres of real estate with a vacation house upstate" rather than "owning half the arable land in Iowa" or "controlling the nation's largest aquifer".
It's very much an out of sight, out of mind perspective.
When people have no historical understanding of the transition from feudal monarchies to the democratic state and liberal capitalism. When monarchies started getting dissolved and governments democratized, aristocrats and royalty-adjacent people were at severe risk of losing their position in society, and sought to find a new way to preserve their status. The people of feudal aristocracy who formulated this movement were literally the origin point of "conservatism", as in conservation of the aristocratic hierarchies within a society that was transitioning out of its previous basis for those structures. When they no longer had the appeal to autocratic leadership to substantiate their high placement in social hierarchy, they moved to the next best thing, which was money, profit, and private property as vehicles to wield influence over people lower in the social strata.
When you understand all that, Robin Hood works just fine as a character of anti-capitalist, or at least capitalism-critical, sentiment, because the same power structures that the rich and powerful used in feudal times were laundered into the capitalist framework via the profit motive and private property.
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I genuinely believe that a lot of liberals just don't have a connection between vast property ownership and the nefarious amounts of influence that gives a person in society. Like, they see a Bezos or a Gates hoarding ludicrous amounts of land and only regard it as an investment vehicle scaled to massive wealth earned elsewhere, to preserve their wealth on that very individualistic level. They don't have the framework to connect the sheer mass of perpetual wealth that such land ownership entails and the amount of power a person holds over society because of it.
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Most liberals see property ownership as "having a private home and maybe a few acres of real estate with a vacation house upstate" rather than "owning half the arable land in Iowa" or "controlling the nation's largest aquifer".
It's very much an out of sight, out of mind perspective.