The racist policies of the Jim Crow era show how resilient the vicious circle can be: even the Civil War couldn’t shake the planter elites’ power. The sharecropping system was almost as cruel and extractive as slavery, and its purpose was the same: to produce cotton for the elites’ benefit. Moreover, enslavers’ exemption from military service shows how elites distorted the political system to their own benefit. While people in the US generally think of the country as uniquely democratic and inclusive, Acemoglu and Robinson emphasize that the South wasn’t this way for most of its history. And yet, the authors also used American antitrust law as an example of the
virtuous circle in the last chapter. Clearly, then, the US managed to have both incredibly inclusive institutions (at the national level) and incredibly extractive ones (in several states throughout the South) at the same time. The authors repeatedly argue that inclusive and extractive institutions eventually clash until one of them changes; in Chapter 14, they will explain how this clash played out in the South.