I don’t really understand what you mean by this.

I mean there’s a very big difference between living in the comfort of the core under a liberal regime and living during a reactionary pogrom.

I’d say that it is… so-called “philanthropy” is a perfectly liberal way of “humanising” the intended beneficiaries of liberal ideology - ie, capitalists. It’s no different than the aristocracy “humanising” themselves by tossing alms to the peasantry.

Sure. The only real difference is technology and scale. But the scale matters a lot, because its easy to see a straight line between a lord’s lackey distributing alms. It is significantly more difficult for someone to understand why AEI shills and Ford Foundation hacks keep showing up on NPR to parrot right-wing economic talking points couched in progressive verbage. It is more difficult to understand the scale of Walton Family wealth or the degree to which cryptocurrency speculation has been used to hijack Congressional campaigns.

Larger and more complex systems are more difficult to resist, in no small part because they become difficult to recognize as a material problem rather than just a foundation of daily life.