By Michael Tavoliero
A useful way to compare very different societies is not by their costumes, slogans, or moral language, but by their structure of access. Who controls the foundational asset and how many are made dependent on the few through structured access?
Feudalism was a gatekeeping system in which a small nobility controlled key resources and legal authority, shaping most people’s lives. Status and opportunity largely followed birth, and access to land, work, and security was mediated by lords through custom, manorial jurisdiction, and hierarchical courts.
Under this diagnostic, medieval England’s feudal state and contemporary Alaska’s “neo-feudal” state (and other states) can be compared precisely because both organize daily life around an upstream source of wealth and a downstream system of permissions.
In England, the foundational asset was land, and the gatekeeping instruments were land tenure, oath, and customary labor obligations. This formed a bundled system in which landholding created obligations, and obligations produced rule.
In Alaska, foundational wealth comes mainly from resource revenue, Permanent Fund investment earnings, and federal transfers. It reaches residents through appropriations, administrative gatekeepers, boards, licensing, contracting, eligibility, and compliance, so upstream public wealth is experienced downstream through institutions that control distribution and permissions.
Englihs feudal power rested on land and used the sequence: asset, then gates, then dependency, then self-reinforcement. Layered rights in land created obligations, and those obligations produced hierarchy and rule. Because land was immobile and monopolizable, controlling land meant controlling livelihood. Dependency followed naturally from access to survival.
Alaska’s surplus is likewise upstream. Power therefore concentrates less in visible tenure and more in revenue routing. The fiscal and administrative choke points of appropriations, programs, licensing, boards, and compliance shape how upstream wealth becomes downstream life.
As feudal England concentrated power in land and tenure, Alaska concentrates power in rent-and-earnings streams and the institutions that distribute them. In both, the foundational asset structures social order, but England’s platform is physical and local, while Alaska’s is financial and administratively channeled.
In feudal England, the gates were explicit and personal. Access flowed through tenure, reinforced by homage and fealty, and sustained by customary obligation. The manor itself functioned as a jurisdictional gate, openly organizing authority and surplus extraction through named duties: labor services, rents, and fees. You could point to the gate and identify it.
In Alaska’s neo-feudal analogue, the gates are procedural and dispersed. Upstream wealth is accessed and distributed through appropriation routing, agency administration, and layers of boards, commissions, licensing, and compliance. These operate as a kind of “soft law” with low public visibility. In many essential domains, people do not simply buy a service; they qualify, wait, appeal, and comply, while protected niches and credentialing raise entry costs. The structural similarity is restriction through recognized channels; the key difference is visibility: England’s gates were legible status relationships, while Alaska’s are technocratic processes that feel like administration rather than power.
In feudal England, dependency was the operating principle: land-based obligations extracted surplus and were enforced through lords, courts, and custom, binding people into stable but coercive relationships that those in power could manage by controlling succession, incidents, disputes, and norms.
In Alaska’s neo-feudal analogue, dependency shifts from personal subordination to institutional gatekeeping: households navigate funding, eligibility, and compliance systems for essentials, and status increasingly follows “access literacy”, the ability to work rules, endure process, afford help, or sit inside decision-making, so dependence appears as procedure rather than overt subordination.
A gatekeeping regime becomes durable when power generates revenue, and revenue expands power. In feudal England, authority was financially self-reinforcing through the Crown’s control of succession and feudal incidents: political power produced revenues that, in turn, strengthened political power.
In Alaska’s neo-feudal analogue, a complexity flywheel turns upstream rents, transfers, and earnings into expanding programs and compliance, creating dependent vendors and constituencies while raising barriers to entry and oversight. As institutions become “essential,” direct household relief is treated as optional, and the cycle repeats. It is stabilized less by hierarchy than by incentives and opacity, where complexity itself becomes power.
Feudalism reinforced itself through explicit revenue rights and hierarchy. Neo-feudalism reinforces itself through administrative expansion and complexity. Both convert control of the foundational asset into durable authority, but modern systems often replace visible rank with procedural armor.
Let’s use a practical litmus test. Count the gates. If a change reduces the number of intermediating gates between Alaska’s upstream wealth and households, it is structurally anti–neo-feudal. If it adds gates, new boards, compliance layers, eligibility pipelines, or procurement dependencies, it is neo-feudal regardless of compassionate branding.
The point is to escape rhetoric. Just as feudal England spoke in the language of protection while still extracting through obligation, modern Alaska speaks in the language of compassion and professionalism while still expanding gatekeeping. The test forces reforms to answer one hard question: does value move closer to households, or do households move deeper into process?
Across eras, the same skeleton appears to control the foundational asset, control access, create dependency, and reinforce it through incentives. England did this through land tenure, oath, and custom; Alaska does it through rents and transfers routed via appropriations, intermediaries, licensing, boards, and compliance. The key difference is visibility, open hierarchy versus dispersed procedure, so “gate count” turns “feudal” into a measurable question: how many doors stand between people and the wealth meant to serve them?
If the merchant-state represents a commercial order that displaced the English feudal-state, does its reliance on trade, contract, and mobility limit dependency? If so, what would it look like in Alaska today, and how much of it is still present?