Privilege

One problem, of course, is how to reconcile the inherent human need for privilege and the possibilities of social democracy. Human history would suggest that, for the most part, they cannot be reconciled: we cannot find a way to be concerned about a more general social good and our own need to feel special, to feel that we have the often unearned right to something that others don't. De Toqueville in The Ancient Regime and the French Revolution argues that the revolution was not just an uprising that manifested itself out of the blue: French society was already changing during the years before the revolution, and the emergent middle-class and newly land-owning peasantry found the unearned privileges of the aristocracy unendurable, yet following the revolution, France quite quickly reverted back to a centralized administration. The French revolution didn't alter the fundamental cultural perspectives of the French: it just removed a heretitary government and replaced it with a middle-class bureaucracy, a system that already was in place before the revolution. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Meet the new boss--same as the old boss. Ok, when The Who function as meaningful sources of political understanding, we're in trouble.