The Confederates' common folks tried to burn the USA to the ground to save their inalienable right to own slaves.

Who will listen to the "perception and needs" of the racist, misogynistic common folks who want to impose their religious liberty (by banning abortion) and and elevate their financial situation (by pushing downward brown and black people)? (The GOP, that's who.)

And don't you tell me it's a minority, when less than a week after the Supreme Court made the VRA null in practice, half a dozen states are rushing to eliminate any black representation. The whole GOP in those states (who already found a way to practice slavery through their carceral system - yes, there are black people picking cotton under the guard of armed white people on horses right now, today) is unanimous in erasing any power from black people. It is their first and foremost priority right now, despite everything else going on.

Grad students outnumber coalminers 70:1, if they're roughly half international which another comment claims, that's still a big difference.

There is historical precedent for uprisings. Those are usually messy and do not tend to leave most people doing the uprising better off.

Much more precedent for new elites putting themselves into a position of power while purporting to be channeling a popular uprising on behalf and for the benefit of the "common folk", who again do not end up better off for it, often quite the opposite.

It's sad and frustrating to see this play out again and again. As you say, you don't need hindsight to see how it aligns with history.

The professors, graduate students, and staff (not admins) are all working class. They are not some kind of elite in society.

The median professor makes less than, say, an electrician. I am a professor in a good school, and I could probably triple my pay by going to industry.

This propaganda needs to stop.

> intellectual elite ignoring the perception and needs of the common folk

Isn’t that what the common folk chose? Was some of that not clear before the election?

We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...

An emperor choosing a bad heir is much easier to explain than the general population of a democracy choosing this.

Interesting comparison. From the Wikipedia [1]:

> For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...]

> During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...]

> He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula

Or finding out that he was just the tip of a giant iceberg that corrupted every square inch of our government.