Today's wonky elite are in love with the wrong French intellectual

For Tocqueville, only the ultra-rich could buy the tools and the power necessary to become true aristocrats. (In a democratic age, everything is for sale because equality makes everyone compete for the only distinction left open to them—a bigger bank account.) But every fiber of Democracy in America is devoted to showing why true aristocracy holds so little allure even for our wealthiest.

Much like Game of Thrones, Democracy in America incessantly attests that aristocracy is unglamorous, uncomfortable, and bound up in concepts today’s rich people have no time or respect for, like an honor of bloodlines that transcends the fleeting interests of the mortal self.

Instead, our fake aristocrats far prefer to live under the government’s rule than to rule over any peons. And since the government is the only earthly entity powerful enough to lord over us all, no matter how wealthy, the relationship works both ways. The frightening inequality that has Hacker and Pierson up in arms is but a side effect of, and prelude to, an ever more powerful and comprehensive equality—just as Tocqueville predicts.

And, just as Tocqueville predicted, the dominance of equality in our minds and hearts is so complete that the significant inequality in our lives—the presence of the super-rich—drives us absolutely insane.