Tolerated by those of us who consent to be governed. Yes, as a white, heterosexual man I enjoy the benefit of the lowest difficulty setting in our society. The thing is that when our nation was first founded that role was to be held by landed men. Our founders wanted the country to be ruled by a meritocracy, an elite without consideration for how that elite was to be created. But in the past two hundred years we've progressed, slowly eroding the barriers of privilege until for a while we had more equality for more people than at any other time in history. Still, it wasn't perfect. Not everyone got to benefit from it. We had to struggle to bring women into the loop, and then minorities. We're still struggling.

But again, we've experienced this kind of inequality before. We've endured periods where the elite were able to run rampant and do what they wanted without much in the way of controls. We're finishing up a period of conservative backlash to the progress we made before the current regression, but the fact that we've regressed into higher inequality doesn't mean it isn't possible to recover.

I want to see the greatest possible equality for all humanity, not just within my community or region but around the world. Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to create it all at once. It's a process, and that process experiences setbacks as the elite see more benefit in consolidating their wealth and influence. But again, we've been here before. We've come back from it before, and we can do it again. We can wrest control of our government away from those interests and restore accountability of our leaders to those who consent to be governed. It's up to us to remember that it's our consent that grants them their power, and that it's within our power to withdraw that consent.