…by revolutionary, I’m trying to draw at least a partial contrast between what I think Bernie Sanders was trying to do in his socialist campaigns for the presidency and what I suspect is going to come out of the current moment now. That distinction rests on my sense that since the 1960s and 1970s America has generated a kind of mass upper class who have combined a kind of rhetoric of pseudo-radicalism — the semi-hostile posture to the edifices of white patriarchy or something — with a socioeconomic system that constantly ratifies and shores up their own privilege, so when I use the word revolution, I’m suggesting that a real revolution would be something that dramatically threatened the class privilege of these folks…we’ve ended up crafting our upper class where the upper class is very comfortable speaking a certain kind of language of social justice so long as speaking that language sort of works with maintaining their own economic privileges.
Ross Douthat, from an interesting new episode of the podcast “The Argument”, with Jamelle Bouie and Michelle Goldberg (edited slightly to remove filler words)