Democracy does not require absolute social and economic equality, but it cannot withstand large and fixed extremes of wealth and poverty, because these undermine the work of legislating in common. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau insisted, when such extremes prevail, shared values vanish, and class powers and resentments become decisive, making the act of combining to rule together impossible. Precisely such extremes have been generated in the United States over the past thirty years through neoliberal deregulation and the dismantling of public institutions that served modest redistributive functions and advanced equal opportunity over inherited privilege.

Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, loc. 363