California to Become Pre-Revolutionary France?

It seems to be slowing heading that way as the Tech Oligarchs distance themselves from the common man.

The oligarchs feel free, and even entitled, to choose the direction of society in the name of a greater good, but somehow their policies seem mostly to make the oligarchs richer and more powerful. Meanwhile, once-prosperous middle-class communities, revolving around manufacturing industries that have now moved overseas, either sink into poverty or become gentrified homes for the lower-upper class. The middle class itself, meanwhile, is increasingly, in Kotkin's words, "proletarianized," with security vanishing and jobs moving downscale.

Plus some of those same oligarchs are "disrupting" their jobs away at a record pace. This article also points out that there is a Californian First and Fourth Estates in this Pre-Revolutionary French model.

The oligarchs are assisted in their control by what Kotkin calls the "clerisy" class — an amalgam of academics, media and government employees who play the role that medieval clergy once played in legitimizing the powerful, and in implementing their policies while quelling resistance from the masses. The clerisy isn't as rich as the oligarchs, but it does pretty well for itself and is compensated in part by status, its positions allowing even its lower-paid members to feel superior to the hoi polloi.

The article talks about these people as either teaching someone how to get a license in whatever field or are there to check the licenses. This clerisy keeps themselves in place and keep the poor man down thusly:

And as Radley Balko notes in the Washington Post, a thicket of petty regulation helps to keep the poor, poor. Traffic fines, fines for not using a city-approved garbage service, even parking tickets all provide revenue for municipal machines that support jobs for the clerisy — social workers, police, etc. — even as they make it harder for poor people to keep their heads above water, or find the kind of work that would let them rise above poverty.

This clerisy also has skin in the game if these same poor people are kept on a perpetual dole. I mean who will be regulating how much dole to give each poor person? Who will be making charts and compiling data and writing and revising regulations when it comes to this dole? Who will print the dole checks and man the dole disbursement sites? The clerisy of course. So they have a financial incentive to keep the poor poor and the oligarchs in place. Hopefully, things don't go the same way that revolutionary France did.