Viva la révolution?

With reference to the French conniption and in anticipation of a similar revolt against the elites (though hopefully a democratic one, i.e. absent la guillotine); I modify a line from Percy Bysshe Shelley's essay A Defense of Poetry with:  'The elite have become more contemptuous, and the everyman more desperate as the vessel of the state is driven between the Scylla and Charybdis of anarchy and despotism'.

bob leading the 'people'

Anarchy & Despotism: the bedfellows of Watermelon philosophy.

Theodore Dalrymple: 'The British revolution, however, has been carried out neither by the proletariat nor in the name of the proletariat: it is, rather, the revolution of the ambitious but ungifted, of whom there is a gross oversupply. For everyone is persuaded these days that there is only one thing worth having, and that thing is power'.
Anyone recognise familiar players in Australia?