She was one of the people who was arguing for the reform of the French taxation system under the idea that maybe, just maybe, the clergy and the aristocrats ought to pay some taxes instead of levying it all on the peasantry. Truly a more despotic individual has never walked the Earth.

Pre-Revolution, a lot of the ire directed at her was driven by the fact that she was a woman who was actively engaging in politics as opposed to being a dandy who just looked pretty, hosted parties, and made babies. She was also criticized for being too extravagant with the public purse, though, so she might well have been complained about even if she did the proper societal role befitting a queen. Post-Revolution, the criticism shifts to the fact that she sided with foreign countries against Republicanism. In large part, she was made the solitary scapegoat of the failures of the ancien régime to help bolster support for the abolition of the monarchy, as she was already unpopular before the Revolution.

Sources?

This is what I read in wikipedia: "Her role was decisive in urging the king to remain firm and not concede to popular demands for reforms. In addition, she showed her determination to use force to crush the forthcoming revolution".

Not the glamourous sympathetic little girl from the Coppola movie...

We've seen it happen France in the 1700s, Germany in the 1800s and 1900s, Russia pre WWI, China in WW2, and Spain during WW2.

Imo, the US is far from this happening. The only people who often complain about radical income disparity live in one of the major cities. Granted it has merit, but there is a sizable amount of people that live outside of those HCOL areas. City people forget that there is a very wealthy, affluent, and secure America outside of cities.

Here is a complete list of all historically attested successful slave revolts: Haiti, 1791

That’s it. Revolutions require leadership. Overwhelming that’s going to be the educated or otherwise reasonably comfortable, or those who were recently so and want it back. Peasant revolts fail without leaders, who are either going to be nobles or bourgeois. Those who can’t organize can’t win and a bureaucracy requires literate men, who are very unlikely to be poor. Revolutions win. Slave revolts not so much.

The Third Servile War for example grew from 70 slave-gladiators to ~120,000 men in 2 years and won several significant battles vs the Roman Army. You really don’t want to see the modern version of that kind of fighting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Servile_War

I really don’t think this is true. Human property varied in how common it was but the institution existed in every agricultural society I’m aware of up until at least three 1600s when serfdom died out in England. That’s probably the first society in which humans were not held as property. Western Europe was also likely the first agricultural society not to have chattel slavery but I’m less confident. Certainly slavery was practiced in the Moslem world into the 1900s and well attested all over Asia and in most of Africa and the Americas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_India

Anyway, by relatively uncommon I mean compared to the US concept of slavery where they made up a huge chunk of the southern workforce and could be sold between individuals.

Revolutions need leaders, like the other person who commented. There isn't enough wealth aristocrats that can lead, so they stem from the middle class. The middle class tend to have lower class friends. They can very easily sway them to their cause. Now multiply that by tens of millions of middle class that suddenly became unemployed.

Unemployed artists can make propaganda, programmers can make websites and portray this information at the forefront everywhere (think the whole black lives matter flags everywhere), business people assemble and manage large groups of people, scientists devote their time to studies on working class struggles and less on scientific endeavors, etc. The lower class can't do any of that stuff. They don't know how and never had the time to figure out.

This is the very reason why Hitler rose to power through the NSDAP. He did this stuff and appealed to the right aristocrats. The NSDAP grew and unemployed middle class members peacefully revolted by joining them because they wanted their old pre-WWI lives back. They hated hyperinflation owed due to the Treaty of Versaille basically imposed on their government an impossible to pay burden which cause currency debasement galore in order to pay it back. This in turn create hyperinflation that essentially decimated the working class. The money they had no longer could buy the things they wanted. Now they have nothing but an education and time.

What I can describe it as, is helpless. Instead of seizing it's political power to improve their lot, most of the people at the bottom of it are either apathetic to politics, or are politically distracted by a culture war.

In regards to your second paragraph, power in America is heavily concentrated towards rural Americans in sparsely populated states, especially at the national level, because of institutions such as the Senate and the electoral college making it rather difficult to get large legislation passed.

I wouldn’t call it helpless, there’s been a fair amount of political energy in America since its beginning.

In my second paragraph, I'm not even speaking about federal political power. The observation holds for municipal, county, and state-level political power - none of which have anything to do with the electoral college.

As a large city dweller for my entire adult life that does not bother me, but it isn't a sustainable process without those economic engines external to them.

Otherwise I'd argue the reverse. Banking, media, software etc. seem to export wealth from smaller communities back to urban centers. In this regard large urban centers can be regarded something as absentee landlords receiving grapes and oil and Amish furniture and exporting spreadsheets and compliance audits.

The difference is that city-dwellers are more economically productive (For various reasons, some of which are systemic), and, after paying for all those things, are left with a surplus at the end of the year.

Not to mention that the cost of supplying more mundane, necessary-for-life goods to rural areas is higher, due to higher distances, and the inefficiencies of serving low-density markets. This is another thing that keeps rural areas poor.

Or rather purchasing?

Employment and salaries are recent concepts, they have no relevance. A few hundreds years ago the largest single concern by far was to have food on the table. There was no functional markets and no long distance transportation, you couldn't buy food if there was a bad harvest or calamity, there was no food to sale and/or the price doubled overnight.