"...Popular sovereignty entails not only rights, but responsibilities as well: if we are masters of our own society, then it is up to us to make it work. During most of our history we have looked upwards-first to the crown and then the state — as if to a benign parent, ready to scold us when we have been naughty but also obliged to look after us, ‘from cradle to grave.’ That needs to change. We have to see that habit for what it is — a feudal leftover, a relic from the time when those at the bottom looked to their masters for succor. Even the cherished welfare state has its roots in the old class system, in which a permanent elite felt obliged to care for a permanent proletariat. The paternalists and socialists who built it were (and are) people of the noblest intentions, but their creation turned too many of us into passive recipients — as grateful for a state handout as (royal) subjects on a Maundy Thursday, bowing their heads to receive a purse from a kindly king. We need to make the move from passive to active, from subject to citizen — from political infancy to adulthood."
- Jonathon Freedland
Bring Home the Revolution