It is a perverse but familiar pattern: the party of privilege argues that it needs authoritarian power so that it can preserve order in the state. Coriolanus speaks for his class when he tells the people that only “the noble Senate …/Under the gods, keep you in awe, which else/Would feed on one another” (1.1.177–79). Then when the wealthy are proven wrong—when the state, rich and poor alike, turns out to thrive under a more democratic system—they long for the disorder they promised to quell.
