As Shaw so wittily shows us, Ruskin’s political perspective boils down to the basically Bolshevik belief that the people are the property of the regime. There is no such thing as a citizen—only a subject. The idea that the people can rule the government is just a fraud—like QAnon—but older. The government has no choice but to rule the people. This is the purely absolutist Renaissance or Machiavellian theory of sovereignty.