[Gladwin]

A lot of the people in the intellectual, professional activist community don't produce anything of real value. This causes them immense guilt, and self-hatred. They direct this hatred at the society that lets them live like parasites. So, the sit in their dusty little offices in the basements of their university, dreaming up a fantasy of their importance. They dream that they are really revolutionaries, and their ideas are superior to what currently exists.

They are the barnacles on the modern ship of democracy.

[Anamensis]

A lot of the people in the intellectual, professional activist community don't produce anything of real value. This causes them immense guilt, and self-hatred.

This has been my theory too. They feel guilty knowing that they have a better life than millions of third-world peasants who work 10 times harder than they do. Pitying the poor will automatically make them resent the rich, knowing as they must that even THEY are someone's "poor," to be pitied. This makes them feel as though they SHOULD be pitied. They then assuage their guilt and resentment and inefficacy by, as you described, sitting in their dusty offices dreaming of taking from the rich (whom they resent for being crude, unsophisticated brutes who beat them up in high school and have now moved on to be successes) and giving to the poor (whom they fear and respect because they feel those poor are somehow more "authentic" humans than they are.) Yup. That's them. In a nutshell. Where they belong.