Well if history has anything to say about it, they will have their heads on pikes soon enough when the revolution happens. People never seem to learn from history.
Honestly, the way it is going now, I truly do not expect the "good times" to last more than another century or two.
World communication has spread the idea, and actual execution, of revolutions around the world in record time. Massive groups at least temporarily cooperate and successfully coordinate, though sometimes extremely loosely: communication cannot displace the need for leaders with strong dictation skills, it can only lessen the requirement to start the initial movement and make the leader's job that much easier.
This means that the more inequality spreads, the worse the separation between lower-class and upper-class becomes, and the more the middle-class fades away completely in those countries where it does [did] exist, more people will take to the internet to have their voice heard. When enough people are pissed off and motivated enough by those who can rile them up to take action, people start taking to the streets.
In this day and age, protests are becoming less and less successful about changing anything, and are also becoming breeding grounds for the kind of violence that sparks a fire under a nation of angered citizens to finally announce their support.
Sometimes, people of wealth and power actually encourage and fund some aggression. It hasn't happened in the developed world, but that's only because we still have that "developed world" appearance.
If someone of import somewhere gets assassinated, politicians held hostage, or nearly anything that, for whatever reason, just so happens to be the "right place, right time", entire nations can be driven to war. Our desire (any developed State) to follow some of the petulant nations into war has seriously waned over the past few decades, especially as the global economy perpetually wanders around, blindly, near the brink.
That said, with enough fuel, the most inane event has often thrown the world into chaos. As economies collapse, natural disasters worsen, populations continue to grow, and the inequalities of classes blow up, I don't expect we, as a global civilization, will escape unscathed.
Hopefully, whatever happens, the result IS a more unified global civilization, hopefully with a stronger central regulatory body, if not a full legal government.
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