A futile demand, as will be seen at song’s end. It was Nietzsche who theorized about ressentiment of the lower orders.

It is not surprising that the lambs should bear a grudge against the great birds of prey, but that is no reason for blaming the great birds of prey for taking the little lambs. And when the lambs say among themselves, “These birds of prey are evil, and he who least resembles a bird of prey, who is rather its opposite, a lamb,—should he not be good?” then there is nothing to carp with in this ideal’s establishment, though the birds of prey may regard it a little mockingly, and maybe say to themselves, “We bear no grudge against them, these good lambs, we even love them: nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality

Quintessentially Enlightenment rhetoric, employed in both the French and American Revolutions.

John Locke is credited with being the first philosopher of rights, which naturally accrue to all people. Whether rights are individual or collective continues to be debated. The influence of Ayn Rand pulls Peart in the former direction, but this song gives no hope to anyone.

Shaking has two contradictory connotations. On the one hand, condescension: the oaks simply know that they are right, and that the maples' screams are futile. On the other hand, as we all know, the aristocrats lost: head-shaking signifies passivity. We the listeners all know how the revolution turned out. The materialist-historical dialectic grinds on mercilessly, exterminating the outdated class.

Marx made the concept of oppression influential.

That is why the focal point in the Social-Democratic programme must be that division of nations into oppressor and oppressed which forms the essence of imperialism, and is deceitfully evaded by the social-chauvinists and Kautsky. This division is not significant from the angle of bourgeois pacifism or the philistine Utopia of peaceful competition among independent nations under capitalism, but it is most significant from the angle of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism.
—Lenin, V.I, “The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, Lenin Miscellany VI.

The scream of the maples implies an irrational hysteria which belies the ostensibly reasonable nature of their claim.

When unrest turns to trouble, revolutionary ferment turns to violence. The tumbril rolls for the aristocracy. The guillotine, a rational form of execution, is invented and deployed.

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, inventor extraordinaire.

The concept of aristocracy, the “oaks”, is found in Aristotle’s Politics. He defines it as “ the form of government which is described in the first part of our treatise; for that only can be rightly called aristocracy which is a government formed of the best men absolutely, and not merely of men who are good when tried by any given standard.” (Book IV.) Does not government by the best sound like the best form of government? Why did the European aristocracy come to believe themselves naturally loftier? WWARS? What would Ayn Rand say? Does Peart believe that some men are better than others? Does he believe that the European aristocracy were those people?

The revolutionary movements believed themselves to be agents of reason, against tradition and religion. The French Revolution set up the worship of reason in Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris: a prostitute was paid to play the role in this deliberate sacrilege of Catholic tradition. Or was it just payback for centuries of oppression and injustice foisted upon the poor by an unholy alliance of Church and State? Neil Peart’s answer will remain ambiguous throughout the song.

The contrast between maple and oak evokes the class difference between the equality-based revolutionaries and the stately aristocrats. One is reminded of Marie Antoinette’s infamous remark:

“Let them eat cake” is the traditional translation of the French phrase “Qu'ils mangent de la brioche”, supposedly spoken by “a great princess” upon learning that the peasants had no bread. Since brioche was made from dough enriched with butter and eggs, and those ingredients were even more scarce and more costly than dough, making brioche even more out of the reach of the peasants than bread, the quote supposedly would reflect the princess’s obliviousness as to the condition of the people.
While it is commonly attributed to Queen Marie Antoinette, there is no record of this phrase ever having been uttered by her. It appears in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions.(Wikipedia.)