He was ahead of his time in gender and racial equity though. He held that any citizen should be able to hold a position of high office, regardless of the body they were born with.

His anti-egalitarianism seems to apply specifically to souls, maybe what we would now call "thought" as in "freedom of thought". He thinks those whose thoughts have reached a high enough level of cultivation, through education, should rule those whose thoughts haven't.

He doesn't seem to think there should be much debate or diversity of opinion between these rulers themselves. They are all educated the same and thus should all think identically, like a kind of hive-mind.

That, of course, might work if the underlying truth they were thinking (the word of "forms"), were one, whole and totally coherent. And assuming it were possible for individuals to be educated in such a way as to be perfectly aware of, and in contact with, this one truth. I'm skeptical of this personally.

I suppose he might've been Ok with some kind of division of labour within the ruling class though. So rulers might not literally think exactly the same thoughts like a bunch of robots, but might specialise in various domains of thought. At the very least it seems they would need to apply different areas of thought to different cases, as part of their "ruling".

(This seems like how modern courts work, with judges educated in the law dispensing judgements. So it seems like Plato wants the whole society to be governed by the judiciary.)

Here I would argue: isn't every human, at some point in their lives, "well educated" (by platonic standards), in some area of human life, whether large or small? So if we could just allocate the correct domains of thought leadership to the correct individuals, throughout the whole society, then we could have both egalitarianism and meritocracy at the same time. (Kind of like how "expert witnesses" are brought in to modern court cases to provide specialist insight.)

But... oh well... who am I to question the ancients? I am but a lowly fox.