Hume’s paradox

You’ve said the real drama since 1776 has been the “relentless
attack of the prosperous few upon the rights of the restless many.”
I want to ask you about the “restless many.” Do they hold any cards?

Sure. T hey’ve won a lot of victories. T he country is a lot more
free than it was two hundred years ago. For one thing, we don’t have
slaves. T hat’s a big change. T homas Jefferson’s goal, at the very left-
liberal end of the spectrum, was to create a country “free of blot or
mixture”—meaning no red Indians, no black people, just good white
Anglo-Saxons. T hat’s what the liberals wanted.
T hey didn’t succeed. T hey did pretty much get rid of the native
population—they almost succeeded in “exterminating” them (as they
put it in those days)—but they couldn’t get rid of the black
population, and over time they’ve had to incorporate them in some
fashion into society.
Freedom of speech has been vastly extended. Women finally
received the franchise 150 years after the revolution. After a very
bloody struggle, workers finally won some rights in the 1930s—
about fifty years after they did in Europe. (T hey’ve been losing
them ever since, but they won them to some extent.)
In many ways large parts of the general population have been
integrated into the system of relative prosperity and relative
freedom—almost always as a result of popular struggle. So the
general population has lots of cards.
T hat’s something that [English philosopher] David Hume pointed
out a couple of centuries ago. In his work on political theory, he
describes the paradox that, in any society, the population submits to
the rulers, even though force is always in the hands of the governed.
Ultimately the governors, the rulers, can only rule if they
control opinion—no matter how many guns they have. T his is true
of the most despotic societies and the most free, he wrote. If the
general population won’t accept things, the rulers are finished.
T hat underestimates the resources of violence, but expresses
important truths nonetheless. T here’s a constant battle between
people who refuse to accept domination and injustice and those who
are trying to force people to accept them.