However, I don't think any part of these historical developments involves contrarians winning through public activism while faced with a uniformly hostile elite.
I think that some activism is necessary, but not close to sufficient, to cause certain kinds of social change. At least in a post-Enlightenment society (i.e. a society that pays any attention to the concept of "consent of the governed").
I think that "consent of the governed" is a concept too incoherent to be salvageable. After all, the very purpose of government is to do things that are arguably necessary but can't be done consensually, and that circle simply cannot be squared.
As for activism in general, I didn't mean to say that activism is necessarily without influence. What happens in reality is some sort of interplay between the activism and the dynamics of the intra-elite conflict, whose exact nature varies greatly between different cases. But some degree of elite support and participation is always involved whenever activism doesn't get routinely suppressed or laughed off.
Today's post, Stop Voting For Nincompoops was originally published on 02 January 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was The American System and Misleading Labels, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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