“I didn’t say violence—I said the implicit threat of force. Think about it: Democracy only arose when the ability to employ force was decentralized. If you go back to the Middle Ages, the state-of-the-art weapon system was the armored knight. He cost a fortune to train, feed, and equip. But a mounted armored knight could overpower almost any number of peasants on a battlefield. And the distribution of political power in medieval society reflected that; authority was vested in a tiny minority, and the people had no choice but to obey. “Then, with the advent of gunpowder, that all changed.
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