Among the important things my dad taught me was this jewel of counterintuitive wisdom: the majority is almost always wrong. I remember him saying that to me on many occasions. It was a warning to be suspicious of the crowd, to not trust the crowd, to resist going along with the crowd. My father, as a judge and a man of politics, knew that one of the responsibilities of a just democracy is to protect the minority from the majority. And why? Because the majority is not as interested in truth as it is in power—and power in the hands of a crowd is often used for revenge and scapegoating. The
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