It's really hard to accurately gauge this kind of thing. If you go too far in the past, then the percentage of literate people drops too fast for us to have first-hand accounts of what people really thought of their contemporary policies. The accounts we have available are accounts from those who were affluent enough to bother with literacy: precisely the groups that would contest the power of the state. If you stick to the last few centuries, you simply don't have enough data.
I'm a liberal, which to me, includes being a meliorist. This means, roughly, that I believe that things get better, and that this is especially true over the long run. I think that the present day society is better than those in the past. So that's the context in which I say, "Yes, we can do something."
The silence of our generation comes, in part, from our multiculturality. Too many of "us" feel like we're irreconcilably different. Race, sex, industry, level of education, socioeconomic status, etc.: we see more ways in which we're different than in which we're the same. So we retreat behind facades of private domains, where the differences can be muted by not seeing them, and in a vicious cycle, reinforces our inability to come out into the public sphere and engage. We spend our days traveling from our private homes, along roadways where our interactions with others involve cursing and frustration, to private businesses, and so many of us need to be back home to sleep soon afterwards for another day of work. If your neighbor went on strike, would you even know or care?
I realize I didn't really answer the question, but I don't really have an answer.