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America is an experiment in how far you can push individualism. Collective action, unions and the like are suppressed compared to other countries. They'll have to relearn that individual responsibility has limits and collective action is still important.

I think there are two main reasons. The first is that things simply haven't gotten bad enough. It's true, there is a health care crisis killing tens of thousands a year, rampant human rights violations in ICE concentration camps, brazen corruption in the administration, etc. But for most of the uneducated and uninformed middle class, these things don't directly affect their daily lives.

The second reason is that the mass indoctrination campaign concerning American exceptionalism has been immensely successful. So while many Americans agree some things could be improved, they are unsure of what those things are because they also still believe the US is one of the best places in the world to live, even as the US has steadily tumbled down the quality-of-life rankings and now arguably ranks below the likes of Estonia and Slovenia. The belief in exceptionalism has fostered a rather meek and servile attitude towards the government.

Yeah, in the US, the protestors are mostly older people. I think maybe they're too anxious and don't want to jeopardize their future careers? Maybe they saw the concerted effort to ruin pro-Palestine protestor's lives? Most companies do background checks (I've had to get a background check to work at Burger King), and even a single arrest on your record is enough to have you automatically filtered out. Maybe they saw that the BLM protests didn't really cause the government to change much. Idk. It is weird though.

After the Civil rights and anti-Vietnam protests of the 60s and 70s, public policy changed to quietly hoover up all of the hippies via the drug war and cut funding for universities and colleges. That, plus McCarthyism and the oil shortage lead to Boomers being one of the most conservative generations in American history. They, along with the government, pushed this idea of freedom through self-reliance and hard work. Those were always the undercurrent of America's politics, but now there were basically no dissenting voices (cause they were all in jail for possession or for being a commie).

The next generations of leftist voices were crushed by the heel of capitalism. Since college and university cost more, individuals participating either needed to already have money (thus be more likely to swallow the "individual effort" freedom narrative) or needed to take out loans (thus needed to keep their mouth shut, since student loans are "forever loans" that can't be forgiven via bankruptcy and they needed employment to pay them back). High school and lower education was stripped of "commie" talking points, meaning the sole narrative taught to young people before college was "America is the best cause of our freedom" nonsense. Unions were taken during this time with "right to work" laws, handing more unchecked power to corporations.

Right now in America, there's a resurgence of leftist voices, but these are students with no masters. We have to rebuild the organizations to support these efforts, but that takes time. In the interim, you'll see mass protests break out from time to time when things get bad, but our lack of generational knowledge on how to utilize these efforts means they'll come and go fairly quickly as individuals are unsure of what comes next. And before those protests can solidify around a single message or platform, mass media will come in to give them a shit one, or twist the actual one to lose public support. That's why the George Floyd protests were big and loud, but didn't really drive any consistent goals. The "defund" narrative was constructed around the movement before it could actually decide that was its goal, and that was too an extreme for position for the average American in that moment (think the Overton shifted on that, now), killing the momentum the movement was gaining.

Another thing is that the gov't targets leaders of these movements and finds a way to put them in jail or kill them. Meaning being the face of the movement is basically guaranteed to get you killed or silenced. So none of these modern protests have true leaders (not single strong men, mind, but actual decision making bodies in general), making it hard to quickly organize messaging and actions. Putting them even more flat-footed for when the next moment arises.

Also, any popular protest in the US that doesn't include rioting gets basically no air time. The George Floyd protests went on for months after the news stopped covering them. Minneapolis' response to operation metro surge outlasted the operation, but you don't hear about it being celebrated.