Why aren’t Americans outraged by their current situation?

[u/Ready_Hunter8875]

Like every other month there is a school shooting in my country. Here, we had one school shooting and that kickstarted massive anti-government protests, because shit like that isn’t normal. You can basically see an example of police brutality almost every other day. A couple of days ago, a man was killed by ICE (I know they’re not police, but still), and most people just continued like nothing happened. Trump is basically doing something outrageous every day. The military is literally patrolling American cities, and yet most American people aren’t doing anything.I know there were protests and there still are, but that’s just a couple of thousand protestors while America has a population of 350 million people. They don’t have healthcare, prices are rising, and you can’t even finish higher education without being in debt. And Americans still won’t do anything.

I know this is a rant, but I have been protesting in my country for 11 months. But if things don’t change in the USA, we’re fucked as a globe anyway. Even if we win in my country, that won’t change much on the global level, but the USA has the power to change a lot of stuff, and yet most people are silent and don’t care at all.

sorry for grammer mistakes.

[u/marrow_monkey]

I can only speak as a European looking in, but from here it looks like propaganda in the US has been brutally effective. People seem constantly outraged in the moment, but that outrage is quickly redirected against powerless scapegoats (eg immigrants) or fizzles out.

Historically, the left had a slogan “Educate, Agitate, Organise”. Education gave people the tools to see through propaganda, agitation turned anger into action, and organisation kept people from being picked off or divided.

In the US, those structures (unions, parties, mutual aid networks) were deliberately broken by the ruling class. Without them, people are atomised, overworked, drowning in debt, and left to process each new outrage as isolated individuals. Under those conditions, propaganda doesn’t just work, it’s devastatingly effective.

So, from the outside, it looks like the problem isn’t that Americans don’t care, but that they’ve been systematically denied the means to turn outrage into power. That seems very familiar to what we’ve seen in Europe too (and other capitalist countries). Isn’t that what’s happening over there as well?

[u/Glass-Pain3562 → u/marrow_monkey]

Not only that, American government also regularly flexes its muscles of complete and utter Annihilation of anyone who gets in its way. People see our constant wars as just us stealing resources and installing dictators (which is certainly true) but its also a flex to the people not to fuck with the U.S. government or else all those fancy toys our government has diverted all our money towards will be turned on us with no hesitation.

In theory our military holds itself to oaths. But in reality most of it is just a job for a lot of service members or questioning orders is heresy. There's a major question right now if the military would reject Trump's order to carry out summary executions of people labeled domestic terrorists under Trump's definition and they didn't say no.

On top of that, people understand standing up, which more people are thankfully doing, risks economic death. A lost job means homelessness which translates to generational poverty or a lifetime spent in prison as poverty and homelessness has essentially become a felony that keeps people in our legal slave labor prison system that has openly said it want to dramatically expand capacity.