You know, DOGE, fascist president and corporations dictating what people can do, institutions being ruined, laws being ignored. Is there any way out of that or is it over? Is the USA done?
You know, DOGE, fascist president and corporations dictating what people can do, institutions being ruined, laws being ignored. Is there any way out of that or is it over? Is the USA done?
Americans are the most domesticated and propagandized culture on the planet. I gave up on the ideal of mass consciousness after Occupy, because the billionaires who own this country have spent generations dumbing it down to the point that almost nobody cares. We’re not seeing mass protests of the kind you describe untill things get very bad for a lot of people.
Occupy was infiltrated by our government by people meant to destroy it from the inside. They incited people and then arrested them for it. This isn’t something that simply died off, they’ve mastered being able to co-opt an idea, push it the way they want, propagandize FUD around it, and then make it disappear.
Occupy destroyed itself by being too unfocused and ambitious. It also failed to institutionalize and burned itself out quickly.
Sure the state also did its part to sabotage it. However some of the structures like consensus and stack speakers were easily exploited by all kinds of detractors and grand standers and also wore people out by their duration.
Don’t get me wrong, it was great that it happened and there are merits to its approach.
CHAZ had a similar problem with their demands. What Occupy and CHAZ have in common is a continuous occupation of an area with people living there and building a small society. Security concerns, internal contradictions, and external pressure then lead to them falling apart after a month. With both we got a super intense short time of action with grand rhetoric but no staying power. Participants seem to be more interested in experiencing revolutionary cosplaying an anarchist utopia than achieving effective change or building a sustainable movement.
Occupy and CHAZ also have in common, that they were not repeated the next month or the next year with any success. Previous participants were frustrated or burnt out by the experience and outcomes.
The Dakota Access Pipeline protests also seem to have attracted protest tourists, who came more for the vibes than the cause.
In this case as well, the protest lasted for one longer time only, remained mostly local, and even ethnically specific.
I don’t know that much about American protest culture and organizations. But my impression is a lack of long term organizations and repeated protests for years for the same goal. There are punctual chaotic outbreaks, sometimes widespread anger like with BLM.
What other sustained long term groups exist besides Code Pink? The name BLM was coopted and exploited financially by a foundation afaik.
I also know that climate activist movements like Fridays for Future and eXtinction Rebellion were only able to mobilize a fraction of what was going on in Europe at the time.
In contrast to Dakota Access the German group Ende Gelände occupied a different coal mine with a couple thousand people every year for a week or so from 2015 to 2024.
Do I have a wrong impression or is there a lack of political organization around protests and causes in the USA?