America is very geographically dispersed. Any commerce that gets impacted generally only draws attention locally. And because of the strong urban/rural political divide in the US, you are mostly only going to attack your own interests.
That is not to say there is not a lot of active mobilization. Mostly through our legal system as well as PR.
Some other things to note:
- While the extent of the damage to the federal government is massive, the domestic impacts are not really felt yet. Most of the stuff that comes from "government" is paid for and administered at the state level.
- The current party won the popular vote and controls both houses of Congress. So most of the frustration is happening between the American people for letting this happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15_February_2003_anti-war_prot...
In retrospect it was obviously a worthy protest, although it it didn't accomplish anything.
NYC had 300-400k protesters that day, according to the article.
You don't seem to care.
- Protesting hasn't accomplished anything in the US in 80 years (EDIT: Almost 60, LOL, usually I math wrong the other direction when calculating how long ago things were). As with letting our politicians tell obvious lies to interviewers with minimal push-back, not having effective protests is just... American, or at least has been for much of living memory.
- Like 80% of the country's not paying any attention, they have zero idea how bad this already is and what's already teed up for the next month or two. Shit the people following this would never believe a person could have missed, they don't know about.
- Civic knowledge is abysmal so a huge proportion of the population doesn't understand why stuff like normalizing open corruption (that one, we let slide in Trump's first term and the Democrats did nothing to draft laws to codify prior norms, when they had the chance, so that's... great) is extremely dangerous. Or that the President in fact does not legally have the power to do a bunch of the things he's doing, and that letting him get away with it anyway means the end of the rule of law and the beginning of authoritarianism. Like half of folks don't understand marginal tax rates and even more think foreign aid is some insane amount of our budget, like 20%. When it comes to our political system, I dunno about other countries, but Americans are, to be blunt, shockingly dumb. They don't know how things are supposed to be or where the guardrails are, so don't recognize how very far off-course we are.
The ones I heard of were around a few thousand at most. That is not large in this context.
sad state of affairs for sure…
This isn’t a civilized European country. Protesting only works when the people who can affect change are listening to the people.
Who do you think the people “below the people in power” are, and why would they have any reason to fear anything but a purity test from someone even further to the right?
Nuclear proliferation is going to go apeshit. Undoing that is very, very hard.
It's also a responsibility, in some situations.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoXPreppers/comments/1igugaw/the_5...
This one talks about concerns over the police sending agent provocateurs to protests to instigate violence and let them crack down on the protestors.
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1j3enrz/trump_ame...
This one is a thread about the government limiting student protests, several comments actually mention Kent State by name
3. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskALiberal/comments/1i1vsp6/why_no...
Here is one asking why there aren't more protests, one answer worries that "protesting in the streets will get people put in prisons being used as slave labor."
These are just the first three results that I found in a moment of searching but I could go on all night. I'm not saying I agree with them or that their thinking is perfect but we can be certain that numerous people are afraid of violent reactions from the state if they try to protest what is happening.
How do you get to "mostly" from there?