Thursday, November 14, 2019
Why
Aren't People in the US Rising Up Like Those Elsewhere in the World?
Without a mass movement continually pushing and prodding for real change and holding politicians accountable—for their policies as well as their words—our neoliberal rulers assume that they can safely ignore the concerns and interests of ordinary people.
The waves of protests breaking out in country after country around the world beg the question: Why aren’t Americans rising up in peaceful protest like our neighbors? We live at the very heart of this neoliberal system that is force-feeding the systemic injustice and inequality of 19th century laissez-faire capitalism to the people of the 21st century. So we are subject to many of the same abuses that have fueled mass protest movements in other countries, including high rents, stagnant wages, cradle-to-grave debt, ever-rising economic inequality, privatized healthcare, a shredded social safety net, abysmal public transportation, systemic political corruption and endless war.
We also have a corrupt, racist billionaire as president, who Congress may soon impeach, but where are the masses outside the White House, banging pots and pans to drive Trump out? Why aren’t people crashing the offices of their congresspeople, demanding that they represent the people or resign? If none of these conditions has so far provoked a new American revolution, what will it take to trigger one?
In the
1960s and 1970s, the senseless Vietnam War provoked a serious, well-organized
antiwar movement. But today the U.S.’s endless wars just
rage on in the background of our lives, as the U.S. and its allies kill and
mutilate men, women and children in distant countries, day after day, year after
year. Our history has also witnessed inspiring mass movements for civil rights,
women’s rights and gay rights, but these movements are much tamer today.
The Occupy Movement in 2011 came closest to challenging the entire neoliberal system. It awakened a new generation to the reality of government of, by, and for the corrupt 1%, and built a powerful basis for solidarity among the marginalized 99%. But Occupy lost momentum because it failed to transition from a rallying point and a decentralized, democratic forum to a cohesive movement that could impact the existing power structure.
The climate movement is starting to mobilize a new generation, and groups like School Strike for the Climate and Extinction Rebellion take direct aim at this destructive economic system that prioritizes corporate growth and profits over the very survival of life on Earth. But while climate protests have shut down parts of London and other cities around the world, the scale of climate protests in the U.S. does not yet match the urgency of the crisis.
So why
is the American public so passive?
Americans
pour their energy and hopes into electoral campaigns
Election
campaigns in most countries last only a few months, with strict limits on
financing and advertising to try to ensure fair elections. But Americans pour
millions of hours and billions of dollars into multi-year election campaigns
run by an ever-growing sector of the commercial advertising industry, which
even awarded Barack Obama its “Marketer of the
Year” award for 2008. (The other finalists were not John McCain
or the Republicans but Apple, Nike and Coors beer.)
When
U.S. elections are finally over, thousands of exhausted volunteers sweep up the
bunting and go home, believing their work is done. While electoral politics
should be a vehicle for change, this neoliberal model of corporate
“center-right” and “center-left” politics ensures that congresspeople and
presidents of both parties are primarily accountable to the ruling 1% who “pay
to play.”
Millions
of Americans have internalized the myth of the “American dream,”
believing they have exceptional chances for social and economic mobility
compared with their peers in other countries. If they aren’t successful, it
must be their own fault—either they’re not smart enough or they don’t work hard
enough.
Former
President Jimmy Carter has bluntly described what Americans euphemistically
call “campaign finance” as a system of legalized
bribery. Transparency International (TI) ranks the U.S.
22nd on its political corruption index, identifying it as more
corrupt than any other wealthy, developed country.
Without
a mass movement continually pushing and prodding for real change and holding
politicians accountable—for their policies as well as their words—our
neoliberal rulers assume that they can safely ignore the concerns and interests
of ordinary people as they make the critical decisions that shape the world we
live in. As Frederick Douglass observed in 1857, “Power concedes nothing
without a demand. It never has and it never will.”
Millions
of Americans have internalized the myth of the “American dream,”
believing they have exceptional chances for social and economic mobility
compared with their peers in other countries. If they aren’t successful, it
must be their own fault—either they’re not smart enough or they don’t work hard
enough.
The
American Dream is not just elusive—it’s a complete fantasy. In reality, the
U.S. has the greatest income
inequality of any wealthy, developed country. Of the 39
developed countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), only South Africa and Costa Rica exceed the U.S.’s 18% poverty rate.
The United States is an anomaly: a very wealthy country suffering from
exceptional poverty. To make matters worse, children born into poor families in
the U.S. are more likely to
remain poor as adults than poor children in other wealthy countries. But the
American dream ideology keeps people struggling and competing to improve their
lives on a strictly individual basis, instead of demanding a fairer society and
the healthcare, education and public services we all need and deserve.
The
corporate media keeps Americans uninformed and docile
The
U.S.’s corporate media system is also unique, both in its consolidated corporate
ownership and in its limited news coverage, endlessly downsized newsrooms and
narrow range of viewpoints. Its economics reporting reflects the interests of
its corporate owners and advertisers; its domestic reporting and debate is
strictly framed and limited by the prevailing rhetoric of Democratic and
Republican leaders; its anemic foreign policy coverage is editorially dictated
by the State Department and Pentagon.
This
closed media system wraps the public in a cocoon of myths, euphemisms and propaganda
to leave us exceptionally ignorant about our own country and the world we live
in. Reporters Without Borders ranks the U.S. 48th out of 180 countries on
its Press Freedom Index, once
again making the U.S. an exceptional outlier among wealthy countries.
It’s
true people can search for their own truth on social media to counter the
corporate babble, but social media is itself a distraction. People spend
countless hours on facebook, twitter, instagram and other platforms venting
their anger and frustration without getting up off the couch to actually do
something—except perhaps sign a petition. “Clicktivism” will not change the
world.
Add to
this the endless distractions of Hollywood, video games, sports and
consumerism, and the exhaustion that comes with working several jobs to make
ends meet. The resulting political passivity of Americans is not some strange
accident of American culture but the intended product of a mutually reinforcing
web of economic, political and media systems that keep the American public
confused, distracted and convinced of our own powerlessness.
The
political docility of the American public does not mean that Americans are
happy with the way things are, and the unique challenges this induced docility
poses for American political activists and organizers surely cannot be more
daunting than the life-threatening repression faced by activists in Chile,
Haiti or Iraq.
How
can we liberate ourselves from our assigned roles as passive spectators and
mindless cheerleaders for a venal ruling class that is laughing all the way to
the bank and through the halls of power as it grabs ever more concentrated
wealth and power at our expense?
Few
expected a year ago that 2019 would be a year of global uprising against the
neoliberal economic and political system that has dominated the world for forty
years. Few predicted new revolutions in Chile or Iraq or Algeria. But popular
uprisings have a way of confounding conventional wisdom.
The
catalysts for each of these uprisings have also been surprising. The protests in
Chile began over an increase in subway fares. In Lebanon,
the spark was a proposed tax on WhatsApp and other social media accounts. Hikes
in fuel tax triggered the yellow vest protests in France,
while the ending of fuel subsidies was a catalyst in both Ecuador and Sudan.
The
common factor in all these movements is the outrage of ordinary people at
systems and laws that reward corruption, oligarchy and plutocracy at the
expense of their own quality of life. In each country, these catalysts were the
final straws that broke the camel’s back, but once people were in the street,
protests quickly turned into more general uprisings demanding the resignation
of leaders and governments.
They
have the guns but we have the numbers
State
repression and violence have only fueled greater popular demands for more
fundamental change, and millions of protesters in country after country have
remained committed to non-violence and peaceful protest - in stark contrast to
the rampant violence of the right-wing coup in Bolivia.
While
these uprisings seem spontaneous, in every country where ordinary people have
risen up in 2019, activists have been working for years to build the movements
that eventually brought large numbers of people onto the streets and into the
headlines.Sanders’ wildly successful first presidential campaign in 2016 pushed
a new generation of American politicians to commit to real policy solutions to
real problems instead of the vague promises and applause lines that serve as
smokescreens for the corrupt agendas of neoliberal politicians like Trump and
Biden.
Erica
Chenoweth’s research on the history of nonviolent protest
movements found that whenever at least 3.5% of a population have taken to the
streets to demand political change, governments have been unable to resist
their demands. Here in the U.S., Transparency International found that the
number of Americans who see “direct action,” including street protests, as the
antidote to our corrupt political system has risen from 17% to 25% since Trump
took office, far more than Chenoweth’s 3.5%. Only 28% still see simply “voting
for a clean candidate” as the answer. So maybe we are just waiting for the
right catalyst to strike a chord with the American public.
In
fact, the work of progressive activists in the U.S. is already upsetting the
neoliberal status quo. Without the movement-building work of thousands of
Americans, Bernie Sanders would still be a little-known Senator from Vermont,
largely ignored by the corporate media and
the Democratic
Party. Sanders’ wildly successful first presidential campaign
in 2016 pushed a new generation of American politicians to commit to real
policy solutions to real problems instead of the vague promises and applause
lines that serve as smokescreens for the corrupt agendas of neoliberal
politicians like Trump and Biden.
We
can’t predict exactly what catalyst will trigger a mass movement in the U.S.
like the ones we are seeing overseas, but with more and more Americans,
especially young people, demanding an alternative to a system that doesn’t
serve their needs, the tinder for a revolutionary movement is everywhere. We
just have to keep kicking up sparks until one catches fire.
Nicolas J S
Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the
American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq and of the chapter on
"Obama At War" in Grading the 44th President: A Report Card
on Barack Obama's First Term as a Progressive Leader.
Our
work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Feel free to republish and share widely.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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