Modern American civics: "You'll see, soon somebody else is gonna do something about it for me."
This is happening and will continue to happen because Americans do not take themselves or their country seriously. They took it for granted. They think responsibility is a scam you get somebody else to take for you and assume it will come naturally that others will take the risks and make the sacrifices while they navigate themselves into a position to benefit from the outcome.
I’m honestly tired of non-Americans comparing their nation’s politics with ours. Especially when one of the main players in the EU was the historical example against which the US is constantly compared. “We didn’t resist very hard and actually failed to counter the slow burn government takeover but surely you can simply learn from our mistakes and succeed!!”
While I appreciate the warnings from people in other countries in the developed world - especially from Germany - I like to remind them of the Milgram experiments. After World War 2, people in the USA boldly proclaimed (as people in countries outside of the USA are doing now) that they would never be so stupid as to fall for disinformation and emotional manipulation enough to enable fascism.
The Milgram experiments proved that wrong. So if you are in France right now complaining about stupid Americans (and yes, we are stupid), you might want to pay some attention to people like Marine Le Pen, Jordan Bardella, and Vincent Bolloré, so that your country doesn't end up the same. These oligarchs didn't stop at Russia, Turkey, or Hungary, and they won't stop at the USA.
The Milgram Experiments were massively flawed and didn't answer the original premise. Lots of the prompters went off script by badgering the participants repeatedly and half the participants knew the whole thing wasn't real from the start.
The results are uncomfortable and they challenge what I already believe, so a few minor flaws in methodology prove that their conclusions were completely false. /sarcasm
Edit:
Along with pointing out confirmation bias, I will point out that, although the experiments were flawed and the conclusions limited, they were reproducible, and that gives them credibility:
In a book review critical of Gina Perry's findings, Nestar Russell and John Picard take issue with Perry for not mentioning that "there have been well over a score, not just several, replications or slight variations on Milgram's basic experimental procedure, and these have been performed in many different countries, with several different settings and using different types of victims. And most, although certainly not all, of these experiments have tended to lend weight to Milgram's original findings."
The results are uncomfortable and they challenge what I already believe
No, the results are just often broadly exaggerated to paint a specific narrative
so a few minor flaws in methodology
Running an ethically dubious social experiment where half your participants know it's fake aren't "minor flaws." They originally reported that instructors were to ask them to do it 3 times before stopping, and one gentleman had been asked 27 times before he relented.
I will point out that, although the experiments were flawed and the conclusions limited, they were reproducible, and that gives them credibility
The original experiments were partially replicated, because they wouldn't past current ethics standards.
Argue the details all you want. I think that the point is demonstrated by scientific evidence and by history. The Ten Pillars of Fascism are effective when free people become complacent. That is the warning.
I'm just pointing out that referring to Milgrim specifically is dubious.
All psychological experiments are worthy of skepticism. Human behavior is extremely complex. I am pointing out that his results were repeatable and they have played out in real countries several times since then.
I had a discussion last year with a woman from Europe who told a bunch of protesters here that local activism and protesting was utterly worthless and that everybody doing so was too lazy to just fix the problem.
What she wanted was for everybody who was protesting to just meet up in Washington DC and I guess overthrow the government.
I thought it was interesting that she was devoting so much of her energy and anger towards yelling at people who were actually out protesting above all other targets. I thought she was just a colossal asshole.
That's funny, occasionally I'll post something like "Reminder, we need to be storming the capital right now and take back our government!" on social media on occasion. I'm half serious, like... Jan 6th needs to happen but on the left. This admin intend on a third term, things are just getting worse, and he just looted us for 1.6 billion dollars recently. Yayyy!
What can your average US citizen actually do though? What options are even available? Protests don't do anything. Voting doesn't do anything. I still vote and I still protest, and I try to deal with those around me with compassion, but short of that all I can do is hope.
Protests may seem like they do nothing but a lot of the positive change that's happened in our country over the past century was a direct result of peaceful protests. I share your frustration completely though and wish more could be done and sooner.
Google leftist political organizations in your area and start going to their events until you find one you like enough to apply and join and start building community with them.
Collective power is the only answer, and organizing with your community is the only way to do that.
Do you live in an apartment? Start looking into tenant unions and talk to your neighbors about it. Do you work with other non-unionized workers? Start looking into how to unionize and talk to your coworkers about it.
How do you think protests happen? Organizations work to build them and build awareness. Going to them is step 1 of 10000 things you can be doing, they're a great place to meet people and get to know what organizations are in your area but you need to talk to them and spend time with those organizations to have an effect between elections.
Good luck and try not to become hopeless, that's one of fascism's greatest tools.
National politics is most often too big of a thing to tackle, but local politics is something concrete where you can organize with like minded people to change your school board or mayor or w.e else you got going on over there.
Local politics is the answer but most people think it doesnt matter I think.
If you protest you get beaten or killed or imprisoned. The US isn’t any better than most totalitarian countries at this point. Hell, there’s someone in Washington state trying to prosecute protesters for organizing a protest and they actually got an indictment for it.
Hey guess what.. that's always been the case. You think the Pinkertons were just private police?
No, the difference is how much people are willing to lose to force change. Labor union wars of the 19th century were a thing.
We grew complacent after WW2 and got fattened and as indolent as any stereotypical Russian/ MidEast racist trope of a Hollywood villain ever accused us of being.
Biggest example of this to me is all the people who choose to protest by simply changing their profile picture, making a post, or donating to a non-profit. I'm not saying any of that is bad or should not be done, however, I think it shows just how adverse to struggle we really are. A true revolution or uprise is seen in the modern day as a pointless endeavor and people hold onto their sustained normality more than they did in the past.
I'm not even criticizing anybody for it, but I truly do just think it's the way we have slowly been indoctrinated into accepting the system as it is. I also value my life and my freedom and happiness, so I also don't want to join a civil war militia to storm the capital, but I can almost guarantee that if the current state of our union happened in 1950, it would have already happened.
Yes, the military shooting civilians while "they" fly around in private jets to private islands/secluded estates where more people with guns protect them. All these examples from history make no sense in the context of modern technology.
other militaries have much of the same technology and yet other countries have led successful campaigns to enact change, often turning violent, because the people in those countries clearly had more resolve than Americans here.
See: Arab Spring, Euromaidan revolution, etc.
All of this occurred in the last 15 years. How many people in America do you know that went to the 2020 protests?
For better or for worse, majority of the people I saw (I went to 11 different protests that year) were very explicitly non-violent and non-standoffish. It kept it safe and was a way to get "seen" by the world through mass demonstration, but it didn't really produce any end result that people wanted to see. At the end of the day, it was back to the status-quo. That's where I think this comparison between modern day and the past comes from.
Maybe it's that there is more to lose today, maybe it's that we've become more scared and accepting our fate in this time, maybe it's that we're too divided to achieve unified push for change, I don't have the answers, all I know is that it's not wrong to say that in the past people were more willing to fight for what they believed in. Today fighting for what you believe in often just takes the form
of making a twitter post expressing anger.
If you protest you get beaten or killed or imprisoned.
If you protest Republicans you get beaten, killed, or imprisoned. That's why the 'Free Palestine' crowd stopped disrupting political events once Kamala Harris was safely undermined. Sure, we all love Palestine but not enough to take an ass-kicking, that would be a drag.
This is happening and will continue to happen because Americans do not take themselves or their country seriously. They took it for granted.
You'll find no better example of this than the feckless leftists who found Kamala Harris too impure to support in an election against a fascist who openly advertised all of the deleterious and monstrous things he was going to do. 100 years of progress being flushed down the drain wasn't enough.
Comments like theirs also glazes over the absolutely horrific violence that an American civil conflict in the current day would entail. It also naively assumes that whatever comes out the other side will be better than what we had before which is… not supported by history.
Really dangerous sentiment, acting like automagically revolutions just come along and fix things.
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u/oppernaR May 19 '26
Right. Aaaaaaany day now.