Why don’t Americans protest?

I was riding the Metro North into the city today when a friend sent me a Facebook thread asking a very thoughtful question. “Why won’t the voiceless marginalized youth of our country ever mobilize on [the scale of the Madrid protests] in New York or Washington?”

America, of course, has a long history of protest and civil disobedience. The Lowell Mill Girls, Eugene Debs and the American Socialist movement, the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, heck — in 1861, a group of citizens got so fed up with the country that they decided to secede from it altogether!

So why now, in 2011, with Americans able to access tools that can organize millions of people in the blink of an eye — a feat unthinkable throughout most of human history — are we simply staying home?

Some have said, “Hey, we Americans don’t have it that bad. There’s simply not enough reason to protest.” Times are lean, but we’re out of the throes of the Great Recession — consumer spending has rebounded, unemployment has dropped to 8.7%, we’re attacking sovereign nations again — things seem to be back to normal here in the US.

And yet they aren’t. Consumer spending has rebounded, but the Consumer Price Index rose 3.8% over the last 12 months, the biggest jump since October 2008, with gas rising by 33.1% in a single year. Real wages aren’t keeping pace with inflation — in fact, they’ve been contracting since early 2010. And while the official rate of unemployment is 8.9%, that figure doesn’t factor in people who aren’t actively seeking work, or people who are underemployed. Some economists have estimated that the real unemployment rate in the US is as high as 21.5%, higher than the 20.7% unemployment rate in Spain.

Meanwhile, as Americans have been forced to shoulder the burdens of a rising deficit and three costly wars, American corporations have been getting a meaty tax break. In fact, many corporations received money from the federal government this year. That’s right college grads — while you were trading your textbooks for barista stations, Uncle Sam appropriated part of your paycheck to GE, so they could half-heartedly devise ways to sell you overpriced wind turbines and pay their subsidiary companies to produce quality programming like NBC’s ‘The Apprentice’. All the better to distract you from the bleak reality of life perpetually indebted to multi-national corporations, whether you work for them or not.

Meanwhile, the companies that precipitated the American financial crisis have seen record high profits, and have made a tidy business out of lending our money back to us at artificially high interest rates. The executives that misled investors and nearly bankrupted the American economy made off with multi-million dollar golden parachutes (compliments of the American taxpayer), as homelessness in the US increased and poverty rates hit a 15 year high.

So yeah, I think there’s a reason to protest.

And despite this massive screwing of the American public, there have been no widespread protests, no Million Man March for sensible financial regulation or a repeal of the Bush tax cuts.

One plausible explanation might be the lack of sex appeal in economic issues. Economic issues don’t have the emotional potency of issues involving race or sex or war. They come up quietly, in hushed conversations around a kitchen table, in decisions to delay a doctor’s appointment for an aching hip, or to take a second job at night to make ends meet. The victims of the financial crisis aren’t necessarily angry and vengeful. Some of them are ashamed, embarrassed by the fact that they’re unable to provide for their families. They are a disjointed group, not unified by any singular characteristic or cause. Many of them misdirect their frustration at the very elements in government trying to advocate for them.

But that’s only one part of the problem. There’s a duality to America’s welfare state that is unique to our country, and shoulders much of the blame for our inaction in the face of great injustice. The welfare state — the insurance, pension, unemployment, disability, housing and food programs — keep the vast majority of Americans out of abject poverty. And yet that same welfare state is no sacred cow; in fact, it’s under constant attack by the conservative movement.

The welfare state keeps most Americans comfortable and complacent. Minimum wage ended the days of sweatshop labor, and government programs, starting with FDR’s Federal Transient Service, have kept Hoovervilles a distant memory. The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program provides food to 43 million people, and over 100 million Americans receive healthcare through Medicare, Medicaid or military service. Nearly 5 million Americans receive unemployment benefits each year, and nearly ten times that number receive Social Security benefits. A well-fed body politic tends not to be in a rush to enact radical change.

On the other side of the equation, while our welfare state keeps much of society afloat, it pales in comparison to the types of benefits that citizens in other industrialized nations enjoy. The citizens of 32 of the 33 developed nations have universal healthcare. Almost all countries in the EU offer free or highly-subsidized post-secondary education. Most industrialized nations have statutory minimum paid vacation and paid maternity leave (in contrast, until Clinton passed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, women in the US were often fired for taking any maternity leave at all).

Despite a welfare state that other nations would consider austere, conservatives continue to chip away at it, dreaming of an impossible country — one where businesses regulate themselves, the destitute pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and government performs only the most basic functions: national defense, negotiating treaties, contract enforcement and the construction of impregnable edifices to keep out immigrants.

Unlike Europe, where the welfare state is revered, Americans come down on the side of less spending and less government intervention. When conservatives in the UK proposed raising tuition fees, students quickly took to the streets, rioting and drawing worldwide attention to the issue. 50,000 students flooded the streets, and hundreds were arrested. The protests were front-page news for weeks. Here in the US, when the US House of Representatives voted to cut $5.8 billion from the Pell Grant Program, the students really let those right-wingers have it. “25 North Carolina Central University students were bused to Raleigh to protest the cuts”, announced a local NBC affiliate. In New Jersey, a protest at Rutgers University got an unexpected bump when “Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J. 12th District, spoke to two dozen students at Voorhees Mall, vowing to fight cuts to education,” according to a local newspaper.

Conservatives have engineered an American narrative inherently skeptical of government programs, distrustful of “big government”. 35% of Americans believe the government should become less involved in education, and nearly half oppose any improvement in public schools if it means increasing taxes. 59% of Americans oppose the new healthcare reform. The majority of Americans oppose raising the tax rate to keep Social Security afloat (and, inconveniently, oppose reducing benefits or raising the retirement age).

And so we are left with a uniquely American problem. We rely on government to provide essential services, yet we’re unwilling to defend those services when they’re under attack. We tell our congressmen to “keep their government hands off our Medicare”. We vote to slash the budgets of the public schools that we ourselves attended.

I’d like to believe that this is why Americans don’t protest. Not because we’re lazy, or lack the ability or intellect. I’d like to believe that Americans are benevolent people who have been swindled by right-wing demagogues. I’d like to believe that the Americans calling for pensions to be slashed, and calling for government healthcare to be replaced by charity hospitals, and calling for all the unions to be busted, are truly well-intentioned people. I’d like to believe that they think, through some voodoo math, that this course of action will help their neighbors dig out of foreclosure, and keep food on the table, and move up in society.

I’d like to believe this very badly, because the alternative is frightening. The alternative is that we don’t take a stand because we’ve become violently disconnected with ourselves. Because we’ve been trained to become deaf to the entreaties of the poor and the disabled and the hungry. Because we’ve been trained to come home after work and turn on the television, and tune out the realities of poverty and oppression, and we’ve been trained to buy into the lies that in America, you can do anything you want if you work hard and follow the rules, and we’ve been trained to believe that we’re all protagonists in a Horatio Alger novel, and that one day we will have the corner office and the new Mercedes, and boy, won’t we be glad we didn’t piss away our lives fighting for the weak and indigent, and won’t we be glad that we didn’t jeopardize our fortunes taking care of the sick and elderly.

Maybe in the year 2011, Americans don’t see anything worth defending but themselves.