Isn't that what we call public debt?

>harder to get the average joe charged up to fight a battle with anything meaningful on the line

Doesn't this imply that on average people just don't care? So, school shooting preventions are just way down in the list of "things I care about", when you have "cushy lives where nobody wants to sacrifice their QOL".

Enforcing the global use of the petro dollar is what keeps Americans living cushy lives so be careful disrespecting the military personel.

This is not a good argument. Children tend to have parents who can vote.

I can, just not in the US [0]. I always presumed this is linked to the health care being provided by employers rather than having a more robust safety net that allows for civil disobedience without having to fear existential risks. However, I also can’t forget that the French have their safety net not as a God given right, but because they fought for it via (often not just civil) protest. Reference also the statements MLK JR made concerning the willingness of white moderates to engage in actually effective disobedience, even when their financial situation allows for such.

[0] https://thenonviolenceproject.wisc.edu/2023/06/02/recent-pro...

> I get what you’re saying but in the last 20 years can you think of any mass protest that accomplished anything substantial?

Nope.

Even the Jan 6 one didn’t really change our quality of life. And damn, that was a protest, by American standards.

If you're not American, one thing that you have to keep in mind whenever you hear "there's large public support in the US for [insert vaguely left-wing thing here] but nothing gets done about it" is that the US's system of government is really only vaguely a democracy. It gives a disproportionate amount of power to conservative rural voters at the expense of everybody else.

This is exemplified in the Senate, which is the least representative legislative body of any democracy I am aware of. Each state gets 2 votes regardless of population, so Wyoming (population ~550,000) is given the same amount of votes as California (population ~39,000,000). Any remotely controversial piece of legislation needs to pass the Senate with a 60% majority. This means that 21 Republican states making up ~20% of the population can block any bill they don't want to pass. Senators are also elected for 6 year terms, which limits how accountable they are to their constituents.

If a bill gets past the Senate, it makes its way to the president, who has veto power over all legislation. The president is elected by electors selected by the states rather than individual voters, and the number of electors is not fairly apportioned either. For example, there are ~728,000 people per elector in California, but ~196,000 people per elector in Wyoming.

In effect, this means that public opinion has essentially no impact on the legislation the US government passes. A 2014 Princeton study ( https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th... ) found that "When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy."

If you're interested in why the system was designed this way, I highly recommend the book "The Framers' Coup" by Michael Klarman.

You clearly missed the part about the divide between the political class and everyone else.

Most people in the US are just trying to pay rent and maybe one day save up for a house by the time they are 40-50.

If you don't see this you are either 1) making enough money you are part of the problem 2) don't actually live in the US so have a completely unmoored understanding of reality on the ground here