by beloch | 2026-01-26 03:31:38+00:00
There appears to be a few factors combining in the U.S. right now that make protests less effective than they once were.

1. Politics are religion more than ever before. There is a solid MAGA core that will not turn on Trump for any reason. When confronted by uncomfortable truth, they dismiss it as lies. When they can't dismiss it as a lie, they choose not to care. The Democrats have people like this too, but they haven't been hired and turned into a paramilitary goon squad the way ICE has. Yet. The "unreasonables" on both sides of the spectrum are not going anywhere. After Trump dies they could easily be harnessed by someone else. When so many people cannot be swayed, the impact of protests are dulled. The "unreasonables" aren't swayed when the other side protests, and the mushy middle will tend to dismiss many protests as products of people they view as extremists.

2. There is a ruling class (i.e. Billionaires) with a firm grip on power (through both parties) and complete insulation from the public. In his discourses on Livy, Machiavelli observed that Roman officials who protected themselves from those they ruled with forts or castles tended to rule in a more brutal and less productive manner than those who lived among the governed. If you want good government, those governing should feel vulnerable enough to behave reasonably. U.S. billionaires, and the politicians they own, are completely sealed off from public wrath. Minnesota could burn and none of them would get more than a warm fuzzy watching it on the news. If a protest doesn't scare billionaires it will have no impact on how the U.S. is governed.

3. "Flood the zone" is just one of the tactics being used to numb people and encourage them to switch off from politics. The nastiness of hyper-partisan politics is, at times, a distracting entertainment, but it's fatiguing the rest of the time. People rightly observe that both of the U.S.'s diametrically opposed parties tend to do similar things (e.g. tax breaks for the rich) and are funded by the same billionaires every election. If people will scream at you for picking a side in what looks like a sham of false choice, why not just stay home, plug in, and tune out? When a big protest happens, people who are numb and tuned out are just going to change the channel and consume some more billionaire-produced pap.

As a Canadian, what's going on in the U.S. has been terrifying to watch. We're so culturally similar that what happens in the U.S. could easily happen here. Even if it doesn't, we're still subject to the fallout. A classic pattern of authoritarian regimes is to lash out at allies and neighbours in order to give their people threats to fear more than their own government. Well, that's us. If MAGA isn't checked, Canada will likely be subjected to far more than tariff's and threats.

It's hard for Canadians to appreciate how nations elsewhere in the world can harbour such bitter and long-lived enmities against one another. We're now experiencing how they're created. It's not hatred yet, but the trust we once had for Americans is gone and won't return for generations. For the rest of my life, we'll always be four years or less away from what could be the next round of American insanity.