But that's what people want, at least the minimum standard of democracy. That's all that is needed to prevent revolution.
There's only so much **** people will accept before they get mad as hell and refuse to take it anymore.
Here's the thing about Americans: they don't know what they want. They want deficit and debt reduction and yet opposed the necessary changes to do so. They oppose aspects of the War on Terror and yet criticize when something is done to fix them. They want health care reform and then they don't.
I think some people are confused in that way; I always think of the immortal line from that one Tea Partier, "keep your government hands off my Medicare!"
But overall, I think this is just a method by which elite opinion-makers dismiss popular opinion: "Oh, those confused peasants. They just don't know what they want!" Polls show differing opinions and it's easy to just simplify this by saying everybody wants everything, as opposed to parsing the data and finding that different Americans have different concerns.
Except I really wouldn't call the things you mentioned as fringe in the United States.
That was my point.
I'm honestly kinda surprised that the PQ is on the down slide in Quebec.
Quebeckers have spent a generation hearing arguments about nationalism and they don't care anymore. Their main concerns today are economic.
You can argue that at least the Republicans will institute changes that can keep their jobs by being more business friendly. When people are frightened they tend to choose job security over labor friendly practices.
Capitalism has turned choosing the lesser of two evils into an art form.
The needs of a certain sect of people. Another problem with Occupy Wall Street was that they acted like they were speaking for everyone when a lot of people disagreed with them.
Sure, but so did the Tea Party. What annoyed me was how the media portrayed the Occupiers as these crazy radicals whereas they portrayed Tea Partiers as ordinary, hardworking Americans concerned about government spending. Somehow the Tea Party narrative was accepted as legitimate while the Occupy narrative was not; I wonder why that would be?
1. There's a reason why billionaires ended up financially supporting the Tea Party movement, because they saw the massive amount of potential within the movement.
2. You really can't claim that they're irrelevant when they now hold power in Congress. The Tea Party is a big reason why Congress cannot get anything done anymore.
3. They sided with the Republican Party because their views are more closely aligned with the GOP over the Democratic Party and they have the resources to spread their ideals around.
4. You really can't say that they channeled their energy into GOP establishment candidates. As a matter in fact, the Tea Party pretty much hijacked the GOP in the 2010 midterms. Instead of going with establishment preferred candidates like Jane Norton, Mike Castle, Trey Grayson, Charlie Crist, Sue Lowden, Bob Bennett, Lisa Murkowski, Chris Shays, and others, Tea Partiers chose even more conservative candidates in the primaries. It cost the GOP a lot of guaranteed victories in Nevada, Colorado, and Delaware and cost them a shot of victory in Connecticut. Even now you have the Tea Party going against the establishment preferred Mitt Romney.
The Tea Party was always just the hardcore GOP base, re-branded. We shouldn't pretend it's anything more than that.
We still believe in the system, even if it isnt perfect. Yes we are cynical but not enough for Revolution. We still have hope that the next guy in office will do better than the last. Perhaps it is foolish to think that but we have the opinion that a bad government is better than a good Revolution.
Nothing will change that but time.
Who exactly would the people rebel against and how? Would we all get our guns, march on Washington and remove the current leaders from power? I wish that we were that united as a people. Any attempt to remove a government would quickly turn into a civil war because a large percentage of any people will support the current regime, no matter which regime it is.
Any successful revolutionary movement in the USA would involve general strikes, workers occupying factories, and splitting the state security forces so that a good proportion of soldiers and cops take the side of the rebels.
I think the main requirement is for American workers to get past the partisan BS they're bombarded with every day: liberals vs. conservatives, Democrats vs. Republicans. More and more people are aware that these differences are largely cosmetic, that the same interest groups rule behind the scenes. But it's difficult to get out of that tribal mentality, which is boosted during election years.
While I have faith in the American working class, I'm also aware that the ruling elite in the United States is brilliant in the way it manipulates information for its own purposes. There's nothing they excel at like divide-and-conquer tactics, and it would be only too easy for them to split a movement that wasn't strongly unified around a clear goal (as the Egyptian revolutionaries were united by their desire to get rid of Mubarak).
If a genuine progressive government ever attained power, I wouldn't put it past reactionary elements to resort to the same brutal methods they used against Allende in Chile, 1973, or to start a civil war, as the White Russians did. But does that hostility from the ruling classes mean we shouldn't even try?
The current government has been handling the resentment of it better than the monarchy did. Yes we have more regulation and an erosion of rights today but we havent had a Boston Massacre type of situation. Now you can argue that the Massacre was one in name only but the propagandists made it more than that. No federal troops have opened fire on protesters. However, if they did, then you might see something.
There was a lot of anger when Scott Olsen, the Iraq vet, suffered a fractured skull in Oakland when domestic police fired a gas canister at his face. But having the police actually kill a protester would create a wave of anger like nothing else, since the death of a protester creates a martyr for people to unify around (two words: Mohamed Bouazizi).
When the National Guard shot and killed four students at Kent State in 1970, for example, it led to a wave of student strikes involving hundreds of schools closing down and four million students.
Many people still believe that they have a say. They always think that the next guy will be better, as I said.
The question is, how much longer will they be willing to believe that?
We like stability. We dont want to be like Tunisia and Egypt.
Everybody likes stability. Revolutions are messy, exhausting affairs. People just want to be able to live and work, have a good standard of living, spend time with their friends and families, and be happy.
But sometimes they can't have that stability they crave, and that's the situation in America today. How much stability can there be when 1 in every 5 Americans are unemployed? People are losing their homes, they're losing their jobs, they're going bankrupt trying to pay medical bills. Seniors are finding their Social Security or Medicare cut. Environmental disasters like in the Gulf of Mexico destroy people's livelihoods while the government protects the perpetrators. Public services, like schools, libraries, parks, are having their funds cut. Students are going thousands and thousands of dollars into debt for tuition only to graduate and find out there are no jobs. One of the only avenues for employment is the military, and new recruits don't experience a lot of stability when they're uprooted from their homes, sent overseas for six months (putting an immense strain on marriages), occupy foreign countries with hostile locals, and suffer the constant risk of death or lifelong injury.
This is a giant cluster****, and it's the reason people are talking about revolution at all, because for most people in today's America there is no stability. You might find it helpful to read Leon Trotsky's definition of revolution, from his
History of the Russian Revolution:
"The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct interference of the masses in historical events. In ordinary times the state, be it monarchical or democratic, elevates itself above the nation, and history is made by specialists in that line of business - kings, ministers, bureaucrats, parliamentarians, journalists. But at those crucial moments when the old order becomes no longer endurable to the masses, they break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, sweep aside their traditional representatives, and create by their own interference the initial groundwork for a new régime. Whether this is good or bad we leave to the judgement of moralists. We ourselves will take the facts as they are given by the objective course of development. The history of a revolution is for us first of all a history of the forcible entrance of the masses into the realm of rulership over their own destiny." 
