[redisman]

The supremely naive "end of history"-era thinking has a lot of inertia. Now it's unclear who's left to fight for Democracy as the old champions are all dead and current generations have no concept of what that would even mean since they've just been reaping the rewards their whole lives.

[Zarath]

I'd be willing to bet money that young people are the most represented group at these protests.

[authoritarian]

Ah yes, all us youngings reaping the rewards of those that have come before us. Insane housing and real estate prices that few can afford, insane university tuition that few can afford, the pharmaceutical industry pushing dangerous drugs with impunity, the war on drugs costing trillions of dollars and leading to the militarization of police and a massive amount of incarcerated non-violent offenders, the destruction of the environment being covered up and lobbied for by massive oil and gas corporations, social security being depleted before I'll ever get to utilize it, huge downturns in the economy caused by irresponsible spending and lending, and countless other "rewards" from the older generations that we now have to fix while simultaneously getting whined at about how we're all lazy slackers that are really causing the downfall of society. I don't buy into the "end of history" thinking, but it is incredible how many people take no responsibility for things that happened during their life time and completely ignore all of the extreme negative impacts those had on younger generations and society as a whole

[ethbro]

And what have we done about that? I'm technically Gen Y, and I'll be the first to admit that with regards to protesting my generation seems:

- Uninformed

- Undisciplined

- Lazy

- Uncoordinated

People were self-organizing large civil society organizations and marching through clouds of tear gas and worse in the 1960-90s... and yet this current generation seems to think that posting a rant on Facebook is valuable?

Incoherent, naive anger is useless.

[rjbwork]

Most of us just don't think we CAN do anything. It seems the world is run by the rich for the rich. We vote but we don't feel that anything we can do actually will effect any change.

[ethbro]

One could make the argument that wealth inequality is higher than it was in previous eras.

But there's always been a major disparity between capital owners and everyone else. Even in the 60s. And certainly at the turn of the century (1850-1920), when US antitrust law was actually first created.

So maybe media centralization? But the 1960s featured a limited number of media channels controlled by a few owners (albeit with some paragons of objective, journalistic integrity). And the turn of the century was the heyday of centralized newspaper control.

I'm honestly casting about for an external why and am hard-pressed to enunciate a coherent narrative.

And in lieu of one, the only thing that's left are that people simply aren't actively protesting.

Whether they're making that choice because of hopelessness or laziness, I don't really care. Because ultimately, it's a choice.

Make the other one.

(And it seems we might finally be, with regards to climate)

[Zarath]

And what did marching through tear gas give us? More interventionism in South America and... Ronald Reagan?

[ethbro]

De facto voting rights for African Americans, desegregation, and women's rights to control their own bodies.

[HappySweeney]

They have de jure voting; de facto kinda not really.

[ethbro]

Compared to the 50s and 60s?

[redisman]

The end of history claimed that basically all countries will turn to liberal democracy once they see how awesome it is. You can look at China to see how well that worked out. It doesn't really have much to do with US internal policies.