Millennials and Gen Z have largely given up. Occupy Wall Street did nothing; BLM did nothing; Trump was re-elected after his first term. It feels hopeless.
People are socially isolated. Most interactions happen on private social media platforms where people have been conditioned to filter their responses to not upset arbitrary algorithms, or future educational institutions, or future employers. The Luigi Mangione discourse caused people to break from that, but look at how YouTube and Reddit wrangled that discussion down. And that was just praising a shooting that already happened.
Most important: Years of hearing praise for government policy and legal means of change has left most Americans paralyzed when those systems are failing. We were raised on Martin Luther King Jr. without mention of Malcom X. We were told to "protest and rally" for change - period. No one explained the unspoken threat behind protests - of the force of 20,000 or 40,000 or however-many angry people. And those in power know that. Every modern protest and rally at most threatens to not re-elect the current politicians, and the Republicans have made it clear they don't plan on honoring that election.
