Why Is There No Violent Yellow Vest Uprising in America?

Widespread social violence, extreme income inequality, and rage at perceived injustice are the classical indicators of the onset of political rebellion.

By the indicators that are commonly used to predict violent political insurrection, America, rather than France, should have been the first to erupt into widespread street protests and rebellion. There are factors at work that aren’t being taken into consideration in the standard model, as will be explained, below.

“Mouvement des gilets jaunes” – FRANCE, 2018


AMERICAN “RESISTANCE”, 2018

Violent Crime is Often a Form of Pre-political Rage.

America is among the most enraged societies as measured by murders and other forms of violent assault and destruction. In large part, that is because there are few public outlets in American society — political mass movements, militant labor unions, revolutionary parties — to channel and organize mass frustration and feelings of relative deprivation: https://eand.co/why-is-america-the-rich-worlds-most-ultraviolent-society...

America isn’t just the most violent nation in the industrialized world — but an off the charts extreme outlier. Iceland is the world’s most peaceful society. Canada is the world’s 7th most peaceful society. America is the 94th.

You could even argue that America’s one of the world’s most violent societies, period, rich or poor. It’s 94 out of 160 — of which the last forty or are barely hanging on as [functioning] societies. It’s developed unique and weird forms of soft and hard violence, like school shootings, opioid epidemics, people dying of a lack of insulin or basic medicine. Meanwhile, murder, domestic violence . . .

America is not only one of the most violent, it is also the most unequal in terms of income distribution in the developed world. Social inequality is highly correlated with murder and homicide.

Economic inequality predicts homicide rates ‘better than any other variable’ – and it is linked to festering feelings of status anxiety. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/08/income-inequality-murder...

But, If Rage and Inequality, Alone, Caused Revolutions, America Would have Burned Down D.C. Long Ago

So, how is it that America, despite its extremely high levels of inequality and social violence, hasn’t already exploded into political violence? I can count five quick reasons:

1. Effective Pacification and Police Measures

One reason is that America is, and long has been, one of the world’s most efficient police states. Repression is effective and barely even remarked upon when a society has been systematically pacified.

For more than a century, the federal government has operated a highly effective political police force, the FBI, and all large cities maintain their own Red Squads. Since 9/11, universal surveillance and political profiling of “extremists” by DHS has been a fact of life in America under the guise of counter-terrorism.

Americans are long used to dealing with threats and rebellions through application of overwhelming violence. The United States was founded in the wholesale extermination of a large indigenous population, and much of the infrastructure during its first century was built by racial slave labor. The American Civil War was the first modern war employing industrial methods of mass slaughter. To this day, we also maintain the highest incarceration rates of any western country, are one of the last to still employ the death penalty, and our prison sentences are the longest in the world, disproportionately targeted poor, young minority offenders. We are consistent – from chains to chains, and would not know what to do without them.

2. Indoctrination for Conformity

Americans are also intensively indoctrinated to be politically docile and conformist. From infancy, the population is subjected to psychological conditioning through the mass media and schooling that socially stigmatizes political activities and thought construed to be outside the mainstream. By world standards, that is a very narrow channel, as is often observed from the outside. American public school systems systematically omit material about U.S. history and society deemed “controversial” or “political”, particularly materials dealing sympathetically (or even-handedly) with uprisings and rebellions. We are conditioned to be politically passive and most Americans, indeed, are reliably regimented and obedient toward authority.

3. Lack of Real Politics Outside a 2-Party System

Another major difference between American politics and most of the rest of the world is our two-party system. It has long operated to coopt social and class-based movements and channel them toward a center that is dominated by entrenched institutional powers. In America, centrist politics is all about money. We are virtually alone in western countries in the stubborn refusal of a Rightwing judiciary to permit regulation of political campaign contributions and the political domination of government by corporate money.

4. Alienation from Genuine Shared Outrage

Lacking all but the most tepid, coopted and superficial political outlets, Americans, more than any other society, are alienated from our own emotions of political alienation by the massively organized organs of anomie — the entertainment industry, digital small screen communication, and apolitical or corporate managed social media. As has been observed for over a century by social theorists going back to Emile Durkheim, mass communications and conditions of work keep us physically and psychologically separate from others, splintered, distracted, immersed in a synthetic reality without ethical norms and traditional forms of human interaction. While FaceBook and Twitter provide illusions of immediate access to community, modern communications actually operate to divide and atomize individuals, hindering political organization from below, preventing effective expression of grievance.

As managed by media corporations, outrage drowns itself out through “news” and opinion immersion. For grass-roots political mobilization, Fox and MSNBC aren’t sedatives, they are what William Gibson termed Information Poison. Information processing “overload” leads to political alienation, stress and powerlessness (Geyer, 1996). Corporate political media use up and misdirect political rage into carefully channeled “safe” avenues such as major party electoral campaigns and meaningless crusades such as “Put Jesus Back in Christmas”, #The Resistance, and the Russia!Russia!Russia! scandal. Altogether, grass-roots political energy is misdirected and dispersed by the most “political” forms of corporate media. That point is alluded to, but not altogether pulled together in a recent Atlantic article, which observes: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/charles-duhigg-amer...

In 2009, a Tufts University study of opinion media found that “100 percent of TV episodes and 98.8 percent of talk radio programs contained outrage.” On MSNBC, commentators such as Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow found ratings success by playing on their viewers’ discontent, even if they stopped short of borrowing O’Reilly’s most demagogic tactics. In 2012, Bill Clinton ruefully observed that the network had become “our version of Fox.” Later that year, the Pew Research Center found that MSNBC devoted 85 percent of its programming to opinion, and just 15 percent to news. At Fox, the split was 55/45.

The method at both networks was, and is, to tap into our reservoirs of moral indignation. But the point isn’t to start a social movement or really even to effect political change, though the programming on Fox News and MSNBC does have political consequences. The point is to keep viewers tuned in, which means keeping them angry all the time. No reconciliation, no catharsis, no compromise.

The more recent rise of social media has only further inflamed our emotions. Facebook and Twitter don’t create content; they’ve outsourced that work to their users, who have quickly noticed that extreme statements attract more attention. On social media, the old rewards of anger—recognition of our unhappiness, resolution of our complaints—are replaced with new ones: retweets, likes, more followers, more influence. The targets of our rage, meanwhile, tend to be strangers less inclined to hear us out than to fire back. It’s a vicious cycle for users, though a virtuous one for the social-media companies, which profit from our engagement.

5. Social Insecurity and Overwork Make Americans Less Likely to Take Political Action

While we are overwhelmed by rage, America’s anger has been engineered to self-destruct or is simply channeled into small echo chambers and harmlessly dispersed. Yet another factor that makes America different and more passive is that we are the most socially insecure and overworked people in the western world. No doubt, working people who are either so overworked that they can’t be away from the job, or so terrified they might lose their employer-supplemented health care if they are arrested, are less likely to take to the streets.

Americans are also more saddled with debt, on average, earlier in life than any others. For some, the calculus to rebel comes down to the question: How will I pay my student loan this month if I’m in jail?

Finally, there has been few signs of a “revolution of rising expectations” in America since the Great Society era of the 1960s ended. Unlike France and other European social democracies, the state never delivered much in America. Expectations haven’t risen, hence no revolution. The closely related “relative deprivation” theory of Ted Gurr (1970) instructed that what triggers rebellions isn’t so much the reality of deprivation, but the perceived discrepancy in what people think they should achieve and what they do achieve. The French Yellow Vest uprising comes at a time when the upward movement in living conditions are being cut-back by Macron’s austerity, just as would be predicted by the “J-Curve”, which was central to James C. Davies (1962) rising expectations theory of revolution. Americans are habituated to demand less, hence we are less likely to rebel when expectations are frustrated.

Those are five reasons why France, not America, has a Yellow Vest uprising and there are little or no signs that will spread to this side of the Atlantic. There are doubtless more.

The easiest explanation may be that authoritarian institutions and fascism are so deeply ingrained in the depoliticized American experience that few of us even are aware of it or feel much one way or the other about it. The question then becomes, what would it take to make a typical 20-Something American lift his nose up from the I-Phone screen where he is checking his credit score for the third time this week?

Share
up
0 users have voted.

Comments

repeal of inequitable laws is the both the right and requirement of the citizenry. People are beginning to cotton to the notion. Other nations recognize the imperative to rebel against the neo-lib agenda. US is beginning to catch on.

up
0 users have voted.
thanatokephaloides's picture

Finally, there has been few signs of a “revolution of rising expectations” in America since the Great Society era of the 1960s ended. Unlike France and other European social democracies, the state never delivered much in America. Expectations haven’t risen, hence no revolution.

And the idea, hammered into our heads from childhood, that we American working class people have it as good as it can be, doesn't help. The French working classes, who really did have it as good as it can be, are royally pissed off at Macron's taking it away from them.

The lack of any real Left in the USA today doesn't help, either. I'm a child of the 1950's; I remember the politics of the 1970s with great fondness. By today's terms, Richard Nixon would be a "leftist" Democrat, and a politician advocating the centrist policies of a Hubert Humphrey would be regarded as a flaming Communist.

We really do need to cast off the chains of this disgusting conservatism.

The question then becomes, what would it take to make a typical 20-Something American lift his nose up from the I-Phone screen where he is checking his credit score for the third time this week?

It's coming. When enough of those 20-Somethings can't get those decent credit scores no matter what they do, because there's not enough after their student loan payments to live on much less save, we'll see the Yellow Vests come out in earnest here.

up
0 users have voted.

"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

k9disc's picture

media masturbation.

It's quite long, but quite lucid and on point when it comes Social Media and Social Controls. It kind of frightened me, to tell you the truth. A bit too close to my understanding with some thoughtful insight on the ramifications of these changes due to corporate, spy, and military perception management.
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmXcjvL9VSc]

He sees, essentially, 2 species developing, although he doesn't come out and say it. 2B will be social media users, 5B will abstain. The changes in social norms due to brain plasticity will create two distinct intellects on the planet; Vaknin suggests for the first time.

This homo sapiens-sapiens and homo sapiens-technologus concept and the idea that social media is weaponized envy are two sharp observations of our current hell in a hand-basket reality. It's really creepy shit.

up
0 users have voted.

“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

janis b's picture

@k9disc @k9disc

My mind is spinning from just the first eight minutes.

Paraphrased: “Are you using social media or not? … Because social media has a massive effect on psychology … This I think is the first time of massive engineering of psychology … All social media was invented by men, schizoid and socially inept. ……”

Thank you for this powerful video of insight, which seems to encompass and address issues and concepts I can only ingest in small segments.

It is frightening.

up
0 users have voted.
Deja's picture

@k9disc
I'm just under 20 minutes in, and I'm thinking I should post the video on my Facebook page as a sort of GBCW, and gtfo of there. I never feel good after going on FB anyway, always feel bad or even mad, and that's why I haven't been on in months.

Thanks for the video. I'm sharing it with my kids for sure. I hope my daughter doesn't stop watching after the 'gay men created fashion industry and boyish figure as the norm' thing. She has a long standing hatred of her curvy body, but is also a huge LBGT advocate. It could go either way with her. Crossing my fingers!

up
0 users have voted.
Daenerys's picture

@k9disc

up
0 users have voted.

This shit is bananas.

Wink's picture

too busy trying to make ends meet, they don't have the time or energy to wear yellow vests. And the rest of us just aren't uncomfortable enough yet to feel the need to put one on.

up
0 users have voted.

the little things you can do are more valuable than the giant things you can't! - @thanatokephaloides. On Twitter @wink1radio. (-2.1) All about building progressive media.

snoopydawg's picture

How cool is this? Now if the cops would join too they'd have themselves a revolution.

up
0 users have voted.

Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

WaterLily's picture

@snoopydawg Please make it so.

up
0 users have voted.
SnappleBC's picture

The answer to that is simple. They don't need to "look up and see anything". They knew all this long before I did. They just don't feel they can do anything about it so their strategy is to dog paddle faster than the people around them and try to ride it out.

By the way, awesome article. Thanks.

up
0 users have voted.

A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard

Good observations and gathered reasons for why we in the US are who we are despite our "exceptionalism". Thanks for taking the time to muse on this conundrum on why we aren't in the streets as well.

I should add too that the 20-somethings that you know apparently don't overlap very much with those that I know.

The question then becomes, what would it take to make a typical 20-Something American lift his nose up from the I-Phone screen where he is checking his credit score for the third time this week?

The young adults I know are in fact the *only* ones that I expect to be out in the streets if anything serious as to protests goes down. The kids are all right. And, the ones that I know are not checking their fucking credit report. Ever. It wouldn't make any sense for them to think of it. They are living paycheck to paycheck, paying exorbitant rents, and are in debt from college. These young people are way more likely to put on a yellow vest and get out in the streets than anyone over 40 that I know. Most of my peers (45-65) are way to comfortable or satisfied with the status quo to even think of protesting. If they do, it is really not a protest, but more of a short social rally. 10:30-noon on a Saturday, with a short walk and a few speeches, then back home to pat themselves on the back.

I'm sorry to be so negative about your work. I was good on everything, really good, until that last sentence. It apparently elicited a bit of a momma bear response. Thank you again for all that came before.

up
0 users have voted.
thanatokephaloides's picture

@peachcreek

The young adults I know are in fact the *only* ones that I expect to be out in the streets if anything serious as to protests goes down. The kids are all right. And, the ones that I know are not checking their fucking credit report. Ever. It wouldn't make any sense for them to think of it. They are living paycheck to paycheck, paying exorbitant rents, and are in debt from college. These young people are way more likely to put on a yellow vest and get out in the streets than anyone over 40 that I know. Most of my peers (45-65) are way to comfortable or satisfied with the status quo to even think of protesting. If they do, it is really not a protest, but more of a short social rally. 10:30-noon on a Saturday, with a short walk and a few speeches, then back home to pat themselves on the back.

I acknowledge the truth in this (see my last Comment in this thread), but most of my peers are also living paycheck to paycheck, paying exorbitant rents, and are in permanent college debt. Why the F aren't they getting out there and making trouble? I think Wink got it right: they

are too busy trying to make ends meet, they don't have the time or energy to wear yellow vests.

I still say it's coming, even here. Push will come to shove......

up
0 users have voted.

"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar

"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides

@peachcreek @peachcreek
The point isn't that the 19-29 group is any less idealistic than their elders. I too have a kid that age and know that they are every bit as genuinely engaged with the world, or more so, than I was at that point in my life. It's an effort to explain why Americans lag behind the French in rebellion, and why some of the standard theories of revolutionary mobilization potential seem to more adequately describe the situation in this country than others.

While I didn't have room in this article to go into the full range of literature (most theory since the 1990s has focused on structural reasons, such as population and prices, in trying to explain why people rebel), I do think that the psychological environment in America is less conducive to the expression of demands for radical change than elsewhere in the western countries.

A lot of that has to do with conditions of economic insecurity, as well as a political and media environment that is more dominated by large corporate interests. Those who have the most reason to be rebelling aren't, and I believe the major reason for that is exhaustion and Americans simply don't believe the political process is going to be responsive to protest expressions of demand for change from below.

Americans who have the greatest reasons to rebel don't. The reason and psychological mechanism for political disempowerment of non-elites has been understood for a long time. Alienation in the sense of a lack of power has been technically defined by Melvin Seeman (1959) as "the expectancy or probability held by the individual that his own behaviour cannot determine the occurrence of the outcomes, or reinforcements, he seeks."

Politics and society in America is simply so broken that even mass, nationwide demonstrations of the lower-middle class with symbolic property damage won't change things. It's going to take something even more disruptive.

up
0 users have voted.
Creosote.'s picture

@leveymg
I've thought a lot about Greta Thunberg, not only about her life, actions, and statements, but from the perspective that any full-scale or even hidden surveillance or violence directed toward these much younger people who respect her would immediately affect their parents -- and that would reveal too much.

One thing the mobile/net culture, with only a few exceptions, makes very clear is the pervasive surveillance we now experience. That's why I read and sometimes post here -- because in my real life I know almost no one who would consider thinking seriously about our situation.

I was reading Kierkegaard when I was at university, not on assignment but from my own curiosity and hunger for vision. And Conrad. In the many intervening decades I still haven't been able to find myself speaking in real life to a person who has a similar history and maintained it.

[edited to fix typos]

up
0 users have voted.