We are at the end of half a century of destroying the working class and militarizing our police.

With no social safety net, healthcare tied to employment, and at-will employment, there’s no working people able to afford a sustained non violent protest.

Capitalist controlled media has eroded any sense of class consciousness amongst the common people, who are more inclined to be angry about the “theft” of a billionaires pile of gold through taxation, than the everyday theft of the value their labor produces.

There have been many one day protests, large ones, but society has been reshaped to make sustained protests virtually impossible. A captured media landscape and election system insulate politicians from consequences. Together these depress the incentive for non violent protest.

Violent insurrection would be met with a ton of state violence.

People, pretty reasonably, aren’t excited to be beaten, sent off to CECOT, or killed.

And of course, I’ll note the many logistic issues. America is fucking huge, most Americans don’t have $500 to cover an emergency, no one has an extra $500+ to fly across country for a do nothing protest in DC. Protest coverage is met with derision by centrist as “too disruptive” while the right wing n enjoys the snippets of our police state bashing protesters with state sanctioned violence.

So a lot of people do the calculus, spend time, money, and energy to go out into the street to be beaten and maybe disappeared so that nothing will change, and they sit it out.