Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’

"And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have... (https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm)

There is an infrastructure of fascism (fox, palantir, clearview, heritage foundation, federalist society, Facebook, CPAC, etc.), but the infrastructure of democracy has been hollowed out by people who just want to enrich themselves by stock trading with privileged information. It is not profitable to challenge power, and it is rewarding to submit to authority. Responsibility for the future is a heavy burden, and nobody wants to bear it. Historically it would have been Christianity that taught responsibility, but Christianity was corrupted and co-opted by the GOP.

There is no pro-democracy party in America to coalesce around and support, only the party of "lesser" evil. The democratic party has very few people who vote for them, most of their voters are voting against the GOP, and the democratic party uses that fact to present candidates they and their corporate backers prefer, rather than candidates the American public prefers. Without institutionally legitimate leaders meeting reality and organizing resistance, many Americans feel hopeless. Most politicians are treating everything like business as usual, which makes it very hard to act, because being disobedient to an authoritarian will be punished, regardless of what laws say or what protections you think you have. You might not be punished today, but we now have a permanent digital record of sorts which ensures that the more power they get, the more your disobedience is likely to be remembered and punished.

There is a prevailing understanding here that nobody has any strategy except "hope", but hope is not a strategy, it only compounds the cost of acknowledging reality as it is, which makes it harder to acknowledge reality and act. You can ask politicians at town halls here "what do we do, we have to do something" and they say "make your voice heard," which betrays the politicians own lack of strategy. The insularity of our politicians prevents them from understanding how villainous they look because they look to eachother for support and affirmation, rather than their constituents. This is fuel on the flame of fascism because when Trump says Washington is a swamp, it's very hard to disagree with, especially juxtaposed with democrats rationalizations of their corruption, especially Pelosi and Schumer.

The average American right now is trying to rationalize to themselves why they are safe, that elections will be coming up and that America will right itself, and that just because things are bad now, they will bounce back when we come to our senses. This focus on justifying why you shouldn't freak out has an opportunity cost of strategizing and planning/executing resistance. Hope and denial are more similar than most would like to admit. Being in a state of hope or denial allows you to avoid asking questions you don't want the answer to because the answer might be devastating. It is that very question that might be devastating that creates and empowers the state of denial and failing to ask it makes disaster inevitable.

We have had so much indoctrination about how good democracy is and how we are democratic, and that we are the example democracy, which have given people the sense that there is nothing they have to do, and no responsibility they personally bear if they wish to continue to remain in a democracy. Lessons of how good democracy is were taught instead of lessons on how to support democracy, what the cost of democracy is, or how to maintain democracy because democracy was a foregone conclusion.

The people who pay the most attention are exhausted and "in trauma," while the average person with average media consumption are fueling their own denial and senses of safety because the reality of the situation has not asserted itself against their denial or their news sources, such as local news (nationalized and owned by the rich who are supporting this coup), keep them in the dark.

It is truly an awful thing to accept and understand that if you don't do something, the bad guys are going to win. It's a common saying, that evil wins through the inaction of good men, but actually emotionally acknowledging it and understanding that saying by asking what it means to do something is a horrible horrible thing. Understanding that if you do not do something and that the you in that saying is yourself, and those actions that good men must take so evil doesn't win are your actions, and the risks of those actions challenging the power of evil are your risks... that's quite a thing to confront.

Meanwhile everyone is broke and precarious.

People aren't very willing to risk everything they have just to get brutalized by a cop that will later be acquitted

America's peers as a country are not Europe, Japan, Turkey, but other very large area, very large population countries i.e. Russia, China, Brazil, India.