A hypothesis on American atrophy

Obviously due to recent events [both epstein files and iran war], posts discussing why Americans haven't been more active in trying to stop all of this have been recirculating

I'm going to offer an alternative explanation given what I've seen both personally psychologically and also what makes sense. I dislike answers which are just "they're stupid lol," they're uncreative and unexplanatory.

There's this phenomenon teens can go through, which I went through, where instead of fighting back they essentially shut down into survival mode. With normal parents, or those teens perceive as normal parents, they will have a tendency to rebel, slam their doors, etc. They'll be angry and make it known, because they want the parent to change whatever is upsetting them [I know portraying the state as a parent is a common right wing point, that's not my intention in this case].

However, with emotionally abusive or negligent parents, teens will do something else. They'll essentially not do anything besides the bare minimum. As long as they aren't being actively beaten, they'll just go through their day and not interact with their parents more than they have to. They won't cry or scream or demand xyz, they simply live. It looks obedient, but they're actually just trying to keep their head down because they know that fighting back makes things worse.

So my hypothesis is that Americans are in this sort of state. I've seen a lot of people in my life like this. They don't go out and protest or try to make things change because they think nothing can or nothing will. So they stick their head down and try to live their day to day life.

I feel it makes some sense. Besides the mobilization in Minnesota, the protests against the double murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good didn't have the numbers or intensity of the George Floyd protests in 2020. Why? It's not like Americans have better material conditions now then they did in 2020 [Besides covid, but I'm unsure if that would make it much worse than today]. So why the change? My two explanations are that the democratic party (who had a large hand in the George Floyd protests, to my knowledge) no longer works as a mobilization force as it did before, both because the leadership doesn't want to and because people have lost faith in them, and also my "survival mode" explanation above