The American liberal, faced with this reality, tends to concede that truth is in fact drowned out by a relentless tide of spin and propaganda. Their next move is always predictable, however. It’s another lesson dutifully drilled into them in their youth: “At least we can dissent, however unpopular and ineffectual!” The reality, of course, is that such dissent is tolerated to the extent that it is unpopular.

Big-shot TV host Phil Donahue demonstrated that challenging imperial marching orders in the context of the invasion of Iraq was career suicide, when a leaked memo clearly explained he was fired in 2003 because he’d be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” [5] The fate of journalists unprotected by such wealth or celebrity is darker and sadder. Ramsey Orta, whose footage of Eric Garner pleading “I can’t breathe!” to NYPD cops choking him to death went viral, was rewarded for his impactful citizen journalism by having his family targeted by the cops, fast-tracked to prison for unrelated crimes, and fed rat poison while in there. [6] The only casualty of the spectacular “Panama Papers” leak was Daphne Caruana Galizia, the journalist who led the investigation, who was assassinated with a car-bomb near her home in Malta. [7] Then there’s the well-publicized cases of Assange, Snowden, Manning, etc. That said, I tend think to such lists are somewhat unnecessary since, ultimately, most honest people confess that they self-censor on social media for fear of consequences. (Do you?)

In other words, the status quo in the West is basically as follows: you can say whatever you want, so long as it doesn’t actually have any effect.

from https://redsails.org/brainwashing/

Because you get to vote for which politician will serve the ruling class

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Because at least they're allowed freeze peach unlike those evil communist dictatorships

They're convinced people in other countries are executed on sight for violating speech laws. My old manager was convinced that America was the only nation on earth that has a "peaceful transition" of power.

They also think democracy works by convincing people to vote in certain ways and then there's a mediated agreement to enact policies based on popular consent and nothing else. They think ideas are magical and America could actually vote its way into being socialist.

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This is a common line around liberals that champion the liberal democratic system: "look at all the things we can do so long as we pose no threat to the ruling class". They carefully curate a subset of activities that count as freedom and democracy and enforce it through owning basically all of the media and political thought in their countries.

Part of this psychology is to celebrate that subset of liberal freedoms. This creates a civil religion, particularly for the state and ruling class (cults of capitalism and VOOOOTING in the US right this second!), and also serves to create an outgroup (everyone that allegedly doesn't have those things) to pity and to target for death for threatening the ones the good liberals have.

Examples of things they celebrate that are similar to "hating the government":

• Voting - even when the "bad guys" win, though usually it acts as a form of catharsis despite having little to rare impact on the important changes in their lives.

• Protests, at first recuperating radical marches into liberal parades, now the liberal parades are all they can imagine and all that happen.

• In the US, gun ownership and brandishing. The conflation of freedom and weaponry growing out of a deliberate political campaign to reinterpret the US Constitution is now an appeal to the "original" vision of the republic, lol.

• A vague hatred of politicians, which sure, the system promotes corrupt sociopaths, but also, liberals themselves actively embrace and defend that system.

Actually all of these are a false catharsis, a way to feel like you're doing something to fight the baddies in power while using the weakest forms of pushback we can imagine. There is no, "this is what needs to change, this is what we think it takes to get it on this timeline, now let's do it and evaluate whether it worked ". Which is to say, nothing that takes our problems seriously.

You can protest if you don't like the government. It won't do anything, but at least you'll feel better.

bc they're brainwashed

Death to America

There is an insightful passage in " There never was a west " by Graeber:

I would add that even the most impressive accomplishments of the liberal state, its most genuinely democratic elements—for instance, its guarantees on freedom of speech and freedom of assembly—are premised on such agoraphobia. It is only once it becomes absolutely clear that public speech and assembly is no longer itself the medium of political decision-making, but at best an attempt to criticize, influence, or make suggestions to political decision-makers, that they can be treated as sacrosanct. Critically, this agoraphobia is not just shared by politicians and professional journalists, but in large measure by the public itself. The reasons, I think, are not far to seek. While liberal democracies lack anything resembling the Athenian agora, they certainly do not lack equivalents to Roman circuses. The ugly mirror phenomenon, by which ruling elites encourage forms of popular participation that continually remind the public just how much they are unfit to rule, seems, in many modern states, to have been brought to a condition of unprecedented perfection. Consider here, for example, the view of human nature one might derive generalizing from the experience of driving to work on the highway, as opposed to the view one might derive from the experience of public transportation. Yet the American—or German—love affair with the car was the result of conscious policy decisions by political and corporate elites beginning in the 1930s. One could write a similar history of the television, or consumerism, or, as Polanyi long ago noted, “the market ”.

I think his point is that the western cultural ideology promotes the "ugliness" of the mob/rubble/crowds. So the various freedoms the state grants are predicated on the fact that they should not directly translate to political consequences (but only indirectly, via votes or protests). The freedoms remain "individual", and so sterile, and this is seen as positive in "liberal democracies".