Ignore all the suffering in the world and just abuse my white privilege to have a trophy wife who secretly hates me and a middle management job at Amaz*n or some corporate firm where I "put the papers on Johnson's desk by Friday" and flirt with my secretary all day long.
Like just imagine how blissfully happy you'd be if you could ignore the inherent evil that exists in all facets of modern life and the only time you feel motivated to do anything is to "vote blue no matter who" once every 4 years just so you can pretend that you've made a difference.
This sounds plausible. Some more anecdotal evidence:
I recall overhearing one of my roommates (who was normally very chill) on election night in another room punching the wall, grunting in anger or something to that effect in anger over Trump winning. He was also probably a little drunk, at least a couple beers in.
The mood on my campus for the next few months was that almost everyone around was suddenly extremely depressed and/or horrified (not to mention the numerous undergrads and grad students on visas rationally terrified of getting deported) and I felt like an asshole (in retrospect, I was for not giving enough weight to some of their valid concerns) for feeling mostly okay with the outcome because I was one of those ex-Bernie libs with a social-chauvinist half-developed class consciousness who hated Clinton and the Dems more than Trump, and was quietly thrilled to see her lose.
There was a gathering of students in one of the popular gathering spaces soon after the election that felt like a fucking funeral. One of them came up to me while I was lurking in the periphery to observe, and hugged me unprompted in a naive attempt to console me while people were trying to comfort each other because she thought I was mourning their loss.
Thanks, I hate it.
I always thought, looking in from the outside, people did the whole "not my president cause he's a meanie" and then just went on with their lives. Is the whole "caring a great deal about it, not doing anything about it though" thing seriously this common in the US?
It's pretty much the ideal mental state to drive consumption and online engagement: many of the people here are basically fear batteries out of which profit is extracted.
Very common. Many genuine and naive progressives are politically paralyzed helpless spectators who don't know the first thing about grassroots organizing. Because they've been conditioned to do nothing but :vote: every two years and pour all their political energy into elections, preparing for elections, and if they're smart enough, attempting (often in vain) to pressure their elected officials to do the right thing, only to be ignored a lot of the time unless actual effective organizers are backing them up.
This makes it all the more important for socialists to demonstrate to the US working class and well-meaning progressives that a genuine political alternative to the two capitalist parties is possible.
It also doesn't help that Americans are deliberately conditioned to have really short political memories. Ask the average American about the history of the labor movement and you'll get almost nothing other than "unions gave us the 40 hour workweek". That shit is buried along with all the genocidal atrocities and lynchings. It's only been over the course of the past decade that US workers have begun to recover from their historical amnesia, which thankfully remains well-preserved by both academic historians and by working-class organizations.