It's not as if the US government can't do something secretly then declare that it was perfectly legal after they get caught. Just because they don't want to have to go through to trouble of justifying their actions to the public that doesn't mean they must consider their actions inappropriate
History is full of governments overthrown by a dissenting populace. The US itself broke out of the British empire when they didn’t like the government anymore.
If they do something egregious, then people revolt.
> If they do something egregious, then people revolt.
Do you mean something egregious like the mass surveillance of the population, or the mass incarceration of citizens, or widespread theft via civil asset forfeiture, or executions by police, or human experimentation on Americans, or dropping bombs on citizens in US cities, or the military shooting protesting college kids, or lying about weapons of mass destruction to justify wars, or prisoners being tortured, or being subjected to virtual strip searches and groping at airports, or two thirds of the population living in "constitution free zones", or the authorization of the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens, or any of the other many many egregious actions that have already been and/or are still being carried out by our government?
My point is that the threat of revolt is extremely remote. For all of the abuses and the erosion of our rights and freedoms we've had just one attempt at violent insurrection in recent history. It involved about 2,000 rioters motivated by a conspiracy theory and it fell apart very quickly. The threat of a successful revolt is basically zero, and that's actually a good thing. A revolt is highly unlikely to solve the problems that we have. Unfortunately that also means that the threat of revolt is highly unlikely to act as any sort of deterrent that might prevent abuses of power by our government. We're far better off making use of whatever is left of our democracy than trying to re-enact the revolutionary war.
The life of the average american citizen is still really good, even though the rights of some minority populations have been violated.
If we look at the quality of life for american citizens compared to other the quality of life of other nations right before revolution (famously french, russian, chinese), we are not close.
So maybe it's not a good idea to burn it down and start over just yet.
> The threat of a successful revolt is basically zero
That's what they all say. But the US lost the war in vietnam and afghanistan to natives with extremely low tech weapons.
