The mystery in modern America, however, is how a *minority* discovered it can vote itself largess (or rather, buy the politicians who will do so). At a certain point, the pitchforks come out.
Nick Hanauer's tongue in check letter to "fellow zillionaires" (his :
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014Our country is rapidly becoming less a capitalist society and more a feudal society. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.
Imagine a snowpack on a slope. A foot of snow falls, and the pack adjusts. An inch falls, and the pack adjusts. And then the snowpack has done all available adjustment. A snowflake falls, and the snowpack lets loose in an avalanche. People say, "nobody could have predicted that a single snowflake would trigger an avalanche," which is true. But they could predict that the first foot of snow had made the slope unstable.
That is basically the pattern with the unrest in Hong Kong, the unrest in Chile, Arab Spring, the French Revolution, the English Civil War, etc. Sometimes it fizzles, sometimes it doesn't. I do not want to see one of the events that doesn't fizzle happen in my country during my lifetime.