You guys talking long term. Turn off the EBT for 5 days and watch what happens. Summer of Love will be Woodstock moment compared to that.
I'm not so sure I agree with that.
When we consider that the average American is obese and the USA is one of the few nations where the poor underclass is not only not emaciated and malnourished to the point of always being on the brink of starvation [think historical underclasses which were usually bone thin and often close to death from lack of food], but rather is obese.
A society of obese low testosterone men is unlikely to rampage. Peasant revolts have never really succeeded, they always need elite assistance. A society only experiences a radical cultural and political shift if the elite side against the society [Western Roman Empire] or if the elite are decapitated in a coup/civil war and replaced with a new elite holding a new vision [Bolshevik Russia, French Revolution, etc].
In the early and middle Roman Republic the masses would promptly hang any politician who promised to provide them money from the national treasury or who offered the masses games or celebrations at the expense of the treasury. The masses (rightly) saw this as bribery and theft of the common money which was held in trust for genuine national emergencies such as war or famine or the financing of important national infrastructure to be used by all for commerce and travel. The idea of a politician offering to finance games from the national treasury was so disgusting to the Roman people that they would promptly kill any who dared to suggest such a use of the treasury money.
Compare with the late Republic and the Empire where riots erupted if the leaders didn't offer to squander enough money on trivial games for the masses.
Tacitus once remarked that in his era, true Roman virtue was gone and that there was a certain sense of resignation in Rome to the fact that Romans realized it was once a better society and that that society was gone and not coming back.
Cassius Dio [Imperial period, late 2nd to early 3rd century] would later articulate similar sentiment.
A number of prominent Roman statesmen in that era wrote that Roman women were the most selfish and materialistic women in the known world and that they were frivolous and vapid. They were renowned for refusing to have children to the point that Rome faced a demographic crisis and didn't have enough Romans or Italians to adequately staff the Roman Army. German mercenaries were frequently used. Many elite Roman men who wanted children and wanted virtuous wives had to get a dispensation from the Emperor to marry a German woman since such marriages were generally illegal.
The Roman Army (Western Roman Empire) of the 4th and 5th centuries [AD] was overwhelming Germanic (if not at least majority Germanic) in its composition, often being Foederati serving directly under the command of their Germanic chieftains who nominally answered to higher Roman authority. The US Armed Forces are still overwhelmingly people who identify with the USA and see themselves as Americans.
Despite Alaric sacking Rome in 410 and Odoacer deposing Romulus Augustulus in 476 and essentially ending the Western Roman Empire, the Germanic bandit kings popping up all across Gaul and the Italian peninsula continued to use Roman titles and engage in Roman ceremonies. It wasn't until the late 500s and early 600s when their demographic position was strong enough that they changed laws and simply ejected middle class Romans from their modest or moderately significant land holdings, often working in concert with Roman elites who threw their own kind under the bus to ingratiate themselves with the Germanics who were the new demographic and military power in Western Europe.
At this point the Roman middle class and lower class (former) land owners were essentially screwed as they had no way to mount meaningful opposition to what was being done to them.
It ultimately doesn't matter what destitute peasants in an urban ghetto do, they are really not relevant. The average person is not relevant, their opinions do not matter, and they don't participate in revolutionary activity. It really only matters what a handful of elites and their immediate retinues/retainers do.
Fifty thousand farmers with pitchforks in 4th century Rome wouldn't amount to a hill of beans.
I will say that the main improvement the USA has made over Rome, particularly the Late Republic and middle Imperial systems, we have extreme civilian control over the military and we do not have a system that allows a general to stay in command for 8-10 years and gain the personal loyalty of 40,000 soldiers while also having the financial prospects of the soldiers tied to their service to the general. We don't have a system conducive for Sulla or Julius Caesar to lead their legions to march on the capital. We are unlikely to have that sort of instability going forward, but we will experience many problems similar to Late Republican Rome.
The elite in the USA are broadly comprised of two specific categories. The remnant of the traditional American elite, and a new elite which is a rootless international class that has no loyalty to any particular nation and is simply loyal to their own elite clique regardless of national boundaries. We might very well refer to them as "globalist elite bankers" as they tend to despise agriculture and industry unless it is owning and controlling those things, while focusing almost exclusively on finance and banking.
The most likely scenario, barring a civil war, revolution, world war, or nuclear war [noting that those four things are NOT mutually exclusive and may all happen in some sequence] is that the USA will continue to decline, a major demographic transition will occur, and the day will come when land deeds in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California are simply invalidated as part of "viva la revolucion!" with the old flags coming down and new flags going up, with similar things happening across the country.
