This post yesterday, about a protest by delivery workers at a Manhattan restaurant, has had me thinking ever since I read it.  My thought is this: I notice that activism is far more widespread and deep-rooted in the US than it is here in the UK, and I wonder why that should be.  

On the one hand, the US is a country where excesses of free-market capitalism, like the absence of universal, affordable healthcare, are tolerated; where people see nothing unusual with only being allowed a couple of weeks’ paid leave each year; and where the McCain/Palin ticket can command a substantial minority of the popular vote after eight years of the Cheney administration.

Yet on the other hand, I noticed on my last visit to the US a couple of years ago (admittedly to San Francisco, which Palin would have regarded as hardly part of the union at all), a sense that the abuses of the Bush/Cheney regime were not being taken lying down.  There were books on impeachment in city-centre bookshops, and union activists handing out leaflets outside a shopping mall on Market Street, protesting about one of the stores inside.  Both were and are almost unimaginable in the UK: talk of prosecuting Tony Blair for the illegal invasion of Iraq is confined to a smattering of blogs and microscopic political gatherings, and I cannot remember the last time I saw union activists out in public, other than as part of a large-scale demonstration.

Culture clearly has something to do with it, of course.  The tradition of civic engagement and grassroots activism still runs deep in the US; my dashboard here on Tumblr tells of people like Dan and bunnynico getting up, and getting out, and doing stuff, whether it’s getting out the vote, helping out at polling stations, or voluntary work.  

But there seems to be more than culture going on.  While I remain deeply sceptical that the incoming administration represents any kind of substantial change, there’s no question that the composition of the Obama vote suggests a significant working-class “verdict on the great economic questions of the last few decades.”

Could the reason for this be as simple as the idea that, if you kick people hard and often enough, eventually they react?