American apathy is a real thing. People used to love public works and public institutions, then the funds supporting these public good endeavors were slowly slashed and looted in the second half of the 20th century, leading to a lack of maintenance and improvement all while the population was growing.
People look at a destroyed public bathroom and blame society, smirk at how shitty and nonfunctional the government is, and put on their blinders and move on with their lives. People don't look at the bathroom and say "we should hire more public custodians to support our city services." People even vote, and campaign against education funding measures.
We've reached a point where there is so much inertia to improve the smallest things, that's pretty scary.
I don't think this apathy is just unique to Americans. I feel like today's population in general (across the world) is more tolerating and expects less from their governments and leaders compared to say 60-70 years ago. We don't see protests like the old days. I don't know the reason - maybe student debt (people are too stressed out about paying back their loans etc that they don't have time for anything else), stagnant wages (people have to do multiple jobs to make ends meet), maybe because cops have much easier/powerful ways of tracking anyone they want, I dunno.
I can't speak for elsewhere, but here in America corporate news media has been spreading anti-Government propaganda for literally decades, backed up by the Republicans slowly gutting every Government program or system and making their provided services suffer. Once things get bad enough, they subcontract the service to a private company. The company does things just as poorly as the Government did, but they keep it consistently bad which is framed as an improvement as opposed to slow degradation.
A great example of this was when the American Healthcare Act was being passed, and Republican lawmakers spent a ton of time gutting the requirements for the insurers and cutting Government subsidies to those insurers to offset their costs, only so they could then complain about the onerous and overbearing requirements (the ones that remained, anyway) and blame the Government for not being willing to help offset the costs (the money which they refused to grant for such purpose).
Meanwhile we've spent trillions on a plane none of our armed forces asked for that hasn't flown a single mission. But no, the single mom buying food on EBT coupons is what's crippling us.
Because income inequality has exploded, the middle class is now nonexistent.
So there are now only the rich who don't have to deal with the problems of the poor, and the poor who are both too busy struggling to survive and too poor to lobby to enact change.
Eventually the guillotines will arrive but for now it's just bad public toilets.
People are as energetic as ever about controversial, tribe-splitting issues, possibly more. We are not going to let power fall into the hands of our blood enemies just because our party’s candidate messed up the trains. He knows this, so there is no reason for him to spend political capital on them, so they will continue to deteriorate.
People look at a destroyed public bathroom and blame society, smirk at how shitty and nonfunctional the government is, and put on their blinders and move on with their lives. People don't look at the bathroom and say "we should hire more public custodians to support our city services." People even vote, and campaign against education funding measures.
We've reached a point where there is so much inertia to improve the smallest things, that's pretty scary.