alt Hacker NewsThere are two realities at the moment: the everyday culture that really hasn't changed all that much, and a federal dog-and-pony circus act that roams around the country doing crazy stuff. The vast majority of people have no interaction with the circus. For them, everything is normal and these news stories are an aberration. If they watch the news, they assume there is some larger story that they aren't being told. So the circus continues like a bad sitcom, nobody caring enough to actually do anything about it because they aren't really sure whether it is real.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act"
[...]
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."
[...]
"The dictatorship, and the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting. It provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway. I do not speak of your ‘little men,’ your baker and so on; I speak of my colleagues and myself, learned men, mind you. Most of us did not want to think about fundamental things and never had."
They Thought They Were Free - The Germans, 1933-45
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.htm