Discussing the January 6 hearings, my friend is musing the lackluster involvement and response from average Americans, citing many independent polls since October and the neglible impact on the midterms.

I offered it’s been a stepwise erosion of confidence in the results of elections, beginning with the seemingly endless court challenges by Gore. And these challenges concluded with Gore’s concession speech punctuated with “I’ll admit defeat but I still don’t believe the results are true.” This was the first major election my son remembers and it imprinted upon him that the election process is vote, declare winner, and then file lawsuits. And my kid isn’t the only now-young adult with this inaccurate impression.

With many more examples between, the prelude to the 2020 election hoopla was the 2016 conspiracy theory that Russia meddled with our election which is the only reason Trump won. So the election process is now vote, declare winner, file lawsuits, and concoct conspiracies.

It’s been a stepwise erosion of the concept of peaceful transfer of power. And it’s been a stepwise escalation of invalidating our own elections and devaluing the voice of voting Americans. Like the frog in boiling water – by slowly increasing the water temperature to boiling the frog won’t notice it’s being boiled – American voters are now conditioned that elections are near meaningless anyway and election malfeasance is business as usual. And while being publicly pouty about losing an election might seem “so much less extreme” than what the January 6 hearings explored, just remember, American voters are the boiling frogs. And the unenthusiastic indifference from Americans is proof positive of just this metaphoric phenomenon.

I’m not commenting on the importance or impact of January 6. I’m offering a solid explanation for why most Americans – supported by independent polling – aren’t anywhere near as outraged as a fringe selection of our citizens are. It might seem it’s just common sense to be outraged about January 6, but common sense requires common beliefs … and being willing to meet in the middle. I haven’t seen much effort towards ideological collaboration since immediately post-9/11.

As with the plenitude of additional “Why aren’t Americans angrier about this?” examples, the disinterest in January 6 is the product of 22 years of numbing conditioning … and most disappointing is we allowed this to happen and we did it to ourselves and just how successful the conditioning towards apathy has been.