Why Aren't The Unemployed Protesting Here?

America isn't Egypt, but it's remarkable that we haven't had angry protests in the United States.

Jon Stewart has some fun with Fox News personalities like Glenn Beck who worry that "we might become Egypt." Yes silly obviously. But behind the silliness is a serious question: Isn't the most remarkable thing about the US in 2011 precisely the absence of protest by the unemployed and foreclosed? Here we've gone through the most protracted economic crisis since World War II - in many ways the most severe crisis - a crisis directly attributable to terrible business decisions supported by government policies bought-and-paid-for by powerful financial interests - a crisis out of which so many of the authors have escaped unscathed (unlike say 1929-33) and indeed richer than before. And yet ... the only populist movement the country has seen is a movement of the right, in defense of the existing rules and arrangements? I can think of many explanations, and yet at a deeper level I remain baffled. I expected otherwise.