When the Iraq War broke out 23 years ago, the world saw the biggest wave of anti-war protests in human history. That included in the United States, where hundreds of thousands of Americans poured out into the streets of Manhattan. In San Francisco, where I was living at the time, massive peaceful protests were accompanied by widespread civil disobedience and direct action as well as property destruction. Thousands were arrested.

We’ve seen no such public response to the war in Iran, despite its being even less popular than Operation Iraqi Freedom. That may be, in part, because American ground troops have not yet been deployed in theater. But I suspect that the reason is deeper than that: it’s because nobody has the sense that anything we do matters anymore.

It’s hard to overstate the level of shock the post-9/11 Bush administration administered to the American political system. Back then, the idea of the United States engaging in a “preemptive” war of choice was almost inconceivable. The U.S., of course, had engaged in wars of aggression before, particularly in Vietnam, but we at least invented Gulf of Tonkin-type precipitating events to allow us to claim we were fighting in self-defense. Other than the preposterous conspiracy theory that Saddam Hussein secretly orchestrated 9/11, we made no such claims about Iraq. We simply insisted that, despite the enormous amount of evidence to the contrary, Saddam was secretly manufacturing chemical and biological weapons, and that, in itself, justified an invasion and occupation.

Once the invasion got underway, the political convulsion of the war itself was followed by a series of equally violent aftershocks: “enhanced interrogation,” Guantanamo Bay, the PATRIOT Act, “extraordinary rendition,” warrantless wiretapping, Abu Ghraib. Each of these episodes felt like a step toward fascism. It seemed as if the White House was systematically annihilating the idea that it was accountable to laws at all.

But even that moment didn’t feel as lawless as this one. The Iraq War, unlike our current one, was preceded by a solid year of non-stop propagandizing. We were being lied to, but the fact that the government was even taking the trouble to invent stories about a secret Prague meeting and Chinese aluminum tubes and yellow cake uranium showed that public opinion still mattered to the administration. Likewise, the intelligence services’ kidnapping and torture programs were justified by endless internal legal memos. The Bush administration apparently believed that courts still mattered, and the spies carrying out its dirty work assumed that, someday, their actions would be reviewed by a judge and that they better have legal cover for all of it.

None of that is the case today. The Trump administration couldn’t even be bothered to launch a PR campaign to promote the drive to war in Iran. The very idea that its acts of aggression, from bombing “drug boats” in the Caribbean to kidnapping and assassinating heads of state, require some sort of legal justification feels quaint and vaguely nostalgic. This is a government that appears to care neither what its citizens think nor what the laws say. So what exactly is the point of protesting? I don’t think anyone in 2003 expected the Iraq War to be called off because millions of people were demanding it, but it at least felt like an attempt, however desperate, to manifest some kind of political pressure on decision makers. The No Kings marches feel purely cathartic. Does anyone who participated in them actually believe there’s even a theory of how they might produce actual change?

By that I mean no offense to the No Kings protesters. Political expression is important even when it’s just therapeutic. The alternative to participating in them is to do nothing at all, other than wait for the November midterms, if you still have faith in such things as elections and the Democratic Party.

But doing nothing is not, in fact, an irrational response to our current state of affairs, which is why, in my opinion, that’s what most of us are doing. It just doesn’t seem like the public has any leverage with this White House, which is an alarming thing to say in a supposed democracy.

If you’ve ever expressed dissent about any aspect of U.S. foreign policy, you’ve probably had some idiot ask you why you you’re not out protesting the way Iran, or China, or Venezuela treats its citizens. The answer is obvious: because you’re not Iranian, Chinese, or Venezuelan. Your opinions have no impact whatsoever on those governments’ decisions. You’re an American, so you’re concerned with what your government does in your name. You register your objections in order to influence your government to act differently.

But it increasingly feels like we have just as little say in our own government’s actions as those of a foreign government. No normal person wanted this war, and millions of people voted for Trump precisely because he said he’d keep us out of these disasters. The President didn’t care. No normal person wants American troops on the ground in Iran, but it looks as likely as not that that’s exactly what’s going to happen. The Republicans are facing rising gas prices, the risk of global recession, and a likely rout in November, and still Trump presses forward wherever his whims lead him. There are people whose opinions do matter to Trump — people who have his cell phone number in their contacts — but the American electorate isn’t fortunate enough to be among them. So we do nothing, because there’s nothing to be done.

The feeling isn’t restricted to foreign policy, either. We’re all sitting around waiting for our jobs to be vaporized by A.I., a technology nobody asked for. Oracle just laid off 30,000 workers in order to divert their salaries into A.I. data centers. Remember when Trump directly intervened to try to prevent the Carrier Corporation from moving a couple thousand jobs from Indiana to Mexico? Oracle is owned and operated by his buddy, Larry Ellison, but the White House isn’t lifting a finger for its laid off workforce. The same Larry Ellison is about to own half of American media, so in the future you can expect not just inaction from the government, but cheerleading from the press when your boss destroys your family’s future to impress his investors with his blind devotion to the promise of agentic A.I., too.

We all know whose interests and judgments register with this president. It’s largely the same people whose net worth will rise from your job being replaced by a robot, and whose patented technologies are picking targets to bomb in Iran. The Iranian government knows who those people are, too, which is why the IRGC is about to start bombing their data centers. That small clique of presidential whisperers has a stake in the bleak future this government is helping to usher in — the one where you have no job and your country is endlessly at war. Their views matter. Ours don’t. Not long ago, the world was more complicated than that, but it isn’t anymore. And we all know it.