On a larger timescale, it can be difficult for the average individual to judge the effects of a given political-economic regime, not just because large systems are complicated, and complicate further over the passage of time, but because those systems themselves are the products of individuals working in concert, individuals who have changing perceptions of themselves and their worlds, and whose perceptions affect the systems in turn.
Change on such a scale takes an enormous amount of labor, labor which is often being done by a minority with gifts of vision and conviction. It takes time and energy to put in the intellectual and relational work to represent to people what is really happening and the nature of the processes they are a part of.
And it takes time and energy to put labor into things like legal, economic, and political systems, which are to connect the collective ideological understandings with the daily mechanics of material life, and which are operating with immense inertia, with a previous regime as the center of gravity.
Of course when something breaks, and if that break is catastrophic enough, perception of the problem itself can become very stark and simple. Yet it is assembling the response to that problem that is the real challenge.
