The beginnings? Historian Rick Perlstein says union protests in Wisconsin show the birth of a movement
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has suggested the unrest that rocked the streets of Cairo and Madrid this year could spread to the US. Is he right?
It was a long, hot spring and summer on the streets of Greece, England and Madrid, as protesters and rioters vented their fury at high unemployment, painful austerity measures and following a fatal police shooting in London.
The US, meanwhile, has been virtually free of rioting and even of widespread peaceful political protest.
This is despite some of the highest unemployment in decades, growing income inequality, dissatisfaction with the nation's direction, frustration with its dysfunctional government and the threat of drastic cuts to social programmes.
On Friday, Mr Bloomberg raised the spectre of social unrest amid high unemployment among young Americans.
"You have a lot of kids graduating college, can't find jobs," he said on a radio show.
"That's what happened in Cairo. That's what happened in Madrid. You don't want those kind of riots here. The damage to a generation that can't find jobs will go on for many many years."
In the past century, the US has experienced its share of political tumult and unrest, from the destitute "Bonus Army" veterans of World War I who clashed with federal troops in Washington in 1932, to the urban race riots in the 1960s and the Rodney King riots in 1992.
And in interviews with the BBC, analysts, writers and historians feared the US was ripe for some sort of social upheaval, but said a lack of social organisation and a sense of despair had prevented social movements from coalescing.
The brutal beating of Rodney King by white Los Angeles policemen touched off rioting in 1992
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It's amazing to me that Americans are so slow to rise collectively... not only against unemployment but against the quite identifiable forces that are responsible for it," said sociologist Prof Todd Gitlin of the Columbia University journalism school.
"I'm not predicting that such a thing will happen, but it would not in the slightest surprise me if there were some burst of street expression, some street rage."
'Quiet riots' Gary Bailey, a professor of social work practice at the Simmons College School of Social Work in Boston said "draconian" austerity cuts contemplated in the US Congress could eventually spark unrest if young Americans felt their future was being taken from them through cuts to education and jobs programmes.
"We are inevitably at risk," he said. "We're not immune to what's happening in the world. The bigger the city and the larger the youth population, the greater the risk.
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