When you have a government with almost god-like surveillance capabilities, it is impossible to even form a revolution. It will be infiltrated and destroyed before you can say Bob’s your uncle.
And if you do it by yourself, you are Timothy McVeigh.
Any communist playbook insists on limiting the people’s ability for free-thinking. Mao, removed the educated to the rural fields to ‘re-connect’ with the masses, but never allowed them to leave their farms, while installing uneducated and easily led peasants into positions of authority. Stalin didn’t have to do this as he had a willing group of lackeys, the ‘intellectuals’ that would rather die in a labor camps than admit they had made a wrong decision.
Here in the USA, we have huge bureaucracies of non-thinking, little tyrants willing to do anything to keep their positions of power and income. We have a school system run by anti-democracy socialists who have been brain-washing armies of non-thinking replacements for several generations. On top of that, a large section of the citizens are willing to put on any shackle handed to them in exchange for their free handouts.
Add to this the influx of millions of socialist latinos that want to join any of the above groups, a majority of crooked politicians and a Pravda-esque news media, it is really a wonder we have any freedom left at all.
Leaderless resistance.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
The Declaration continues, however,
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government...
And so there we are, or we might be if the War of Independence were the sort of thing the author is talking about. Unfortunately, it isn't.
What these skeptics of physical rebellion tend to overlook or deliberately ignore is that no revolution in the history of man has ever gone far enough. Each revolution has targeted the corrupt government of their day, but no revolution has ever actually removed the elitist cabal behind those regimes — the same cabal of elites that has bankrolled nearly every tyranny over the past several centuries.
This is false, and it points out the differences between the French and Russian Revolutions and the American experience. The former were complete social revolutions in which the ruling class - not just the obvious offenders, but the entire class - found its blood running in the streets, its property confiscated, its physical presence banned. It was through no lack of rigor that these were co-opted, it was through the accession of a new ruling class populated by different people. Milovan Djilas dealt with this in his seminal The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System. You cannot rid a society of all ruling classes by exterminating the existing one. It's been tried.
That is not to delegitimize revolution as the last, worst option, the expression of free men and women of a rejection of tyranny. How close we are in the United States to that threshold is a topic that is frequently and vigorously debated; what is appreciated more than it is acknowledged is that as societies go, America's is (1) very armed, (2) proficient, and (3) remarkably ruthless once the threshold of violence is crossed - ask, for example, the Japanese of WWII how savage that conflict turned out to be. It is no light thing to begin killing one another because we're pretty good at it.
If there is a trigger event it is likely to be instigated by authority, not by revolutionaries, despite a certain Guy Fawkes romanticism by would-be revolutionaries splashing paint on walls. The art of despotism is to see that the threshold is pushed, but never crossed, and the current administration is populated by aging radicals who are well aware of it. Prudence, indeed, shall dictate...up to a point. We pray cooler heads prevail before that, but prudence also dictates a plentiful supply of ammunition just in case.