Bouazizi's fire ended up burning quite a few government officials, even outside of Tunisia.
By my count, it started six rebellions, prompted five government reforms, and Libya's Qaddafi got brutally murdered in public. Libya, Syria, and Iraq are still in a state of civil war.
So more recently than the late 80s. As recently as right frickin now.
>...(4th July, Bastille day) tends to be the statistical anomaly
While I think your statement is true, it's probably true because individuals and society can adapt to invasive governemnt behavior for a very long time. Historically we see the Tea Act, the Boston massacre and the Intolerable acts and think "Of course the colonies rose up"
But we often forget or don't take into account everything leading up to 1776 in the British Americas:
The British government prohibited settlement beyond the Appalachian mountains in the early 1760s, offending many colonists.
The currency act banning bills of credit issued by the colonies.
the sugar, stamp, townshend and tea acts - all tax acts on common consumer goods such as sugar, tea, newspapers, playing cards, glass, paper etc. Some of these were later repealed but only under intense pressure and economic reprisals from the colonies.
This was all just after the French and Indian war which the colonies bore the brunt of. Many in the colonies felt that they had proved themselves in the war as a capable independent military and economic force. So there were least 10 years of turmoil leading up to July 1776 and 20 if you count the start of the French and Indian War.
And the American Revolution got the ball rolling for the French. Starting with Louis the 16th going into debt to help the colonies and helped merrily along by, yet again, an unfair tax system.
Both of these examples and many more, are largely caused by economic turmoil (largely, not solely, of course there are many factors).
I think as long as governments watch what you spend and where you spend it, but don't decrease how much you can spend then everyone will go merrily along.
From Justice Robert's majority opinion of Riley v California:
Our cases have recognized that the Fourth Amendment was the founding
generation’s response to the reviled “general warrants” and “writs
of assistance” of the colonial era, which allowed British officers
to rummage through homes in an unrestrained search for evidence of
criminal activity. Opposition to such searches was in fact one of the
driving forces behind the Revolution itself. In 1761, the patriot
James Otis delivered a speech in Boston denouncing the use of writs
of assistance. A young John Adams was there, and he would later write
that “[e]very man of a crowded audience appeared to me to go away,
as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance.” [...]
According to Adams, Otis’s speech was “the first scene of the first
act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and
there the child Independence was born.”
