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You're thinking of revolutions. That's what Tocqueville's paradox is about.
There's plenty of rebellions under worsening conditions. People who are getting fucked over never overthrow their ruling elite on their own, but they do often tend to be unruly and use the only real language of the masses: widespread ineffectual violence and vandalism.
Plenty of riots to go around, plenty more nihilistic terror to come.
Any aspiring dictator knows wanton violence is the siren song of the crowd lusting for better leadership. But the crowd never seizes power for herself.
This is not true, oppressive societies are a lot more fragile. You only need to take out the elite. And you have no shortage of potential allies. Ask Cuauhtémoc. Ask Saddam. Ask Mussolini.
The history of the world is full of god emperors whose rule is unquestionable until the day someone with a bigger stick comes about and the locals cheer the new management.
A tyrant inspires no loyalty. And they need the boys to die in their wars.
I'll happily give up my seat. No Chinaman ever called me an incel.
My number one domestic policy goal is to make sure they have no willing soldiers.
I'm not as convinced, but I'm also thinking about oppressive societies that emerge from the people rather than being imposed top-down.
Top-down oppression is fragile (especially because it tends to be obviously self-enriching, or rather, it becomes fragile when it can be reasonably perceived as self-enriching), but bottom-up oppression isn't, to the point that it's very hard to call it out. For instance, safetyism in the West is very much oppression, but everyone who perpetrates it does so with the approval of its own conscience. There's no Czar of Safety and therefore the problem is much more difficult to root out because it exists within every man, woman, and child; the senate and people of the US can't just send the 101st Airborne to topple racism for the same reason they can't send them to remove BLM rioters.
The only way to deal with bottom-up oppression is for an opposing nation (or reality) to throw so many bags of money at the people that they can start clearing the self-enriching parts of themselves away, while ensuring that no top-down version of that oppression arises. Contrast post-WW2 Axis nations with modern MENA; the US can blow up a good chunk of it in the name of feminism but the people remain in opposition to that.
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