Just something coming into my mind given all the recent 'new hate speech laws' and seeing the slow growth of resistance to all these decrees.
We've seen all these policies but EVERY ONE of them is a failure due to spotty enforcement (even if by design), negligence, inefficient allocation of resources, extremely poor supervision etc.
Yet we can see in other countries, despite different issues plaguing them, they are able to have authoritarian rule like in China with their social credit score and the like.
Is the main reason why the left is slowly losing every gain they make or attempts to copy authoritarian rule similar to others down to simple lack of basic competency? As I think a lot of people would be ok submitting if they knew that the system was actually ran well.
They never start out well-intentioned. It's just the will to power. One does not establish the dictatorship to safeguard the revolution, one makes the revolution to establish the dictatorship.
The same applies to the countries that you do not label as 'dictatorships', incorrectly. What distinguishes any Western country from China, other than the competence of the Chinese state and its ability to raise rather than destroy its people's living standards? Not much, as we all live under an oligarchic dictatorship.