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As I understand it, the reason the world have become more democratic and liberal for generations was because freedom made a society work better. The open societies out competed the closed ones.

If this model really works for China and other non democracies, so they can keep a liberal economy and still control people hard politically, then:

1984, here we come. :-(

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It really does seem like, with so much distraction and so little necessity, we're nearing the end of the democratic stage of the cycle, where people use freedom chaotically.

No, the world became more US like for generations because the US was a relatively homogenous ethnic population (after genociding the competing ethnic groups) that controls a quarter of the planet's natural resources and has oceans for borders, so it rose to economic and military dominance easily.

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