They have to be happy on average. It's like being in a race where all the competitors started running in different directions, but eventually finding that the others have turned around to follow your target, effectively giving you a head start.

To spell it out more clearly, here is a great place for one's opponents/competitors to be stuck in - authoritarian enough to eliminate any advantages of liberty, but not authoritarian enough to be efficiently coordinated.

c) not happy nor unhappy, probably they just noticed that US also started to use same recipes to mute any deviant or discordant voices. Next step could be to replicate GFC