30 Years in Hong Kong
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No individual citizen can take on states of as obscene size as never before seen.
What you can do is to stop sponsoring authoritarianism. Vote with your feet (and move). Pay your taxes to some place freer:
That is why I included RSF's press freedom index also.
Hmm. Perhaps the Heritage index was not relevant.
It is just politics.
Of course, you are much more free in France / the eu, including when it comes to economic matters.
Though, I will second a neighbour comment from Clewza313.
The veil of regulatory liberalism of Gulf countries crumble after your first in person interaction with a local official.
A lot of it is probably partially due to dumb methodology. They have Saudi Arabia's tax burden rated at 99.1%, but that's probably because Heritage is all less taxes == more better and Saudi Arabia's government is basically a state-owned oil company, so they basically don't tax at all.
Edit- Do conservatives make new government walls, tariffs, new taxes/tax structures, new tax credits, new gun regulations? I even heard an interesting idea, why are conservatives destroying the environment, they shouldn't want the environment to change if they are conservative.
Anyway, the 2020s breed of "conservatives" would be seen as liberals in the eyes of 2000s or 1980s "conservatives".
You will. If an average person can say "I will fight," people will fight, if an average person can't say "I will fight," people wouldn't, and will be subverted by ones who can. That's the only hard truth there.
You people in the West, do not forget. Your freedom did not simply fall upon you from the sky once you reached some development level.
Your freedom was paid in blood, guts, and violence. This is a simple historical fact. What you call the developed West today had the biggest share of revolutions, civil wars, regular wars, and general social strife than the rest of the world combined over the last 200-300 years.
The shackles of slavery are very easy to put on, but extremely pricey to get rid of.
Historically, great injustices almost never quietly resolved on themselves. They were either ended by external influence, or failed catastrophically in a burst of extreme violence, like slave uprisings, serf revolts, revolutions, and such.
Some keep telling that lessons of the French revolution(s) are no longer relevant today, I'd say they are scarily getting more, and more relevant with each passing year.
Profits first
Think different.
If China had a political process robust enough to elect and then retire a Trump-like figure, the US would simply be the inferior superpower. The only structural advantage I see for the US these days is the superior legal and political framework.