> For all its innumerable faults, flaws, and outright human rights violations: the West of the latter 20th century seemed like a plausible v0.0.1 of some future, hypothetical, benevolent society.

A large digression, but I do wish we didn't need these silly ritual flagellations each time we mention that the West was actually pretty good. To call these things "human rights violations" implies that the West defied some accepted standard for how we treated people, but the West was always on the leading edge for human rights (slavery, colonialism, racism, etc were normal on virtually every continent until the West decided they were wrong). We often talk about the West as though it is some great failure because it didn't emerge from the mists of history fully-formed and prepared to adhere to our modern moral standards, ignoring the fact that our modern moral standards are precisely the product of millennia of Western progress.