Anything that even has the slightest overtone of old-school totalitarianism gets mocked and derided by the media and the educated classes. No-one intelligent takes the "war on terror" seriously, for example.
In a democracy, whoever influences public opinion is basically in charge. We live in a weird society where most media outlets are controlled by big business, and yet most people who work in media are very progressive (you might not believe me, but it's true: Fox News/the Daily Mail/etc do not have some secret source of right wing humanities graduates, and so most of their reporters are typical young, metropolitan, educated liberals). That makes the media a weird Rorschach test where from one perspective it's under the thumb of big business and from another it's under the thumb of the "liberal elite".
The best model I could come up with to understand Western society is that there are basically two power structures that rarely openly compete but continually grind against each other like tectonic plates. One power structure consists of large corporations, finance, the military, and so on. The other consists of the media, academia, many government agencies (most government workers are again, progressive) and various international organisations. Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, is considered a left-wing outpost in right-wing capitalism, which is why Marc Andreesen was condemned for coming out as Republican, and why tech employees can be fired if they offend the enforcers of "social justice".
The best evidence I can give of this is one paper that studied the policies of right-wing and left-wing governments. They found that right-wing policies favoured the top 2% of society. Left-wing policies tend to favour the top 5%.
This post http://www.macroresilience.com/2013/04/08/radical-centrism-u... explains the paper and how our current system basically gives us the worst of both worlds: "Where the government was the sole operator, such as prisons and healthcare, “pragmatic” privatisation leaves us with a mix of heavily regulated oligopolies and risk-free private contracting relationships. On the other hand, where the private sector was allowed to operate without much oversight the “pragmatic” reform involves the subordination of free enterprise to a “sensible” regulatory regime and public-private partnerships to direct capital to social causes."
I have no idea how this will end, but I'm not optimistic about the future of democracy. Too many people squabbling over deckchairs while the Titanic keeps sailing towards the icebergs (whether or not Sesame Street retains its government funding is irrelevant, when both military and social security spending keeps going up and up).
The successful governments of the twenty-first century will probably be a mix of corporate nationalists, like China and Russia, (basically Fascism with some self-control) and pragmatic city-states like Singapore.