> However, in the biggest examples we've seen so far, like the communist Russia and China, the ideals of equality were trampled almost as quickly as they were declared. And their biggest differentiator, as declared by them, was that they were communist

Both of those countries have stayed in a state of imminent world war (and later nuclear war) since their founding until today. Ronald Reagan even triggered Ww3 a few times while trying to push the USSR back into a corner.

During that time, the dissidents in the US were persecuted harder than any dissidents in the Eastern Bloc - McCarthy commissions would practically end your life by accusing you of being a communist and the society would do the rest by casting you out, jobless to fend for yourself in the wild. Whereas in the USSR, as a dissident to the system, you could have been exiled to a central Asian city in the middle of nowhere, but would still have a job, a house and your children would go to school.

The funniest thing is that people have no idea that the very same laws to effect such persecution exists in every. single. 'democratic' country. They are called 'emergency laws' and they are triggered in the case of existential economic or actual war, major catastrophe, social collapse, alien invasion etc. These laws allow many things ranging from the state or even the local authority that represents the state shoving you into prison for no reason to an officer with a pistol executing you on the spot for treason or trying to avoid fighting for your country.

Just a year ago a New York court suspended habeas corpus, the fundamental right that ALL the rights in the common law system is founded upon. At that moment, all freedoms have ended in NY and the police was able to do whatever they wanted with anyone, until a higher court suspended the decision because the justification for the habeas corpus suspension was not strong enough. Which means that if there was a sufficiently acceptable reason at that moment, habeas corpus could have been kept suspended and any repression way beyond what you could have in Eastern Bloc could have been possible because habeas corpus basically is the lynchpin of every single right in the Angloamerican common law system. The Eastern Bloc countries you keep lambasting were founded on civil law, and in civil law everything has a standard - including what kind of emergency measure allows what kind of drastic action. Nobody can do 'whatever' with anyone outside what the law clearly and indisputably dictates - much unlike common law, which relies on 'interpretations' and 'precedents'.

> You don't really get the same level of authoritarian in the so called capitalism or "modern democracy" because in order for this model to thrive, you need to have sound relations with other democratic/"capitalistic" countries and they won't trade with you if you don't obey certain standards.

Thats only in the romantic theoretical picture. Otherwise you do business with Saudi Arabia, any fascist dictator (much better for labor costs) and no satellite of yours can refuse to trade with you because you (the US in this case) are the master. A master who can easily put up trade barriers through tariffs and quotas to its 'free trade' allies but expect those allies to pull down all barriers. Few people know that the US does that.

> A good example is what is happening in Hungary and Poland now: after the right took over they decided to make a more or less gradual switch to an authoritarian regime

They are authoritarian and those other countries arent authoritarian only because you are shown what happens in any country by the media selectively and you happen to be in the privileged ~10% demographic that doesnt have many problems and is part of the system unlike the poor at the bottom. Otherwise the US has repressed the Occupy protesters by hooking them up with tens of thousands of dollars of fines for 'trespassing' on !public! property back in 2011, effectively bankrupting most of those people and ending their livelihoods for good. Meanwhile Germany is currently busy with jailing people who object to the Ukraine war as of this very moment.