All of those authoritarian regimes you’ve mentioned were right-wing communist regimes, kind of like the present day North Korea. Those were not bread out of the left-wing democratic socialism that most of the modern world is using right now, that’s something different. Take Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, or even Slovenia, and you’ll find stable, growing economies where the middle class is strong, and the country is doing well as a whole. Now, when we look at the United States, we see that half of all wage earners make less than 30,000 a year, that 78% of wage earners live paycheck to paycheck, and that most of the wealth the United States enjoys is all the way up at the top 1%. And in terms of the United States having a democracy, a Princeton University study concluded that the public opinion has essentially no impact on what legislation gets passed, mostly because of corporations paying off our politicians to be their puppets. Those corporations have the greed that our free market capitalist system gave them, but when you look at more compassionate societies overseas, you see far better success stories than here in the USA.

That being said, you have a valid point on racism not being a viable threat anymore, something I have echoed before in one of my other articles. In this one I was more focused on systemic racism that makes the people of Flint not have clean water and that makes cops shoot innocent people on the street, not the blatant personal racism of the KKK or Neo-Nazis. But your point has been well taken.