Jeremy Riddle, I have no dog in this fight myself and haven’t followed this particular exchange with Lana in-depth. But I am both familiar with her and with her thinking, and she and I agree and disagree in probably equal measure.

All that said by way of disclaimer (which I rarely offer), I invite you to peruse and consider the self-quote from my profile:

The bland acquiescence of a middle class, for its own amoral self-preservation and the upholding of its insular privileges, is the foundation of all tyranny

All the dictators and regimes in question here, every last one of them, is or has been propped up by the acquiescence of a middle class. Every even-marginally advanced society has a comfortable, and vulnerable, sector made up of intelligentsia, business management, bureaucrats, etc, whose very survival and the sustenance of what advantages large or small they have over anyone else, relies on the code of conduct for middle class life the world over:

Go along, to get along.

From the moment the contracts are signed, whether of mortgages or terms of employment or membership in various organizations, the middle class way of life depends entirely and near-exclusively, on conforming to imposed norms, and not making a dissident spectacle of oneself.

And all tyranny, regardless of its theoretical underpinnings (on which I agree with Lana in principle: it is ALL smoke and mirrors, and meaningless) draws its true powers from that sector which stamps the documents and writes the academic papers and makes the trains run on time, and does so day in and day out with little thought to whether the regime it serves is in the right or is utterly psychotic.

I say the middle class itself, is the guarantor of all repression, by offering itself without terms and conditions to whatever madness is expected of it to participate in the administering of. What say you?