Again with the assymetry games.

Again? I have replied to you three times. Once to ask a clarifying question, once with a full substantive argument that you still have not actually addressed, and once to point out that you were ignoring it. Calling that "asymmetry games" is just a way of dodging the fact that you were given a response and chose not to engage with it.

I have lived in former communist countries, spent a great deal of time in Serbia, Hungary, and Poland. I have spent time in China. I experienced life in those countries personally.

You take a set of travel experiences and personal impressions and inflate them into civilizational authority. Spending time in post-socialist countries does not make you an expert on socialism, and it certainly does not refute the argument I already made and you refused to answer. As I said in my earlier reply, many of the defining problems of the post-Soviet space were not some natural flowering of "authoritarian culture." They were imposed through shock therapy, privatization, IMF-style restructuring, Western-backed market reforms, and the rapid liquidation of public wealth into private hands. The social collapse, oligarchic looting, immiseration, and institutional corruption that followed were not acts of God. They were produced. To point to the wreckage after that process and then smugly declare it proof of your worldview is either ignorance or dishonesty.

And "I have spent time in China" does not help you nearly as much as you seem to think it does. What does that mean exactly? A visit? A posting? A few months in a city twenty years ago? I am a born and raised rural Chinese minority. I know my country better than you do. That is not mysticism or identity politics. It is a simple fact, and it highlights the arrogance behind the way you assume a limited outside experience entitles you to lecture others on a society you do not actually understand. That is chauvinism.

I’ll take life in a liberal democracy any day over an authoritarian regime.

Good for you. Personal preference is not an argument. It is certainly not a rebuttal to the point I made, which is that so-called liberal democracies are structured around elite power while dressing that domination up in procedure, legality, and polite rhetoric. You keep confusing the style of rule with its substance.

Democracy is not perfect, but authoritarianism is perfectly horrible and soul crushing.

This is just sloganizing. "Authoritarianism" is the empty pejorative stupid people reach for when they do not want to do any actual analysis of class power, state structure, or material outcomes. Every state uses coercion. The question is which class benefits from it, how power is organized, and what social results follow from it. You have no interest in answering that, so you retreat into moral theater.

And on democracy, we do in fact have democracy. I would argue a better democracy than the West’s in many respects, especially if democracy is supposed to mean responsiveness to public needs rather than ritualized elections inside systems where capital sets the boundaries in advance. Even by the standards of Western institutional research, public satisfaction with the Chinese system has remained extremely high. Harvard’s own long-term survey work put it above 90 percent. That fact alone should force at least a little humility from people who keep insisting on describing over a billion other people’s political lives with the vocabulary of Cold War propaganda.

So no, your anecdotes do not settle anything. Your time in post-socialist countries does not erase the role of the US and EU in producing the disasters you now point to as proof or the fact they are structurally predicated on massive corruption and and infallible rule of capital. Your brief appeal to having "spent time in China" does not outweigh the views of people who actually know the country from the inside or have studied the real statistics and history. And your repeated use of "authoritarian" is not analysis. It is a substitute for analysis, and not a very intelligent one.