The West is highly totalitarian, but it uses mass media control to enforce its message, so it can pretend to be liberated.

This works well as long as no one starts asking hard questions. ('Why am I doing this job anyway? Why are public systems being starved of cash and breaking down?') But aggressive dissenters are still intimidated, harassed and jailed as soon as they start making a difference. (qv Genoa) Although to be fair activists have been good at marginalising themselves, believing that a bit of shouting, throwing and agit-prop is going to make a difference.

Less aggressive 'debate' is fine because it's easy enough to ignore.

Meanwhile the scale of media saturation is staggering. Not only are most people exposed to constant advertising from radio and TV - how totalitarian is a system which delivers hours of media reinforcement every day? - but dogma is repeated regularly in most of the news outlets.

You can see how locked down the system is when reality (e.g. climate change) creates conditions that require policy change. Instead of responding with flexibility, the dogma responds by repeating the same old messages more loudly, so it maintain exclusiveness and privilege.