Usually a purely authoritarian regime is short-lived if it seeks to govern by authoritative methods, a point made by Boetie.
The ideal of an authoritarian personality is to be glorified and loved. Therefore, repressive power is diffused through a pyramid structure to a capillary level thus creating the perception of the lider as benevolent or good. He is not directly associated with repression. That's left to the minions. When governance is personalized in this manner, control becomes near total and for the most part voluntary.
Modern democracies do have totalitarian aspects to them. Take for example canned laughter or televised applause as means of fabricating false consent, above all misappropriating "consensus" from the absent spectator.
As for the "free market" it can easily generate totalitarian situations or impositions such as trusts and cartels. A classic example is the monopoly of television in Italy and its totally deleterious effect on public opinion, not so much in that it persuades people but much worse: it regulates what people are supposed to think about.
I think today North Korea may be the only totalitarian state left, unless one wants to argue that Saudi Arabia is a totalitarian Theocracy. We have met the enemy, and he is us — Pogo
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.
The reality you describe in the West is a dangerous pathology, but it needs a different name. I can't think of a good one at the moment, and that indicates a problem for rational discourse on the subject (or that I have a momentary memory hole -- oops, that term is taken...). Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
Contemporary totalitarianism rejects the Ideal and substitutes it with the Object, the gimmick, the Show, yet its object is identical, complete biological control, preferably through a consensus of the majority. And if events are presently attenuated before the horrors of Stalinism and Nazism, it is wrong to make a simplified caricature of this, our past. The horrors of Nazism and Fascism enjoyed popular consensus, just as torture and Guantanamos do today. Extraordinary rendition will tomorrow be ordinary. Dissent will be dealt with in day-care centers. The show must go on.
Kim junior may not use the same tailor (Liberace's?)as the pope but he's into platform shoes and kidnapping South Korean stars.
When he was born all the trees blossomed and birds stopped their migration and sang a triumph- all in the dead of winter. Imagine what the snow looked like with all those dropings.
Talk about consensus building. Throw in Herod and an all star cast.
