Something along those lines, yes. Caning for vandalism, death penalty for smuggling drugs, dominant party since the nation’s founding with a habit of suing its opponents into submission, that sort of thing.
I can be pretty freakin’ Statist. People get offended over banning chewing gum. Me? When I looked up the reason why they did it, I might well ban it too. And that’s just a ‘silly’ example. There are some much more extreme policies I might go along with if I trusted the government enough.
…which I don’t, especially not the American government, which is rife with incentivization problems, lobbying, and shear incompetence at every level. For example, Illinois had to amend their state constitution to get their politicians to actually spend the state transportation funds on transportation.
Singapore has the kind of government that freaks out when they go from 70% of the vote to 60% of the vote, which in any other country would be considered a landslide victory, then managed to get back up to 70% of the vote.
America has the kind of government that needs the occasional large-scale protest because the guys in charge are either dishonest, stupid, or both.
And quite frankly, there is no path to the formation of an American Action Party which then obsoletes one or both of the existing parties and rules America with a studious technocratic fist.
Edit: China, of course, also an authoritarian country in Asia, but they flat-out don’t deserve it.
