For those advocating an all renewable energy grid. You cannot reliably power big industrial factories and infrastructure with renewables only. The answer NEEDS to be: nuclear as a base, and a heavy push towards decentralized renewable grid on top.

We need to do both of those things. Mindless consumerism aside, the best option to solve our base energy needs which are not frivolous (infrastructure, healthcare, education etc etc) is nuclear.

There is a whole system of media devoted to getting normal folks to vote against their own interests. In the regimes you list (and I’d argue also in western so called liberal democracies too but to a lesser extent) the capitalist class and political class are so intertwined due to influence and corruption, that whatever the needs and whims of the leading politicians, the media machine will distract and manipulate. The same tactics that they use are the ones which have worked since the start of mass media, they know how human psychology works.

Appealing to emotional arguments, external threats, racism, nationalism. Remember these are political tools, unfortunately very effective ones, as we saw in fascism in the 1900s. A curious consequence is that often, the worse things get for the normal people, the easier it is for these malicious actors to spin and manipulate and blame it on an external force or political enemy which deflects blame or allows for more extreme political ideology to rise in a society. So you get an accelerated political extremism.