I think we may both be suffering from cultural myopia. If I know something, it's that mentally, Russia and the US are rather similar. I'd like people from other countries to chip in on that. elizabeth, raisin, is it like this is Canada? Cedar, is it like this in the UK? goobster, was it like that in Hungary?
We've had something called the "snoopers charter" in the works since 2002/2003, I'm not entirely sure how it has changed but it's still going strong in 2016 and last time I looked into it, they were making similar "decrypt all the things" demands -- fundamentally breaking how our modern society functions. The Home Secretary, Theresa May. is one of the biggest driving factors for this bill -- and she is very likely our next Prime Minister with 2/3rds of the vote (within their party, we can only hope it goes to general election before that). She has also tried to remove us from the European Court of Human Rights. Oh, and the woman who is running against her? She has in the past said that workers of small companies deserve no rights.
Hungary has gone full-Nazi since I left. The glorious party of the people (led by the charismatic young handsome college student) has found that it really likes power and really doesn't like conversation and debate, and has turned the state into an ultra-conservative, right-wing hate machine. So the Hungary I once knew is no more, sadly. I'm not even sure I would travel there again, if I could.
Maybe it's less cultural myopia per se than it is just the fact that people are people, and culture doesn't change as much as we might think.
Doesn't sound like it. Sounds more like there are apathetic cultures and proactive cultures, or something akin to that. Look at the quality of life in Scandinavia: they're in the coldest region of the planet, and yet, always at the top of the ratings for a lot of things. You don't see a lot of quality-of-life improvement in the dictatorships, do you? That's because culturally, there's little choice, little control for people of their lives. It's a vicious circle some cultures don't enter or escape, for one reason or another.