It is becoming more and more apparent to me that the the "winning" of the Cold War was not an unequivocal good. Now that the governments of the West no longer have the Warsaw Pact nations against which to contrast themselves, it's easier and easier for them to sell out the principles of freedom for which they long stood. The West no longer stands in opposition to the East and thus is no longer compelled to differentiate itself. The motivation is gone. Western governments no longer have to preserve our individual rights the way they had to back when they were presenting themselves as the moral superiors of the godless communists.
The victory of capitalism is also turning out to be a hollow one. The acceleration of the branding and marketing of everything is attempting to achieve the goal of turning us all into consuming automatons (when did we stop being citizens and become consumers?) who live to work and purchase. Ironically, that's not very different in practical terms from the fate we would have been assigned under a socialist system. The ineluctable path of capitalism is towards basically the same end as that of totalitarian communism; we live to work and consume. Here's an experiment for you: count how many times people are referred to as consumers rather than as citizens. When did that happen? Why are people labelled in such a materialistic fashion? When you use metonymy, identifying the whole by a some characteristic, you imply that is the important one. Using consumer as a label for you and me and everyone else is that our defining attribute is that we purchase goods and services. At least in communism there was the "worker," which has a certain nobility to it.