One of them is a authoritarian regime where the press is controlled by the state and the others are a collection of countries with some of the highest democracy ratings in the world, by most scales, including for freedom of the press.
> That's my point. The farther left you go the more things the state has control over.
That’s because you’re using the term incorrectly: right-wing authoritarian states were just as perilous for those who disagreed – imagine being a left-wing business owner under Hitler or Pinochet! You’d much prefer living in “left-wing” Sweden unless you were very right-wing.
The mistake is trying to use a single term to compare multidimensional properties. The degree to which power is centralized in the state is independent from economic and social policies, and you can find examples of many combinations depending on which characteristics you’re interested in (for example, the Soviet Union was good for the perspective of opening career paths for women and terrible for gay rights while Nazi Germany was bad at both, and no single term comparison is going to cover that).
> That's my point. The farther left you go the more things the state has control over.
Is this true, though? With full socialism isn't control supposed to be pooled by citizens? If anything, it's more akin to libertarianism, just that instead of citizens self-organizing in groups to manage bits and pieces they self-organize in groups managing everything.
However people in the USA talk about the left as a bloc and people in Europe don't talk about communist media or politicians (although there are a small number).
You would have a better analogy if you used "socialism" rather than "communism".
