Given that the situation at times in the past decade has been as physically and psychologically difficult as the more deliberate and world-apparent punishments meted out by states in the last century, I have little patience with people shouting about gulags from their McMansions, or even their reasonably well-furnished apartments. The point seems to be that what's actually going on isn't reached by these ideas, and the vocabulary simply isn't at hand to express why a good number of people (and specifically these people) are in extraordinary difficulty in a country where a significant preponderance are rather well off.
Every political situation arrives in advance of its aesthetic. And if you don't know the world that you're in, absolute virtue is the only way. With Thoreau to the woods. With Tolstoy to the fields. With Merton to the texts and study. There's a subtle but important difference between a fictional world and a false one.