Sometimes truth is more approachable by distant analogy. Contrast two authoritarian systems, neither of which I know particularly well, and both of which I know primarily by the fiction written under them. In East Germany, a well-educated person who simply didn't go along with the corruption wouldn't find himself sleeping on a park bench. There was a social order to be preserved. Contrastingly, in Albania, if someone was reluctant to go along with things, they might find themselves demoted to a low municipal administration -- also not on the proverbial park-bench, but then, given the personality-based character of rule under the postwar dictatorship, you were then a target for others looking to trace another stencil on their aircraft. Eventually, you might find yourself sent to the mines, and as social structures continued to be subordinated to personal power, in the mixed population of criminals and political prisoners, might be killed by one of the former. Two oppressive systems of authoritarianism, perhaps of fundamentally different character, despite their doctrinal similarities.
Now, the US is currently not an oppressive totalitarian regime, pace the intemperate howls from the McMansions, but in the most recent political shift, it has become more like one of these two worlds than the other. True national socialism is rightly inconceivable, because subordinating the power of the state to corporatism leads to very, very bad things. True socialism as a path to communism has also rightly been determined to be much too dangerous in the context of large states and industrialization. But it is possible for societies, whatever their point on the political spectrum, to have greater and lesser notions of general social order. The key is to recognize where the social order works to preserve the society against the excesses of right and left, and to preserve it in itself.
The intelligentsia park-bench metric. A new Benthamite calculus, perhaps.