Unlike a dictatorship, the head of a totalitarian regime is an ideology. That makes it very hard to end the regime by simply toppling its titular leader. You must discredit the ideology or subsume it with another one.
Book 1984
JP’s Dystopic Journal: Halloween Special
Independent thinkers question the intentions of others and have a stubborn reliance on facts when it comes to making important decisions for themselves and their loved ones. The leftist elite cannot have anyone questioning their decisions, much less refusing to go along with them. To paraphrase the fascists-- Nothing outside the collective, everything inside the collective, and nothing against the collective. All wants and needs must align with those of the collective. We see this taken to its logical extreme in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, when society completely collapses without the services of those who refuse to sacrifice their own self-interest to an ungrateful society that takes them for granted.
LR Podcast, S3E26: Halloween Special
The Left is highly motivated by fear, and they fear a world in which they are not in control they will be victimized by those who are. This is driven by the Marxist belief that all power imbalances between people result in a oppressor/oppressed relationship.
The Thought Police
Thier surveillance state in 1984 was slightly more advanced than ours, though ours is rapidly catching up. It enabled them to detect deviant, anti-party behavior as soon as it manifested itself. That would trigger increased scrutiny. If it advanced to the point of being displayed in public, the perpetrator would be imprisoned, and eventually killed. Not just killed, but all traces of you would be erased. People would quickly learn not to oppose the ever-changing Big Brother narrative. They were conditioned though fear, and the knowledge they were monitored constantly to intuit wrongthink and stifle such thoughts before they emerged. This is what Ingsoc called "crimestop". People were trained to self-cancel any independent part of their psyche.
JP’s Dystopic Journal: “Equal” Justice
Thankfully, the surveillance state in the real world, at least in the West, has not been developed and exploited to quite that extent. What the current regime in America does seem to have, similar to the one in fictional Oceania, is the intent to destroy all competing ideologies, and political groups. Going against the State's narrative can't get you killed, (yet) but sometimes can get you imprisoned and can certainly get you canceled.
LR Podcast, S3E22: The Left desperately want you to believe Meloni is a fascist.
You're meant to fear black shirts kicking down doors and beating people who go against the regime, but what the Left really seems to fear is that she'll be successful in delaying or halting their Great Reset plans. More than jackbooted thugs, the Left fears Meloni's ability to stifle their agenda to establish a global, collectivist oligarchy.
LR Podcast, S3E14: JP’s Dystopic Journal
Postmodernism is a philosophy that refutes the notion of objective reality. It refutes the Enlightenment notion that Man advances his situation mainly though reason. Enlightenment philosophies are the basis of modern Western democracies in general, and of the United States in particular. Enlightenment thinking stands in the way of establishing a collectivist Utopia, and so must be supplanted in the body-politic by the post-modern viewpoint. Postmodernism can be said then, to be the philosophic means to that collectivist end.
Liberty Relearned 