They once where protected by the state- but the state, as policeman- has been continuously reduced in its protector role, by those, who found hackable political interfaces, the ticks on the state wave through the fleas on the people. The pent-up backlash to all this results in a militant vote for anti-parasitic and exposure limiting institutions.

Fascism promises to remove those attackers, by fire-walling away the exterior and prosecuting perceived attackers on the inside of the nation.

Every successful scam, every allowed exploit, is a advertising for the totalitarians who promise to restore order.

Then again, when doing mega structures, a launch loop is more plausible.

The middle east is already gone. They will nuke one another, rather sooner then later. And their governments know. They desperately embrace the surveillance state as stabilizer, move there centers of government out of population centers expected to implode in senseless rebellion and anarchy again and again - they want to build cities optimized to escape nuclear retribution, for the day when some of their madmen lob a device at Israel.

They celebrate right now in Ghaza and chant for more violence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3yaBgGzANc

And that boiling cauldron of madness is wide spread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwdlsHaRD1k

It was a ringing bell, bringing the attention back to the old ugly worldorder of great games, land-empires and bloody conquest and the inability to isolate from hostile ideologies, even if you are the usa and living on a giant island. Bush went to iraq and the failure to build any working state there- showed not only the failure of neoncons, but also of the whole "all cultures are equal" and academic impotence. There explanation models had nothing for this but tired rehashes of colonial/anti-colonial ideology, no predictions, no real help, just "belief in universal values and western culture, and righton" - and that was it. No help for the 2 billion stuck in religious ember, not real analysis to free the wasted geniuses trapped under burkas. Silence, ideology and absence, thats whats left.