I was listening to Harry McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mountain" from the O Brother soundtrack. It's a funny description of what hobo heaven would be like. (Rivers of whisky etc) What would a shit-lib heaven be like? I'm thinking of UK libs heaven having means tested genital inspections. Everyone else here is way funnier than I am, what you got?
Literally the Hunger Games Capitol.
Absolute poverty and suffering all around the periphery to keep the treats in, with some districts to show off as "on your side" and "they actually like being under our control! :so-true:", but urban paradise in the middle with all the individual freedom you could ask (except the freedom to question the government but who needs that?) and a strong autocrat in charge who presents himself as benevolent and lovable and knowledgeable and strategic because it's better that way than letting all the "unwashed masses" vote.
Like, literal vomitoriums in the sense that people usually mean it because there's so much food, while everybody else starves, and there's a slave class with tongues cut out so you don't have to talk to them or acknowledge their presence (the logical endpoint of the increasingly large servant class of food delivery workers and Uber and all that) because it only makes you feel guilty, and that's basically the worst emotion you've ever felt because you're so sheltered from the world outside.
Feeling guilty is the most noble act of the liberal.
Those were actually exit points in coliseum and theaters in ancient Rome.
I know, I was referring to the common misconception of them, and I think the author might have known that too maybe, to drive home the idea that "even the Romans at their height weren't this decadent"; perhaps I should have used a different word than "literal" but it made sense to me at the time