...if the west (and the US in particular) had maintained impartial rule of law and constitutional freedoms.
The US did not have impartial rule of law in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Notably, black Americans in the south were regularly impressed into forced labor, often for the rest of their lives, on the basis of flimsy or even non-existent legal pretext.
(A representative but concocted example: the local sheirf arrests a black man who’s walking through town on charges of “vagrancy”. The man is found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. The sheriff sells the “contact” for hard labor to a local industrialist who owns a mine. (The sherif and the industrialist are buddies, and have done versions of this deal many times before). The man is set to work the mine for the period of his sentence. When he’s near the end of his sentence, he’s accused of some minor infraction as a pretext to add more years to his sentence (if anyone bothers to keep track of when his sentence is served at all.)
What makes you think that impartial rule of law decayed since WWII instead of generally (though not evenly) improving?
The US did not have impartial rule of law in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Notably, black Americans in the south were regularly impressed into forced labor, often for the rest of their lives, on the basis of flimsy or even non-existent legal pretext.
(A representative but concocted example: the local sheirf arrests a black man who’s walking through town on charges of “vagrancy”. The man is found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. The sheriff sells the “contact” for hard labor to a local industrialist who owns a mine. (The sherif and the industrialist are buddies, and have done versions of this deal many times before). The man is set to work the mine for the period of his sentence. When he’s near the end of his sentence, he’s accused of some minor infraction as a pretext to add more years to his sentence (if anyone bothers to keep track of when his sentence is served at all.)
What makes you think that impartial rule of law decayed since WWII instead of generally (though not evenly) improving?