Asking for a friend.
That depends on what country it is.
Culture defines the "total" character.
Consider Chinese with their obsession of 5 thousand years of history and century of humiliation, the grandiose vision of "Middle Kingdom" being the center of the world surrounded by barbarians who cannot become Chinese.
Its totally different from totalitarian LatAm dictators who
base their charismatic-conservative rule on broad social
tendencies that center on machismo and religious zeal,
or perhaps African despots who rule by decree and depend on
professional army support who are fickle and prone to coups:
they don't have broad support and have to find balance of force
to maintain control, divide and conquer strategies of ethnic-religious tensions exploited to shuffle competition.
this so much this