Functional plurality is the larger claim that surfaces once the same analysis is run across contrasting systems: no inherited political tradition has, by itself, solved the conditions the AI transition will demand. Each strong ecology tends to be missing precisely the function its own culture constrains — one may need the material standing and capacity circulation it instinctively distrusts, another the protected interiority and opposition it institutionally limits, another the emergence and technological sovereignty its rights architecture never produced.
This is not political centrism, which splits the difference between ideologies. It is plurality by function: the framework asks what a given ecology actually needs to keep differentiated life viable, consequential, and correctable, and it does not care which tradition is conventionally credited with supplying it. The practical effect is that no system gets to claim it has already finished the work — the point of the regional studies, and the reason none of them comes out simply “better.”