COVID-19 has notoriously exposed the inner authoritarian among a lot of people who ordinarily claim to be liberals, e.g., New York Legislation Provides for Indefinite Detention of Unvaccinated at Governor’s Whim, by Kay Smythe, NationalFile.com, December 18, 2021. You can tell that theirs is a characteristically Left Authoritarianism because of its irrational focus on equality rather than efficacy, e.g., its refusal to look at differential racial impact and its refusal to put restrictions on key at-risk populations (the elderly, obese) rather than socializing the suffering across the entire population—because that would be (aargh!) “discrimination.” But the existence of Left Authoritarianism should not be a surprise. There’s been gathering evidence for it in the technical literature.
