My grandson was telling me recently that he has a prof at the college he attends who's a liberal Democrat who tells his students that the Republican party is the party of authoritarianism.
There may be some authoritarians in the party, of course, but generally speaking the professor's claim is manifestly untrue.
If "authoritarian" is defined as an individual leader or party which seeks to arrogate for itself more power than the constitution allows, if an "authoritarian" is one who seeks to bypass the representatives of the people and impose mandates and policies by fiat, then surely Republicans are the least authoritarian players on today's political scene.
Indeed, Democrats, at least since Barack Obama, have repeatedly used executive power to circumvent the legislature and increase the power of the federal government in our lives. Republicans, including Donald Trump, have used it largely to limit federal power and get the government out of our lives.
In fact, this may be the root of so much of the seemingly irrational hatred for Trump during his presidency. Those who desire an overweening, centralized regulatory state which intrudes itself dictatorially into every nook and cranny of our lives were appalled that Trump was so successful in unravelling much of the "progress" they had made over the last fifty years in realizing their dream of an all-powerful federal government.
The truth is that, so far from governing like an authoritarian statist, Trump, for the most part, governed like a small-government libertarian.
An authoritarian, after all, does not appoint strict constitutionalists to the federal bench and Supreme Court. An authoritarian does not seek to give back to the states the authority to set their own laws on matters like voting regulations and abortion.
An authoritarian does, however, seek to expand the reach and power of the federal government, to impose onerous mandates on businesses and individuals, requiring them, for example, to wear useless masks or to get vaccines they don't want. An authoritarian does place unnecessary burdens on private enterprise, seek to restrict freedom of speech and religion and the right to bear arms, and to dictate what children will be taught and exposed to in schools, even against the will of those paying the bills for their schools.
Those who wish to maximize individual freedom are not authoritarians, those who wish to minimize it are. In our contemporary politics, it is conservatives who wish to maximize individual freedom and progressives who wish to constrict it.
Like my grandson's prof, progressives sometimes seek to deflect attention away from this fact by accusing conservatives, i.e. Republicans, of being the very thing they themselves are.
