American authoritarians are generally partisan hypocrites – approving of authoritarianism by their own tribe, aghast at authoritarianism by the other tribe.
Plus a deluded belief that the authoritarian tools being handed to their ideological leaders will forever be in those hands and never used against them in the future by their ideological foes.
Yeah, that’s basically the same in Australia. The ones who claim to be small-Government free market types or pretend to be libertarians seem to be the most authoritarian of all…
For example, the ruling party has strong links into coal, oil and gas companies (big political donations going one way, much bigger grants and subsidies going the other). They cut subsidies for renewables because they “always let the market decide”, and now when older coal power stations are increasingly uneconomic they’re literally bringing in a forced subsidy to keep them going (sold as a “capacity payment” to “ensure reliability of the grid” - even though the clunkers are increasingly unreliable). It’s going to cost somewhere between $150 and $400 a year per-household on our power bills if they get it through.
Other things are like trying to come up with some kind of way to fine or sanction banks who refuse to lend to fossil fuel companies, or stop activist investors trying to force companies to go green. This is all by the side of politics who claim the utmost commitment to free markets and small Government! Same party pushing all these authoritarian surveillance laws too…
It's really easy to take a both-sides stance here, but the last presidency (ending in that same president causing an insurrection attempt at our capital) shows that one side is clearly more dedicated to authoritarianism than the other - socially, politically, and legally.
People really seem to be hung up on equivocating a sitting president attempting to overturn an election with people on twitter saying mean things.
TBF the Obama administration set some nasty precedents internally (whistleblower prosecutions under espionage act) and externally (assassinations), plus plenty of similar precedents set by previous administrations both D and R
I don't consider my framing to be a "both-sides" false equivalency — I simply did omitted labels, because I felt that was rhetorically stronger. The framing is entirely compatible with the possibility that one side exhibits much more severe authoritarian tendencies than the other.
