The Authoritarian Left

As a progressive I go, "whoa, authoritarian WHAT?"

I don't see the Left as authoritarian, this is not Red China or Russia, you can pretty much do what you want as long as it's approved by our corporate masters.

But to be scrupulous I took a few steps back and looked again, and you know what I found?

The Authoritarian Left.

In fact, I realize that the left has been pushing an authoritarian agenda for decades now.

The Left is guilty of pushing decency, tolerance, and religious freedom on many people that don't seem to want it.

We've made the assumption that indecent, intolerant, theocratic people are bad, so we can just ignore them. Unfortunately, they won't go away.

In fairness, we've been tricked by conservatives over and over into thinking that they're really actually decent people, one Republican even ran on a platform of "compassionate conservatism".

Tacitly recognizing what the Left has long known, than plain conservatives are anything BUT compassionate.

Since the 60s, the Left has been insisting that everyone accept black and other non-white people as equal and just as deserving and capable as anyone else.

But conservatives feel oppressed by this, they believe they have the right to oppress any minority they want, it's part of "freedom". They seem to be still hurting from the Civil War. They won't accept that The Lost Cause is truly lost.

Like Trump, the South lost, but they won't accept either.

Since PC and "woke" entered the lexicon, they've been complaining that they don't get to use words like "ni@@er" freely anymore, and this loss of freedom is intolerable to them.

They don't accept that people should be able to connect with whomever they choose; to be right people should all be straight, so they want to keep marginalizing and criminalizing LGBTQ+ people.

Nobody is stopping them from being straight, but they resent leftist efforts to accept gay and trans people, because they don't think they should be made to tolerate them.

Bluntly they feel like "I don't want to be forced to live with darkies and fruits if i don't want to, and I reserve the right to harass and discriminate against them, which is my prerogative as a straight white American.

"And no Democrat is gonna tell me otherwise."

Remember, until the middle 20th century, white supremacy was considered by many on the Right to be an open and lofty principle. And I'm sure they resent us turning it into the bad, even shameful thing that it's been all along.

Perhaps most strongly they believe Leftists are persecuting Christians because we resist them trying to take over the culture and enforce biblical beliefs on society.

Leftists fight against putting things like the Ten Commandments in public buildings, and teaching prayer, creationism, and other religious doctrine in public schools, which are an arm of the government.

In that the Left consistently insists that all people should be accepted and treated equally regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual preference or identity, along with other things, they see us as enforcing these things at the expense of their freedom to reject them, which is actually authoritarian.

But in that respect, speed laws, and all other laws, are also authoritarian. One can easily see a point where EVERYTHING can be considered "authoritarian" to the extent that the term becomes meaningless, because EVERYTHING that's not strict anarchy can be considered as such.

"You can't tell me I can't shoot you in the face, that's AUTHORITARIAN!"

What's happened is that the Right has redefined "authoritarian" to mean, "stopping us from just doing anything we want to do, even if it's against all the express values of the United States of America."

Conservatives are the people of law and order, except if you try to enforce laws against THEM.

They've now emboldened themselves so much as the "oppressed class" that they are breaking every concept of decency and fairness to pursue a Christo-fascist theocracy, which is their dream.

These of all times is when the Left, along with all people who take decency and acceptance as primary values, must stand up strong, and ram our values down their throats if necessary, because we are right and they are WRONG.

As a progressive if someone wants to call me an "authoritarian of decency", I can live with that.