Excerpt:
"You know the term “authoritarian.” You think you know what it means.

An authoritarian dad, boss, or government says: my way or the highway. They are forever barking orders and see compliance as the answer to all human problems. There is no room for uncertainty, adaptation to time and place, or negotiation. It’s ruling by personal dictate while tolerating no dissent.

To be authoritarian is to be inhumane, to rule with arbitrary and capricious imposition. It can also mean to be ruled impersonally by a machine regardless of the cost.



Sounds like a conventional government bureaucracy, right? Indeed. Think of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Think of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy which are right now issuing edicts that will end in the ability of your washing machine to clean your clothes and your car to go the distance.

They have been doing this to us for many decades, with or without the permission of Congress or the president. The agencies have become literally out of control in the sense that no one can control them.

Any society managed by a large and intrusive bureaucratic machinery is necessarily authoritarian. A government that is not authoritarian is necessarily limited in size, scope, and range of power.

Let’s say you have a political leader who has routinely called for less in the way of authoritarian rule by bureaucracies. He intends to use whatever power he has to curb the autonomous rule by administrative bureaucracies and subject them more to the wishes of the people, who should ideally be in charge of the regime under which they live.

Such a leader would not be called an authoritarian. He would be called the opposite, an emancipator who is trying to dismantle authoritarian structures.

f all of the above makes sense to you, try to make sense of this news story in the New York Times. It’s about the growing efforts on the part of many activists to resist a second term of Donald Trump.

In passing, the story says: “If Mr. Trump returns to power, he is openly planning to impose radical changes — many with authoritarian overtones” including “making it easier to fire civil servants.”

The story quickly adds that he intends to replace the fired employees with “loyalists.” Maybe. But consider the alternative. The president is supposed to be ostensibly in charge of 2 million plus bureaucrats that are employed by 400-plus agencies in the executive branch — but they don’t actually have to carry out the policies of the elected president. They can in fact completely ignore him.

How is this compatible with either democracy or freedom? It is not. There is nothing in the Constitution about a vast army of bureaucrats who rule behind the scenes that is in no way reachable or manageable by elected representatives. "