Once upon a time, us liberals argued against that sort of thing. Probably because we saw first hand what it does to a society. Good luck, like you said, you will need to live under the fist in that world you create, I’ll be thankfully gone.
This is hard to support if you study much history. Every environmental law has been criticized as authoritarian. In the middle of the previous century, Los Angeles had smog so bad it was common not to be able to see across the street and some conservatives argued that doing anything about it was tyranny and would devastate the economy; California’s air quality laws were so effective that they were widely copied and it devastated the economy into 5th place globally. Very few of the critics ever admitted being completely wrong about that, even if they will admit that it’s easier to breathe now.
That pattern repeats for water quality, bans on all kinds of pollutants, anti littering campaigns, etc. because there are a lot of industries which have a financial incentive in preserving the status quo. Often those pushes cut across industry lines, too: for example, a decade ago there was an astroturf campaign arguing that DDT restrictions were responsible for malaria deaths (based on people not knowing that evolved resistance was already a major problem in the 1950s), and that appeared to be funded not by the chemical industry but by the tobacco companies who were looking for attacks on public health agencies in Africa in response to successful anti smoking campaigns.
People may describe things as authoritarian in process, but once the law is established by elected representatives, it is by my definition NOT authoritarian.
Where? When? It’s by definition not applicable to the topic of this thread.
People not having patience for the political process to play out leading them to desire and adopt authoritarian means as their solution to get their way scaring the fuck out of me.
~1.8M voters over the age of 55 age out every year in the US, so while the argument may be tired, older folks won’t have to hear it for long (and change, while constant and inevitable, can be hard to accept).