I agree with your premise, but liberalism has a long way to go towards educating the masses if we want to stop the tide of authoritarianism.

People are even less informed, in some ways because they’re educated with propaganda, about the dangers of rampant authoritarianism. And authoritarians can promise much more than liberals will ever be able to. We promise freedom and equality of opportunity, they promise revenge and free stuff and moral superiority and suppression of those deemed immoral.

The most worrying thing to me is how the very extreme far left, at the very edge of the Overton window, are beginning to resemble the far right in horrifying ways. In modern history, those people have always supported radical economic authority, but now they also support social authoritarianism as well. They deify people based on race (and believe that some people are inherently more valuable than others solely due to their race, gender, or sexual orientation), they want suppression of free speech and a left monopoly of the press, they want to police religion, a small subset even want to allow the abuse of children (gender reassignment/hormone therapy in children, along with the very small but growing pedophilia sympathy group) and they want all arms to be in possession of the government. The radical left’s views are so intertwined with the radical right’s that, unless you stop to consider the nuances, they are nearly indistinguishable from the standpoint of how much government oversight they want.

The radical right, and social conservatism in general, is no friend to classical liberalism. But the biggest threat to classical liberalism, and to our freedoms, is the ever growing threat of the radical left (when compared to the ever shrinking radical right). The radical left no longer stands with us in the realm of social freedoms, they stand completely against liberalism. They are the epitome of radical authoritarianism. The masses are more pre-communist/radical socialist, and the elites and politicians are corporatist bordering on fascist.

Sorry for the long rant, but the radical left is frightening. And I’m not sure that liberalism has the tools to stop the ever growing wave of authoritarianism sweeping across our country.