Every government is authoritarian. You only consider it not to be "authoritarian" when you support its use of authority. Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing, it obviously depends on the government in question, and who is trying to destroy it, and why. People who always justify the use of authoritarian means by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn't "authoritarian".

Is the US "authoritarian" when it bombed Vietnam back into the stone age and Eisenhower himself said they refused to hold elections because they knew the US occupiers would only get 20% of the vote? The Vietnam war, the Afghanistan war, the destruction of Libya, or the US prosecution of Julian Assange, or the Smith Act Trials, Operation Earnest Voice, Operation Condor, Operation PBSUCCESS, Operation Ajax, Operation Mockingbird, etc, etc, were not "authoritarian"?

Maybe you'd agree these things are "authoritarian", but either way it proves my point. Plenty of people like to insist the US isn't "authoritarian" not because it actually isn't but because they support what it does.

If you never desire to leave your cage, you might feel incredibly free. Liberals who never genuinely try to challenge the authority of the liberal state they live under have a tendency to believe that it isn't authoritarian, because they have never once even desired to challenge that state's authority. (Yet, ironically, they will always support the state's authority when they see it used against those who do try to challenge it.)

credit to zhenli真理