Just something coming into my mind given all the recent 'new hate speech laws' and seeing the slow growth of resistance to all these decrees.
We've seen all these policies but EVERY ONE of them is a failure due to spotty enforcement (even if by design), negligence, inefficient allocation of resources, extremely poor supervision etc.
Yet we can see in other countries, despite different issues plaguing them, they are able to have authoritarian rule like in China with their social credit score and the like.
Is the main reason why the left is slowly losing every gain they make or attempts to copy authoritarian rule similar to others down to simple lack of basic competency? As I think a lot of people would be ok submitting if they knew that the system was actually ran well.
What differentiates the often-benevolent monarchies of the past from modern tyrants is a culture of indifference or even contempt for the governed. Monarchies and similar systems in traditional societies were built on the concept of noblesse oblige wherein future monarchs and the children of the aristocracy were inculcated with the idea that their rights and privileges came with a responsibility and a duty of care for those who owed them fealty. They didn't always take that concept to heart, but many of them really did, and that produced a sort of reciprocal loyalty between the aristocracy and the governed.
The modern elite were born out of the new liberal middle class of the industrial revolution. They did not inherit and were never educated with that same sense of reciprocal duty in mind, and their inherent materialism predisposed them to think of human beinfs as just another resource to harvest in order to enrich themselves. It is possible that some of their poor governance decisions are the result of incompetence, but I really think that for the most part they both hate the rest of us and are terrified of us. They can't ignore the possibility that some of the middle class might be able to supplant them, because they themselves are a product of exactly that.
You can add to that, that in traditional society, people are born into power. In modern society, you have to strive for power. The only people who have power are those who really, really want it - the people you would least want it to have.