Under a review of a book that helpfully informs us that revolutions are authoritarian. 
“Authoritarianism,” he writes, “is one of the most striking features” of revolutions. Napoleon was an archetype, followed by a grim parade of successors: “Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot … Khomeini.”
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“The principle of popular sovereignty could be disregarded in the name of the people,” Mr. Edelstein writes. “It was in the name of a future, improved democratic government by people Y that the present, inferior democratic government by people X must be suspended.” Ancient despots had promised order. Modern despots were empowered by the allure of so-called historical progress, to be achieved with terror and coercion. The hiss and thud of the guillotine, the gutters running with blood, the show trials and purges, the inevitable dictatorships of “virtue” or the “proletariat”: These were not failures, Mr. Edelstein suggests, but the necessary if exorbitant price of progress.
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“The inevitable compromises of democratic governance,” he writes of our present moment, “do not sit easily with either progressives or traditionalists. Liberal democracy gets worn down by historical expectations or regrets.” This general ennui produces perilous effects: a taste for centralized power, distain [sic] for procedural justice, aggressive ideological purity, contempt for moderation. Whatever his intentions, Mr. Edelstein may find that his study of revolutions induces in readers an appreciation for the age-old, Polybian balance of the U.S. Constitution, even as history threatens to overtake it. We should certainly hope so.
I've honestly come to believe that if you are mainly concerned with "authoritarianism" and not "will my children get hatecrimed" or "is it possible for me to get sick and not have my life ruined for it" then you are not a serious person. Get a life. The state is oppressive, people wield power to meet political goals, sometimes they're good goals and sometimes they're bad. Sometimes they do it for the rich, sometimes for the workers. Sometimes they send the cops to protect the Klan, sometimes they send the cops to arrest billionaires for poisoning the water supply. Am I seriously supposed to believe that nothing good will ever come from using state power?
If your life is made worse by the system you don't need some nebulous 5 dollar word to articulate it. Look at the price of insulin, dawg. Look at what insulin is. Pay or die!