Comment by mindslight

The straightforward answer is that those supporting the autocratic authoritarianism want autocratic authoritarianism. They've been primed with decades of anti-American grievance politics condemning our distributed societal institutions as being foreign attackers, and they crave the simplicity of some big man with a big stick to make the complex world go away. They've also been primed to believe that they are supporting "freedom" (even though it never plays out that way in practice), so the more these actions reek of autocratic authoritarianism the more aggressive they get in their rationalizations.