Being temporary and being authoritarian are entirely orthogonal. In general I would imagine that cultures willing to accept temporary authoritarianism for the "right reasons" are more prone to falling to dictators.
Most democraties have provisions for times of exceptional needs and counterpowers against that. Of course that's a weakness but a weakness that's judged better than mass deaths or complete fall of the country.
Those have to be limited in time and regularly subjected to control by democratically-elected institutions (actually vote to see if extended or not).
I completely agree of course. My reply was simply because I think it's important not to inadvertently conflate things, particularly when the issue is contentious. In this case the concepts of authoritarian and permanency, as well as the concepts of people who deny COVID, people who distrust vaccines, and people who were dissatisfied with the various government mandates.
Granted there is quite a bit of overlap among the latter trio.
It's a silly hypothetical though - the argument that some emergency measures during an international pandemic emergency are authoritarianism would only make sense if we were all still subject to the measures (like stay at home orders).
The problem for your argument is that the temporary emergency measures turned out to actually be temporary. Authoritarian regimes use emergencies (often fake ones) to entrench long-term change, this was a real emergency that had a temporary response...
I don't think so? I'll state it again - temporary and authoritarian are orthogonal. Attempting to claim that the lack of permanence demonstrates that the measures weren't authoritarian thus my claim that the two concepts are orthogonal is incorrect is begging the question (at absolute minimum).
Naturally I never claimed that a dictator was attempting to take over. Merely posited that staunch resistance to such measures as a matter of principle is probably not a bad thing for society on the whole.
But temporary authoritarianism to avert a crisis is rarely what people are thinking of when they say authoritarianism.
Ancient Rome would elect dictators to take control for two weeks at a time, because that was the only effective way to control a crisis. It remains a very effective way to control a crisis, but it only works if people can trust the political system because the political system is worth trusting. Especially people have to be able to trust they can unelect that guy (at least by waiting two weeks).
