What exactly would it look like to be an authoritarian liberal?
Americans have a particularly confusing form of "liberal" today, but at least my understanding of the two terms has them pretty specifically at odds with one another. I'm not sure how an authoritarian would have centralized so much power when the focus is on individual rights and freedoms.
It's just a language issue. "Liberal" in the US doesn't mean the same thing it means in other English-speaking countries. Americans coined the term "neoliberal" to talk about what other people just call "liberal." In the US, "liberal" just means that you vote for Democrats, and that you're concerned. It's not a distinct ideological stance.
That really makes the distinction of am "authoritarian liberal" pointless at that point. One is a ideology and the other is a political party, the combination of the two is completely irrelevant as any party could align with one specific ideology.
Americans have a particularly confusing form of "liberal" today, but at least my understanding of the two terms has them pretty specifically at odds with one another. I'm not sure how an authoritarian would have centralized so much power when the focus is on individual rights and freedoms.