Moral authoritarians in general should be strongly opposed no matter what their values are, I struggle to think of a more retrograde force against human progres

Moral authoritarians in general should be strongly opposed no matter what their values are, I struggle to think of a more retrograde force against human progress than the kind of curtain-twitching, aggressively conventional sort of person whose world view is “I’m absolutely right and you’re wrong, because I’m an authority figure and I said so”. People with an overemphasised disgust reaction are genuinely terrifying as a bloc because they’re fertile soil for the seeds of tyranny to grow in. Moral authoritarians who get powerful enough produce an ideological monoculture, something which does to ideas exactly what inbreeding does to genes. You can see this eventually in any overly authoritarian system, no strict moralistic ideology can survive contact with objective reality in all its shades of grey forever. Political and moral opinions can only ever be approximately correct, but moral authoritarians think they can just ignore all the complexity and produce simple answers with all the finesse and grace of a freight train that ignores the curves in its track as too complicated to bother with. Ideological pluralism and cognitive diversity are so important for a free society that can grow and develop, and moral authoritarians stand directly opposed to these things. Unfortunately the pandemic has brought many of them out of the woodwork and validated their appalling worldview.