I would personally hesitate to use "authoritarian" and "autocratic," and I would further point out that saying that the CSA was "on its way" to becoming anything says precisely nothing. We can't argue counterfactuals. We can't say a thing that didn't happen would happen with any certainty. Overall, while I think the video does a fairly good job outlining some of the trends in the wartime Confederate government, and some opinions of its citizens, it's ultimately making an argument that, at least from a historiographical perspective, can't be proven.

All that said, the CSA's short, violent existence did make a great many wartime decisions that seem to complicate its supposed political ideals. Emory Thomas argues that:

In many respects the Southern nationalism of the Confederacy resembled that of the United States from which the Southerners were trying so desperately to separate. The administration of Jefferson Davis reversed the state rights political philosophy which had called it into being and bade fair to make the Confederacy a centralized, national state. Draft laws, impressment, confiscatory taxation, habeas corpus suspension, economic management, and more affronted the South’s state rights tradition.

Emphasis mine. Many of these decisions were not arrived at easily, of course, and it was predominantly the enormous pressure put on the states in rebellion that led their congress to erode the philosophy of private freedom and the sanctity of property that so animated secessionists in the first wave of rebellion. It wasn't only that the federal forces occupied rebel territory and killed rebel soldiers, but its very existence on the borders allowed enslaved workers a means of escape, which undermined the Confederate economy as well as sapped Confederate morale. Slaveowners almost universally expressed bewilderment and shock when their own enslaved servants fled to areas of federal occupation, having apparently truly believed that their enslaved workforce was loyal and happy in bondage.

Pressures didn't just undermine southern faith in the social strength of their slave society, but in their image of themselves as committed, patriotic gentlemen-soldiers. Early rebel rhetoric leaned heavily on the image of the southern gentleman as a peerless soldier and a fearless fighter. Instead, especially as the fortunes of war seemed to turn against the rebellion prior to Lee's defeat of McClellan at the end of the Peninsula campaign, anxious Confederate citizens and journalists wrote with increasing venom about the tide of shirkers, skulkers, stragglers, and bounty-jumpers. James Martin quotes a writer for the Richmond Dispatch, whose editorial followed on the heels of the brutal Seven Days battles:

Calling on stragglers to return to duty, it urged civilians ‘‘to show the straggler no quarter.’’ They should be ridiculed and ‘‘frowned down.’’ No one should feed them or give them a bed to sleep in. The editor appealed to the women of Virginia — ‘‘more especially . . . the younger portion of them’’ — ‘‘to treat the renegades with the scorn they deserve; to drive them back to their colors with the scorn which nobody but a woman knows how to manifest.’’

One Richmond citizen estimated that there were 3,000 men of military age hanging around the city's saloons and dance halls, who escaped duty by purchasing substitutes. That many of those substitutes were "bounty jumpers," men who enlisted in the army, received their sign on pay, and then deserted, must also have been at the forefront of anxieties. It was with this kind of disloyalty that the draft and conscription laws came into being. The Conscription Act was, as mentioned above, the first universal draft in American history, and required all men from 18-35 to enlist to serve for three years or for the duration of the war. It passed in April, 1862, a couple of months before the complaints quoted above. There were a number of loopholes in the act; men could hire substitutes to fight in their place and remain free of service (this was a longstanding practice from militia service as well), and men in essential jobs were given exemptions. A few months later, the "20 slave rule" was passed, allowing men who ran plantations with more than twenty enslaved workers an exemption as well. The oft-repeated suggestion that the rebellion was "a rich man's war and a poor man's fight," while greatly exaggerated by Lost Cause mythmaking after the war, owes much of its resentments to this part of the act. Regardless of who exactly was exempt or why men failed to volunteer in adequate numbers, the fact that skulkers were such a visible problem within the Confederacy chipped away at the comfortable notions that, to use a cliche, each southern boy was worth ten northern men.

But we should be careful to point out, too, that the Conscription Act wasn't issued from on high by a single autocratic ruler, it was a wartime exigency passed in the interests of survival by the rebel congress after several softer measures - bounties and other recruitment inducements - failed to produce adequate manpower. It was fiercely debated and it was challenged by powerful Confederate politicians after it had passed. Interestingly, it was the army itself that seemed to support the measure; volunteers heavily resented the fact that men who refused to do their patriotic duty were free to carouse in the saloons of southern cities while they marched, footsore and hungry, to challenge federal invaders. A soldier from Arkansas supported the measure because it would grab up those men who were "laying around home and enjoying all the Comforts . . . while we are undergoing all the hardships of Camp life."

There are numerous other elements we could explore here, especially the impressment laws, which allowed military authorities to impress any local enslaved laborers for use by the army. This measure was opposed by slave owners who resented the imposition of military authority in the disposition of their private property, and it was in many ways a central tension between two of the pillars of the Confederate state: the planter class and the officer class. Both saw themselves as the most important class within the rebellion, and both felt that the other owed their loyalty to them as the avatars of the rebel cause. Empowering the military class at the direct expense of the rights of property owners was a longstanding fear in the American republic, and if anything suggests that the vitality of the centralized Confederate state was assuming greater and greater power, it's this particular wartime necessity.

Ultimately, though, while again I would caution that "autocratic" is a bit strong, the trends in the Confederate government in its short and brutal existence did suggest a growing centralization of power in the hands of the executive branch, and especially in the hands of its military leaders. These measures were explained at the time as wartime exigencies, as necessary sacrifices for the survival of the rebellion, but since the rebellion was crushed before it could bring these questions back up in peacetime, we can only conclude that traditional rights to private property and personal freedom were set aside as a wartime struggle. It is ironic, given the vociferous state's rights stance of the Confederacy, but we can't really conclude much more than that.

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Sources

This answer drew predominantly from James Martin, "A Feeling of Restless Anxiety: Loyalty and Race in the Peninsula Campaign and Beyond," in The Richmond Campaign of 1862 ed. Gary Gallagher,

Colin Edward Woodward, Marching Masters: Slavery, Race, and the Confederate Army during the Civil War - as a sidenote here if you're interested in the question of slavery and its centrality to the Confederacy and especially to the Confederate army, I would highly recommend picking this book up, and

Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation, 1861-1865

First, there's something we need to acknowledge before we grapple with this question. The Confederacy was explicitly a nation founded on the principle that slavery was a positive, moral institution. It completely rejected the idea that Black people were, well, people, much less respect them as citizens worthy of rights or protection. The commitment to these ethos meant that the Confederacy had to necessarily exercise autocratic, violent authority against its Black population, because slavery, as a social and economic system, needs the continuous aggressive pressure of both society and the State to sustain itself. This is a point that Atun-Shein illustrates, by drawing a comparison to another long oppressed group, Native Americans. But the Confederate example is especially vile, for maintaining slavery and thus the privileges of rich planters and of White people more generally was their whole raison d'etre. The Confederacy can only be considered an authoritarian nation because a big portion of its population was denied even the most basic protection by the State, and consequently it could never have had democratic legitimacy or claim libertarian states rights without disgusting hypocrisy.

In view of this, when virtually all Southerners, and most Northerners, talked of Confederate authoritarianism and undemocratic measures, they talked of authoritarianism against its White population. This understanding unfortunately was reflected through the decades by historians who've focused on whether the Confederacy was legitimate, secession was democratic and the Davis regime was authoritarian by examining only the White population's experiences and actions. See the large focus that's been giving towards determining if votes for "Conditional Unionists" truly were a sign of Unionist sentiment or just another flavor of seccesionism. These questions are valuable, of course, because through the war Confederate policy was tailored to the opinions and needs of White Confederates only, so understanding those is needed to understand what the Richmond regime did and why.

But my whole point is that we cannot stop at merely the Southern White experience, but need to go beyond, in the name of both historical accuracy and justice. Think of how, for example, the Davis regime has been dennounced as oppressive and despotic for its repression of White Unionism in the mountainous upcountry. A Tennessee Unionist regaled Northerners with the sorry tale of how people in East Tennessee "were driven from their homes . . . persecuted like wild beasts by the rebel authorities, and hunted down in the mountains; they were hanged on the gallows, shot down and robbed". This was certainly despotic, that is unsaid. But these painful experiences would have been familiar to the enslaved, who were used to being driven from their homes, persecuted, attacked and murdered by White power structures before, during and after the war. But because for many White Americans societal and State violence against Black people was always legitimate, while societal and State violence against White people was almost never legitimate, the Black experience and perspective is often forgotten. For the around 39% of the Confederacy's population that was forcibly enslaved, the nation could only be undemocratic, violent, autocratic and authoritarian.

After this introduction, I'll continue with my answer, hoping these previous paragraphs have made it completely clear that Black people and the violence they suffered must not be ignored. I don't think Atun-Shei forgot it either, but what he was getting at was that, even if we only consider the White population, the people whose rights the Confederates were supposedly vindicating through their secession, the Confederacy was still an authoritarian government. Was this true? As he discusses, people have willingly or carelessly forgot about Black Southerners and, by focusing merely on White citizens, have argued that the Confederacy was a libertarian, democratic, legitimate republic. Atun-Shei refutes this point, for although the union of all White people as "the only true aristocracy" was a big part of Southern rhetoric, in truth the Confederacy also violently repressed people if they were poor, trended towards Unionism, or in any other way challenged the dominant power structures that had favored rich White, male planters for decades. And in this regard, I believe he's right.

The question of whether the Confederacy repressed White Unionism is one I won't examine deeply, simply because it's a plain, established fact that an authoritarian rebel government and Army acted violently against those Southerners who didn't accept their rule and supported the Union instead. From people taken prisoner indefinitely, to massacred captives, to those who were terrorized and driven away by Confederate soldiers, the Unionists of the South suffered badly under the rule of the Confederacy. See, for example, the way the Davis administration dealt with the Tennessee Unionists that attempted to rejoin the Union. After an uprising that saw bridges burned and telegraph lines cut, and which made a pro-Confederate editor exclaim that "civil war has broken out at length in east Tennessee", the authorities responded by executing the ringleaders, jailing a thousand men, and expelling or forcing to flee thousands more. Unionists guerrillas in the upcountry also were dealt with harshly. Governor Zebulon Vance of North Carolina dispatched thousands of troops to the peace hotbed of the Western part of the state, even "making hostages of women and children until husbands and fathers turned themselves in". Trouble continued and later two regiments dispatched by Robert E. Lee had to resort to outright torture to bring the guerrillas out.

For these Unionists, the Confederacy was also certainly a authoritarian, autocratic nation, which sought to use its coercitive authority to force them to sacrifice property, prosperity, life and limb in the name of a greedy, arrogant and unfeeling planter aristocracy. Their famous, bitter motto of "rich man's war, poor man's fight" perfectly encapsulates their resentment. As the war progressed, and the planter aristocracy showed that it was indeed reluctant to make sacrifices for a war they had started and that would mainly benefit them, the sentiment among common White people that the Confederacy was acting unjustly and illegitimately became more generalized. It's important to note that hatred against the slavocrats did not necessarily translate into hatred against slavery itself, much less support for Black liberty or rights. But, nonetheless, the necessary sacrifices seemed to much to a good many Southerner, who concluded that Richmond had no right to force him to give up his property, his home and even his life in the name of rich slaveholders. And the response of Richmond, as we saw, was violent repression that was almost universally understood to be legitimate too among the committed rebels.

Why, then, can we find so many prominent Confederates speaking out against Jefferson Davis' supposed tyranny? It's simple: the actions of the Confederate government only became tyranny when they affected the White, male planters the whole movement intended to cater to. When proud planters were asked by Richmond to surrender their property, the people they enslaved or their authority, they reacted in horror and suddenly found out that central authority was an evil. It was not an evil when it was used to further their interests, but when it was used against them these so-called libertarians donned the mantle of States rights. Maybe there was some genuine doctrinaire commitment, but the reason they supported and believed in States rights was because it allowed them to lord supreme over their states. They did not want this authority to be contested by a powerful central government any more than they wanted it contested by their "inferiors". Many Confederates were able to swallow their pride and understand that sacrifices were needed if they wanted to win the war. But other planters, to a level that's frankly illogical, refused to heed their government, even if they knew that defeat meant their complete perdition.

See, for example, how bitterly most planters resisted Davis' attempt to impress the people they enslaved into the Confederate Army. The help of enslaved laborers was urgently needed, especially if the South was to face the Union and its manpower advantage. Yet they absolutely did not want anyone to take even a single enslaved person or even a single pound of cotton. Their self-interest was obvious: even if these impressments were temporary there was little guarantee that Richmond would pay in good specie. But for most planters there was also the simple reason that they felt that no government should have the authority to take what's theirs, even if it was taken to defend their property. And so, planters "declared that they will allow their fodder to rot in the field" rather than allow the Army to take it, and without a single shred of irony planter James H. Hammond said that heeding a request for his maize would be "branding on my forehead 'slave'". When Charleston was menaced by Yankee forces, and the Army desperately called for enslaved laborers to strengthen its defenses, less than a fifth of those requested arrived. From Texas, a planter swore that his class would only lend its slaves to the government "at the point of a bayonet."