Well, speaking as a member of the liberal left, I reject the idea of dropping the distinction. To drop it implies dropping the entire notion that oppression exists, a thing I am not willing to do. Yet this deriding of the binary distinction between oppressor and oppressed does raise some interesting issues.
I endorse the idea that authoritarianism means dividing everyone into two groups -- people who morally matter, and un-people who don't morally matter. And it means assuming that the rules don't apply to people who morally matter, and taking an hostile and punitive attitude toward un-people who don't.
The difference is that authoritarians of the left divide everyone into oppressors and oppressed. Authoritarians of the right divide people into us and them.
George Orwell, I think hits on something like this in his Notes on Nationalism. By "nationalism" he means something like what I am calling authoritarianism or illiberalism. "By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’." He goes on to identify sub-categories. "Positive" nationalism he identifies as nationalism on behalf of one's own group, such as neo-Toryism or Celtic nationalism. "Transferred" nationalism he identifies as nationalism on behalf of some other group, such as Communism, class consciousness, race consciousness, or pacifism. And "negative" nationalism he identifies as identifying solely against, rather than for, a group, with the examples of anglophobia, anti-Semitism, or Trotskyism. It is probably not a coincidence that "positive" nationalism is generally seen on the political right and "transferred" nationalism -- invariably to some oppressed group -- is seen on the political left.
I will add that the right-wing approach has the advantage of being easier. How difficult is it, after all, to champion one's own group over outsiders. But the left-wing approach has the advantage of having greater moral authority. Champion one's own group, right or wrong, is easy but amoral. Champion an oppressed group means taking the moral stance of fighting against oppression. And oppression, after all, is absolutely real and deserves to be opposed.
And that may be why right wingers keep on adopting the language of oppression from the left and claiming that they are the ones who are oppressed. The concept of a two-tiered system of justice, after all, comes from longstanding complaints on the left that our country has a two-tiered system of justice, for Black people and White people. (Or for rich people and poor people). When OJ Simpson died, ant-Trump conservative Mike Madrid mocked Republicans for being outraged a a Black jury ignoring overwhelming evidence of a Black man's guilt with no self-reflection. It took me some time to realize what he was getting at -- conservatives ignoring the overwhelming evidence against Donald Trump.
And, indeed, from the authoritarian/illiberal/nationalist viewpoint, the whole idea of individual criminal justice gets cast aside in favor of championing the right group. The longstanding tradition of White juries refusing to convict lynch mobs is notorious. When OJ Simpson went on trial for killing his ex-wife and the man with her, an all-White jury had recently acquitted four White cops caught on camera beating a Black man. So a Black jury decided that turnabout was fair play and acquitted a Black man for the murder of two White people. And Republicans are now insisting that if a Republican former President is put on trial, it is only fair to retaliate by putting a former Democratic President on trial. Turnabout is fair play, after all, and individual culpability is just an artificial construct created by oppressors -- whoever they may be.
And, just to be clear, I do not believe that to escape the stigma of authoritarianism, we have to deny the existence of group oppression and pretend that all individuals start out on an equal basis. The authoritarian Left and the authoritarian Right agree that some people should be excluded from moral consideration. They just don't agree whether it should be on the basis of oppressors versus oppressed or us versus them.
The liberal non-authoritarian Left agrees with the authoritarian Left that some people are oppressed and that we should fight oppression. The disagreement is about how.
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