Obviously it was a good thing that it was banned, but I'm just wondering if it would technically be considered authoritarian.
As in, is any law that restricts people's freedom to do something (yes, even if it's done to also free other people from oppression as in that case, since it technically restricts the slave owner's freedom to own slaves), considered authoritarian, even if at the time that the law is passed, it's only a small section of people that are still wanting to do those things and forcibly having their legal ability to do them revoked?
Or would it only be considered authoritarian if a large part of society had their ability to do a particular thing taken away from them forcibly?
Authoritarian is a very small portion of people made decision and control the majority, where in democracy the decision is made based on the majority.
Is the decision to end slavery a majority decision? Then it's democratic.
WTF, no. Democracies can be authoritarian. If they abridge rights or compel individuals to action, that's authoritarianism. Doesn't matter it 51 people out of a hundred think they can boss the the other 49 because they voted on it.
That sounds just like what the losing side will say tbh. Brexit is bad, but it's a bad choice made by the majority, in that it's still a democratic process voted by the masses. Democracy is a system, it's the will of the people, not a moral alignment. It's democracy as long as the people affected by the result is there to vote.
Democracy can be authoritarian but then it will be called authoritarian, not democracy.
Depends on what you get to vote on, who gets to vote, if their votes count, etc.
A more democratic system could have done something like, we'll test run Brexit for a few years, make an assessment, and then allow everybody to vote again to continue Brexiting or roll it back. But that's not going to happen because ... well... representative democracy is authoritarian by design. Nobody is going to put a "Roll Back Brexit" question on a ballot who championed a pro-Brexit stance and will fight any attempt to give the people a chance to vote again (heck, they'll probably fight tooth and nail to keep any useful assessments of the effects of Brexit from being pushed into the public sphere to help voters make informed decisions as well).
It is exactly what people in the minority will say. I, as someone often finding myself in the minority, say it often and early. Just because more people agree on something doesn't mean they get to force the rest of us to go along with them.
Thanks, I think this answers my question. Even if it was a majority decision, it seems intuitively like the government (and the majority of people) imposed some kind of authority over the remaining slave owners (who were in the minority), but I understand that generally such a decision wouldn't be considered generally "authoritarian" just because it used that authority, unless it was imposed upon the majority of people.
Representative Democracies are, by definition, authoritarian. A small number of people are elected, democratically, to make the decisions for the majority.
With the contradiction being that the people who were pro slavery could just decide, "Nah, we're not going to end slavery", and continue to do slavery. Which I'm pretty sure is generally how that went in the USA.
If democracy is authoritarian, then what is the lack of democracy called?
Depends on how things are organized i guess.
Two things that come to mind are dictatorships and aristocracies, at least as far a governments go.
In short, authoritarian...?
Oh... you were asking a rhetorical question.
Yeah, sure. That works.