I know that authoritarian is a lib-brained anti-communist term that one shouldn't use unironically. But what other term would you use to describe those who seems to have a love for the exercise of state violence and coercion for its own sake? The howling hogs who cheer when police beat up protesters, the psychos calling for refugees to be gunned down at the border, the monsters who revel in the misery of the poor and love to step on those who cannot defend themselves.

You could call them rightists or conservatives or something like that but that doesn't carry the appropriate stigma or convey the wickedness of their proclivities. You could also call them fascists which would be correct most of the time but it is too broad a term to center in on their specifically sadistic relationship with state power. It also plays into the liberal idea of fascism being defined by "fascist methods" instead of by fascist ideology and belies the existence of the well-mannered and polite fascists who are the most dangerous kind.

  • ImSoOCD [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Just like to drop this in whenever people are discussing the word “authoritarian”:

    In human psychological development, the formation of the authoritarian personality occurs within the first years of a child's life, strongly influenced and shaped by the parents' personalities and the organizational structure of the child's family; thus, parent-child relations that are "hierarchical, authoritarian, [and] exploitative" can result in a child developing an authoritarian personality. Authoritarian-personality characteristics are fostered by parents who have a psychological need for domination, and who harshly threaten their child to compel obedience to conventional behaviors. Moreover, such domineering parents also are preoccupied with social status, a concern they communicate by having the child follow rigid, external rules. In consequence of such domination, the child suffers emotionally from the suppression of his or her feelings of aggression and resentment towards the domineering parents, whom the child reverently idealizes, but does not criticize.

    There has been work done attempting to (poorly) conflate support for the USSR with this personality, but it is fundamentally an antifascist work

    • effervescent [they/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Baumrind is a developmental psychologist who is still taught in education programs and coined three types of parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. A fourth one was later added (neglectful) to differentiate between permissive parents who are emotionally available to their kids and those who aren’t. Children thrive within environments where they have the structure of rules but are still able to have their emotional needs met instead of repressing them. This is one of the main reasons why parenting is a justified hierarchy imo. I would love to see more parenting collectives to help provide parents with the resources and techniques by connecting them with social workers, educators, and each other. Of course, under capitalism these would be largely dominated by middle class white women. But I think they would still do some good