In my experience, it's easier to start by questioning what "authoritarian" even means. All societies and political structures rely on authority to maintain social control to greater or lesser extents. A really good example of this is asking what is the difference between a tax collector and a armed robber. Both demand money from you and threaten violence if you don't give it to them. The main (and some would say only) difference is in authority. The tax collector has authority, the robber does not.

Then, question where liberal "democracy" derives its authority from. Most libs will claim that it comes from the approval of the people or the democratic mandate (same thing, really). That's when you can question why studies repeatedly show that there is no correlation between popular opinion and policy. Show them polls of how most Americans want public health care and ask why it never passes.

Lastly, you can raise the question of whether liberal democracy actually has any democratic mandate if it does not in fact follow the will of the people. If there's no democratic mandate, then what actually separates a liberal democracy froma dictatorship where one party keeps getting voted in because they fudge the votes? The people can vote a guy out? And what? Replace him with a different dude who won't do what the people want?

A place to start would be to talk about the incredible violence the system doles out to the poor with full legal authority.

• Eviction / homelessness: is it not authoritarian to have half the country one missed paycheck away from armed thugs showing up and violently throwing them out to live on the street, where they will be vehemently despised by all of society?
• Healthcare: is it not authoritarian to tell people with fixable terminal illnesses, "you don't have a good enough job that provides insurance. instead of treating you, we will allow you to die,"?
• Prisons: is imprisonment not the height of authoritarianism? What about slavery? The school to prison pipeline, private prison bed quotas, and over policing and over sentencing of black communities are all legal means of ensuring and encouraging innocent people end up in prison, in actual slavery.

A liberal may argue that they don't like any of those things and hope to change them through reform, at which point you have to sell them on the idea of the dictatorship of capital; that they will not be able to reform anything until they are allowed to by the ruling class. I like the way @Tankiedesantski@hexbear.net describes it in his comment in this thread

aimixin:

Every state seeks to preserve itself and so every state will use authority when it is faced with potential destruction. This is not inherently a bad thing, it obviously depends on the government in question, and who is trying to destroy it, and why. People who always justify the use of authoritarian means used by whoever they support, and then those who are intellectually dishonest pretend that somehow their use of authority isn't "authoritarian".

and:

You aren't paying attention. Democracy is authoritarian. It is the means by which the democratic will of the people express its authority, by means of force. What happens if someone picks up a gun and tries to oppose the democratic consensus? Do you just sit by and let the democracy be destroyed? No, the democratic state uses its own authority to oppress the opposition.

There is no such thing as a distinction between "democracy" and "authoritarian". It's a meaningless buzzword. The opposite of a democracy is an autocracy or an oligarchy, not "authoritarian". That's just something westerners fling at other people's democracies which they don't like for daring to vote for something against US interests and want to see them blown up and millions killed and displaced.

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Liberals pretty much want to either shove the homeless into a labor camp (eg prison) or force them on to a death march (eg destroying their tents and possessions before forcing them out of the city where they can die from exposure). In general, liberals view homeless people as subhumans who must be exterminated. It's something that they don't hide as well as the other ghoulish aspects of liberalism. Liberals not only want a repressive state apparatus to crack the skulls of the homeless but they would go so far as to imbue the very architecture of their cities with anti-homeless measures. Can't have the homeless soil the seats of public benches and other flat surfaces with their homeless asses, so there needs to be spikes everywhere. Or barring that, every flat surface needs to be in some awkward angle so that it's virtually impossible to sit on them.

Meanwhile, communists just want to give homes to the homeless and call it a day lol

I don't use "authoritarian". If it ever had a useful meaning it's long gone. Now it's just an empty pejorative. I can't say "well x is authoritarian but y is not" because the term has no fixed meaning. It just means "bad evil country I don't like"

The only times I've been able to convince liberals to rethink things have been instances where a liberal media platform have agreed with me. Articles about Abu Ghraib being a torture camp, or a YouTube video about poverty in West Virginia following strictly generational lines.

For burgeoning leftists, it's a lot easier. I just ask them what the FBI and CIA do. I ask them why universal housing doesn't exist, even though it would be cheaper to the public than our current widespread homelessness problem.

The trap of liberalism, at least in America, is a belief that saying and believing certain things constitutes systematic change. Liberals genuinely believe that if enough people are exposed to the same NPR articles or whatever, they'll all become politically aligned and the government will soon follow. They believe that as long as they're permitted to talk about or publish their beliefs, that society is still salvageable, because that's what they believe is the main vector of change. They think it's a word of mouth game, they think it's all polls and voting.

So that's the hurdle for a growing leftist. You have to convince them that the line of authoritarian isn't just a freedom of speech thing. Because that's the actual distinction they make. They think censorship is where it goes too far, now you're authoritarian because you've censored opposition.

By well-meaning baby leftist I assume you are talking about situations where you have a good-faith conversation with somebody who doesn't dismiss you as an authoritarian extremist red-fash tankie out of hand and you're not in an online pissing contest with shitlibs.

People arrive at the well-meaning soft left because they see all the things that are wrong with the world and feel a moral outrage against poverty, climate disaster, bigotry and all the rest. They see the problems and reject the current state of the world but they're still stuck in the liberal way of conceptualising politics; ie. you make a convincing argument in the marketplace of ideas (preferably using humour and politeness), you protest peacefully and then when you have convinced enough people they will vote for someone who will finally do the nice and sensible things and that is you step outside of the bounds of acceptable political action, unspecified bad stuff will happen.

Your job as the baby leftist's radical friend is to demonstrate the futility of that liberal notion of politics but to do so in an empathetic way. Talking about the history of stuff like Operation Gladio, the coup against Allende or cointelpro can be a powerful way of sowing distrust, so can discussions about corporate media, the role of money in politics, broken promises from "progressive" liberal politicians or said politicians' impotence against the far right. You should be the doomer, showing how liberals have always failed "progressive" causes and how they're currently failing them and making the case that they will continue to fail.

Once the baby leftist is beginning to question the system as opposed to just specific policies you call talk about political action that has made social progress possible. How people won rights and improved their lives by bypassing the bureaucratic trap of bourgeois parliamentarianism. People went on strike, they fought cops, they beat up Nazis, they broke rules and they were rude and impolite to their oppressors. Somewhere people even made fully-fledged revolutions that didn't only banish illiteracy, sexism and exploitation from these places but also scared the bourgeoisie globally into making concessions.

The important thing in all of this is to be empathetic and listening. Nobody wants to be lectured or talked down to. There's also good reasons why baby leftists are still stuck in the liberal mind prison, the most obvious being that it is what they have been indoctrinated into believing all their lives and they get confirmation from the media and the people around them that they're right. It takes more than a single discussion with some guy to change that. Also, voting on things after having had a rational good-faith debate enlightened by objective facts is not a bad way to make decisions and you shouldn't be dismissing it out of hand. The problem is not that votes and debates doesn't work as such but rather that capitalist class society makes such things impossible to realise as anything but empty theatre.

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First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection. -MLK 1963-04-16

what's more authoritarian than forcing people to work, on penalty if starvation, under incredibly authoritarian, private regimes, perpetually enslaved to the whims of the boss?

Before I answer your question about liberals, let's start by deconstructing the term "authoritarian."

In "On Authority", Engels says the following:

A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists.

while Bakunin and other anarchists in the 1st international, on occasion, did argue that anarchists reject "all authority" they, as Carole Pateman correctly notes, "tended to treat 'authority' as a synonym for 'authoritarian,' and so have identified 'authority' with hierarchical power structures, especially those of the state. Nevertheless, their practical proposals and some of their theoretical discussions present a different picture. Bakunin, clearly, did not oppose all authority but rather a specific kind of authority, namely hierarchical authority. This kind of authority placed power into the hands of a few. For example, wage labour produced this kind of authority, with a, quote,

"meeting [...] between master and slave [...] the worker sells his person and his liberty for a given time.

Lenin said that the state is merely an instrument for the suppression of one class by another, which is why he believed in seizing the state rather than destroying it. That is, replacing a Class Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie (Capitalism) with a Class Dictatorship of the Proletariat (Socialism), which would eventually become Communism.

So, all that being said, my issue with liberals, is less that they are "authoritarian" and more that they are reactionary. The class dictatorship of the proletariat may be called "authoritarian" just like the class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (Capitalism), or the class dictatorship of the landed aristocracy (feudalism). So the real question is, whether the authority is reactionary or revolutionary. The authority of liberals was at one point in time revolutionary, specifically in the context of the end of feudalism. The replacement of the feudal aristocracy by the bourgeoisie was, if nothing else, historically progressive. However, the liberals and conservative bourgeoisie are both reactionary, and the socialists are progressive.

The bourgeois revolutions, such as the French revolution, were looked upon by Marxists as historically necessary but ultimately outliving their purpose. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, all agreed on this:

Marx:

The gigantic broom of the French Revolution of the 18th century swept away all these relics of bygone times, thus clearing simultaneously the social soil of its last hinderances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice raised under the First Empire, itself the offspring of the coalition wars of old semi-feudal Europe against modern France.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm

Engels:

In my opinion (and that of Marx) the book contains the first specific and correct account, based on a study of the archives, of the critical Period of the French Revolution, namely from 10 August to 9 Thermidor. […] The whole French Revolution is dominated by the War of Coalition, all its pulsations depend upon it. If the allied army penetrates into France – predominant activity of the vagus nerves, violent heartbeat, revolutionary crisis. If it is driven back – predominance of the sympathetic nerves, the heartbeat becomes slower, the reactionary elements again push themselves into the foreground; the plebeians, the beginning of the later proletariat, whose energy alone has saved the revolution, are brought to reason and order.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1889/letters/89_12_04.htm

Marx, Engels both thought the French revolution was of a progressive character when it took place, destroying the semi-feudal Europe and giving birth to bourgeois Europe. A necessary historical development to make socialism possible in the future.

Stalin:

As modern history is the most rich in achievements and as it is this which is the most important thing in the modern history of bourgeois countries, if one considers the period preceding the October Revolution in Russia, it is the victory of the French Revolution and the affirmation of capitalism in Europe and America which should be emphasized and so we believe that it would be more valuable to have a manual of modern history beginning with a chapter on the French Revolution.

The biggest failure of the summary seems to be that it does not emphasize clearly enough the great difference between the French Revolution (bourgeois revolution) and the October Revolution in Russia (socialist revolution). The central theme of a manual of modern history must be precisely the theme of the opposition between the bourgeois revolution and the socialist revolution. To show that the bourgeois revolution in France (as in all other countries) in liberating the people from the chains of feudalism and absolutism, imposes on them instead, the chains of capitalism and bourgeois democracy, whilst socialist revolution in Russia broke all chains and liberated the people from all forms of exploitation and that is what must be the thread running through a manual of modern history.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1934/08/09.htm

Trotsky:

The Great French Revolution was indeed a national revolution. And what is more, within the national framework, the world struggle of the bourgeoisie for domination, for power, and for undivided triumph found its classical expression.

[…]

Jacobinism is now a term of reproach on the lips of all liberal wiseacres. Bourgeois hatred of revolution, its hatred towards the masses, hatred of the force and grandeur of the history that is made in the streets, is concentrated in one cry of indignation and fear – Jacobinism! We, the world army of Communism, have long ago made our historical reckoning with Jacobinism. The whole of the present international proletarian movement was formed and grew strong in the struggle against the traditions of Jacobinism. We subjected its theories to criticism, we exposed its historical limitations, its social contradictoriness, its utopianism, we exposed its phraseology, and broke with its traditions, which for decades had been regarded as the sacred heritage of the revolution.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/rp03.htm

Lenin, furthermore, viewed Socialism as, among other things, the proletariat seizing upon the state capitalist monopolies and the state machinery.

For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/ichtci/11.htm#v25zz99h-360

To make things even clearer, let us first of all take the most concrete example of state capitalism. Everybody knows what this example is. It is Germany. Here we have “the last word” in modern large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organisation, subordinated to Junker- bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics, and in place of the militarist, Junker, bourgeois, imperialist state put also a state, but of a different social type, of a different class content; a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism. Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state organisation, which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries). At the same time socialism is inconceivable unless the proletariat is the ruler of the state. This also is ABC. And history (which nobody, except Menshevik blockheads of the first order, ever expected to bring about “complete” socialism smoothly, gently, easily and simply) has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth in 1918 to two unconnected halves of socialism existing side by side like two future chickens in the single shell of international imperialism.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm

you can call it "parkinson's" or "cancer" but that's just your neuro-fash tankie opinion

my body is a temple to democracy, this is what true freedom looks like, cells doing whatever the fuck they want

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