Here’s my crank theory. If you think about authoritarianism from a rhetorical/mobilizing passion perspective, rather than a political arrangement, policy agenda, or place on the fantastical left/right axis, then it’s most useful to define authoritarians as people who believe that the ideal world is one with a stable hierarchy of submission and domination. Authoritarians believe that the in-group is entitled to dominate others, and should not be held to the same standards as those “below” them on the hierarchy.
Authoritarian systems rationalize the hierarchy on the grounds that those toward the top have more self-control than the people/groups below them, and therefore have the “right” to demand submission. There’s more here. One of the characteristics of an abusive relationship is that the abuse is narrated so that the victim is the one responsible for the abuser’s behavior.
The victim is framed as responsible for having provoked the abuse on the grounds that, had they been more submissive, compliant, polite, accommodating, the abuser would not have been forced into abusing them. So, the behavior of the object of abuse forced the abuser to be abusive. If you think about this way of narrating the situation, the victim was the one in control of the situation, and could have chosen not to trigger the abuse, whereas the abuser had no choices.
This is a narrative about abuse, a way of assigning people roles of good or bad, victims or villains.
It’s the narrative used to defend police use of excessive force, parents who sent a kid to the ER, slavers’ mass killing of African-Americans in the middle of a fabricated panic about insurrection, mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans, lynchings, DV, and so much else.
That is authoritarianism.
There are three points I want to make about it. First, the people justifying the violence on the grounds of insubordination never imagine that it might have happened to them. Were they (or an in-group member) treated that way, their hair would catch fire because of outraged they would be.
The second is an inherent problem with authoritarianism and the fantasy of rationality. Authoritarianism is the belief that the ideal political/cultural/social situation is one in which an in-group leader (or group) who has universal genius is at the top, making the decisions, and power flows down. The people below them are supposed to enact those decisions, and they are also all in-group. So, it is a structure of a person with access to the truth dictating true policies to those below them. And everyone should kiss up and kick down.
Third, what’s so weird about this way of narrating the ideal relations (and I’m not the first or only person to point this out) is that the argument is that many people make the argument that (usually white) males need to be in charge of everything because women and non-whites aren’t in control of their emotions. But, when white male patriarchs respond with an out of control level of violence (e.g. slavers,, the police, or a parent who sends a wife or kid to the ER), it’s the fault of the victims for having provoked them. So, white males should be in charge because they are in control of their emotions, except they aren’t–the victims are.
They aren’t actually in control of their emotions because, as their defenders say, they have no choice as to how they respond to insubordination.
Sit with that.
The whole argument for “white men should be in control because no one else has control of their emotions” is in direct contradiction with the defense of white men who get out of control on the grounds that they couldn’t control their response to insubordination.
Pick a lane.
Authoritarianism is never actually about some group being more rational than others. It’s about a lot of things—deflecting uncertainty, in-group favoritism, confirmation bias, projection—but it’s never about doing unto others as we would have done unto us. And it’s interesting what happens if you point that out to people who claim to be Christian authoritarians. Suddenly, they know better than Jesus what it means to be Christian. Christian authoritarians who want to reject treating others as they would be treated cheerfully reject the authority of Jesus.