Why? Because the term isn’t neutral.

That’s what I said; the center defines the standard. The US is authoritarian by social-democratic standards.

They emerge and transform through shifts in the mode of production and the intensification of class struggle.

“Class struggle” is not a one-dimensional variable, and the mode of production is to a significant extent a choice made by those within the system. A revolution has degrees of freedom for who is in its circle of solidarity.

Anarchist models that treat authority as a contaminant to be minimized misunderstand the state as a neutral tool rather than an instrument of class power.

State communists mistake the state/vanguard as a neutral outsider rather than a material entity. Authority left to fester will shape the material conditions to enshrine the authority at the cost of those without authority.

The trick is to have a system where if people choose to engage in authoritarianism they lose power. A liberal democracy can arrest a head of state who engages in illegal actions more easily than a feudal monarchy does.

This is because of their respective structures, with indictment being a legal structure with physical preparation done to facilitate it on the one hand, and being treason in the other.

So naturally the more a system facilitates the overthrow of authorities, the less authoritarian it gets. You’re right that politics is a constant work in progress, so a good political system incorporates that progress as smoothly as possible.

No system can withstand a sufficiently powerful foreign intervention, but a system where the overthrowing of authority is as mundane as throwing out the trash, where people’s best method of accumulating wealth and power is by betting on something other than authority, can split your false dichotomy.

Systems that attempt this are called anarchy.

That said, you are missing one key element from the meme. People aren’t voting for authoritarianism because they are unhappy but because they have reaped the fruits of authoritarianism/imperialism on a global scale and they want the system to find new people to exploit.

If a region in the western world became anarchic with no economic changes, it would rightfully be overthrown by people from the global south who their economic system oppresses. Liberal democracy prevents this through citizenship and the authority of those with voting rights over those without.

So anarchy would qualify in spirit if not in letter, but it would require a reckoning with everyone whose oppression we benefit from.

Authoritarian is a meaningless pejorative. All states/countries/political groups etc. must be authoritarian by necessity in class society

Historicially, classes have been created or destroyed in order to create more or less centralized authority-driven decision making, and societies with less centralized authority have called ones with more centralized authority “authoritarian”.

Feudalism, dictatorship and even economic subjugation are called authoritarian by less authoritarian states.

In practice, the criterion for “authoritarianism” is however far back on that scale makes your current political center have anxiety about their ability to keep their current privileges from the authority.

But in theory you can see that the social organisation with the least authority possible would be an anarchist one, designed to dissolve class hierarchy when possible (e.g. abolition of private property) and apply anti-authoritarian safeguards if not (e.g. teach children how to take class action against adults, and make it easy for them to do so).

While such a society will still accumulate authority, it is designed to process it like any other waste product.

This means “authoritarian” is as meaningful as “filthy”. We can never be fully clean, but someone who chooses not to bathe to the standards of their time can be called filthy, and those standards can improve over time.

I guess she really didn’t understand…

Donald Trump? Undoubtedly; he has probably forgotten his wife’s name a couple of times.

But the Trump administration? Certainly not.

I know it’s up to the natives, that’s why I’m asking. Because if they choose to build an oppressive system then those with power within the new system are the new oppressors to fight, and it would be nice to avoid that.

I don’t understand what “give the land back” means. Would you mind explaining it?

There are a lot of poor, oppressed people who live on land their ancestors didn’t own. In the US, all Black people and most native Americans don’t live within 1000 km of where their ancestors lived 600 years ago. So when land is given back, what happens to the people that currently reside there? Do natives become landlords? Is there ethnic cleansing? Or is it only land where people don’t reside? Also, many native cultures didn’t even have land ownership, so how do you give land back without forcing them into a western mould?