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 @[email protected] describes it in his comment in this thread

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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.

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