authoritarian, libertarian, right, left-- what quadrant of the Political Compass are you in?

[carolinayellowdog]

24. thanks, inspired by your previous posts about "authoritarian" as a term

that is absolutely crucial to describing what is going on in contemporary debates, yet which interested parties want to stamp out as crazy hate speech instead of sober truth.

My own parallel experience was with the word "fundamentalist" outside Christian context. In the past due to my historical interests I participated in online discussion groups devoted to various "alternative religious movements" that were spinoffs of Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and New Age Christianity. In every case a dynamic emerged in which the more liberal adherents were ganged up on and bullied by the true believer types, who exemplified every description of fundamentalism. Scriptural literalists, strong sense of us vs. them, triumphalist beliefs about the future, dogmatic certainty, yadda yadda. But whenever their targets and victims within these groups, or outside observers like me, brought up the point that this destructive bullying met all the criteria of fundamentalism, the bullies would go into overdrive getting even more abusive while at the same time hollering the equivalent of "Ma, he called me a bad name,make him stop!" (The standard defense was since they weren't conservative Christians they could not possibly be fundamentalists.)

That is what I see with authoritarians freaking out at the word authoritarian.