"Authoritarian" is an analytically useless concept Carl Beijer

Guess the term: some scholarly works of history and political theory use it in specific and coherent ways, but almost no one else does. Instead, its primary role in our discourse is to demonize political opponents and shut down debate by vaguely invoking the memory of Nazi Germany and other violent, repressive regimes. In this use, it appeals to a concept that is just too vague and subjective to explain or describe anything; in this use, it never moves the conversation forward or contributes to any kind of substantive analysis. It seems to be favored, in practice, by bomb-throwing demagogues and juvenile college partisans who want to vilify people and ideas without engaging in meaningful criticism.
If the word that comes to mind here is fascist then you have undoubtedly heard a Republican talk at some point in the past six years; delegitimizing this term has been a major project on the right since at least 2015.
But curiously, this description is an even better fit for a term it is almost never applied to: authoritarian. As with fascist, there is indeed a relatively obscure literature that defines the term authoritarian in ways that are specific and rigorous enough to be useful. But if fascism-so-defined is an endangered species in our discourse, meaningful use of authoritarian is virtually extinct.
As we usually encounter it in the discourse, authoritarian is analytically useless. It brings to mind images of Nazis barking orders and Big Brother propagandizing on the big screen, comparisons that understandably trigger a fight-or-flight reflex in decent people; but it gives us no real way to evaluate whether these comparisons are fair or reasonable. Understood literally, any imaginable form of authority — sensible or unreasonable, beneficial or malevolent, legitimate or illegitimate, trivial or expansive — can be related to history’s greatest monsters insofar as both are authoritarian.
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Another point in common with fascism and authoritarian: both suffer less from a lack of definition than from a surplus of definitions. There are almost as many authoritarianisms as there are political traditions, which means that even though they use the same term they are often describing very different and often incompatible ideas. Let’s look at some of them.
* The Frankfurt School uses authoritarian to describe a certain kind of personality, or rather a kind of psychological complex. Its political and cultural expressions are often quite unpredictable, and even innocuous; interest in astrology, for example, is authoritarian and can be directly related with the rise of early twentieth century fascism. In fact, the Frankfurt School occasionally uses the terms authoritarian and fascist interchangeably, which brings us to a broader tendency.
* Particularly in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, a whole genre of writers like Arendt and Orwell set out to explain the horrors of early twentieth century fascism as a problem of a certain kind of authority that has certain kinds of powers. In “What Is Authority?”, for example, Arendt objects to the liberal “confusion of authority with tyranny, and of legitimate power with violence,” but insists that she does not have in mind “‘authority in general,’ but rather a very specific form”.
* The anarchist tradition, of course, makes “authority in general” its central concern — though even among anarchists the takes are notoriously diverse. Chomsky, for example, insists that there are cases where authority can be justified, and specifically argues that “the state…provides devices to constrain the much more dangerous forces of private power.” Proudhon, meanwhile, writes that “Authority, Government, Power, State, — these words all denote the same thing…there will be no liberty…till in the political catechism the renunciation of authority shall have replaced faith in authority.” (Confessions p.7)
* In contrast with Chomsky, libertarians and Objectivists arg