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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 argue that private power should not be understood as a kind of authority at all, that capitalism is in fact a direct expression of liberty, and that authoritarianism should be exclusively understood as a problem of state power.

There is no real through-line in any of these theories of authoritarianism; or if there is, it is utterly trivial, achieving consensus on only the most blatant and obvious problems (once again Nazi Germany comes to mind). So it’s revealing that in conversations about authoritarianism, there is rarely any effort whatsoever to establish a shared intellectual framework, or to even clarify what framework one is operating in. When the Objectivist casually refers to taxes as authoritarian, this is not a real attempt to communicate some underlying analysis that one can accept or reject; it’s no different from when an Objectivist refers to taxes as fascist. Both are much better understood as exercises in guilt-by-association with oppressive regimes.

Even when it comes from perspectives other than Objectivism, authoritarian usually suffers from the same kind of problem. Disagreements about whether something is authoritarian usually express a conflict between different political perspectives; but instead of talking about those perspectives directly, the speaker just assumes them in the way he uses authoritarian and expects his critics to accept it.

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Within capitalism, the term authoritarian seems to play a special role. Since it vaguely gestures towards some abstract, in-general problem that can afflict both public and private power, it seems in that sense ideologically neutral, existing outside the petty dogmatisms of capitalism and socialism alike. For this same reason, descriptions of the state as authoritarian suggest a false equivalence with the authoritarianism of private power, as if both are the same in consequence and justification. Contemporary debates about Covid vaccination requirements, for example, routinely suggest that a mandate imposed by the state is authoritarian in the same sense as a requirement imposed by private employer.

And yet at the same time, the libertarian account of authoritarianism is still ideologically dominant. By default, our discourse usually proceeds as if there is really no such thing as private authority; within capitalism everyone associates voluntarily, and can move on to a new job, advance to a new position, or find another business to patronize at their leisure. To the extent that authoritarianism has infected the private sector, this is understood as a problem of state authority insofar as it is acknowledged at all; the dystopian menace of employers demanding vaccinations, for example, only really started to make headlines given the possibility that the government would require them to do so.

There are always much more rigorous and productive ways to talk about these problems. When we are talking about the private sector, for example, we can get extraordinary insight into the power dynamics at work and the roles of various actors within a system of authority if we specifically talk about capitalism; if you have a problem with employer vaccination requirements, for example, you can talk about how this is really just what happens when workers do not control the means of production and have to bow to the will of some rich capitalist who does. When we are talking about the state, we can talk specifically about whether and how state authority is diverging from democracy’s mandate, or we can talk about whether some “right” to not be vaccinated should outweigh the common good. None of these conversations need to resort to vague rhetoric about authoritarianism — and in fact, when you see that term emerge, it’s often a good sign that these substantive conversations are being avoided in favor of hyperbolic, demonizing attacks on the state.

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Let’s suppose that the standard Republican take about the supposed left-wing bias of MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and so on are true. It’s not — this is a gross simplification that calls liberal orthodoxy “left” and then ignores all of the coverage that doesn’t even meet that standard — but let’s accept it for the sake of argument. Let’s imagine that these outlets are all radical left propaganda organs. Let’s also suppose, to accept another exaggerated claim, that if you depart from this radical left orthodoxy and dare to take a Republican position on anything, you will be blacklisted from this entire ecosystem and that all of these journalists will do everything they can to destroy your reputation. This is a wild overstatement of what actually happens, but for the moment let’s pretend it’s accurate.

Does this mean that your career will be ruined and you will be shut out from society as a pariah? Of course not.

This is because even if we pretend that the radical left dominates the media in the United States, there is still obviously a very large right-wing media market. The right has the most-watched cable news network. The right has a whole galaxy of news outlets, from the WSJ to the Free Beacon to the New York Post to Reason to the National Review to the Daily Wire to the Daily Caller to Newsmax to the Epoch Times to Breitbart to American Greatness to The American Mind to The American Conservative, from nearly all of am political talk radio to the endless parade of individual ventures (Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro) to all kinds of dark-money funded ventures (The Federalist, Chronicles) and so on. This of course is just media that is aligned with the GOP more or less explicitly; if we add so-called “independent” outlets and voices (Infowars, Andrew Sullivan) along with “Democrats” that no sane person would consider left-wing, even by US standards (Jonathan Chait, Jennifer Rubin), the right-wing media sphere grows even larger.

If you want to become extremely rich then you probably have a somewhat better shot in liberal media than in right wing media, though the odds of either happening are both of course infinitesimal. If you just want to make a living, however, and perhaps go to the occasional upscale happy hour or land an interview with a famous politician, the chances of making it are probably roughly even. They may even be slightly better on the right, because good jobs on the left are concentrated into a smaller number of large outlets, whereas they seem to be spread across a larger number of small outlets on the right. And while getting a left media gig often demands a prestige degree, knowing someone, and the ability to intern for an extended period of time without pay, the barriers to entry on the right seem to be much lower, particularly given the conscious, systematic efforts the right makes to cultivate and promote new media personalities.

What if you just want to be popular? Well, if you want to be some kind of top-tier A-list celebrity megastar, then sure, liberal media is probably the way to go — though again, as with getting rich, the odds of this happening are tiny even then. But if all you want is a lot of adoring fans, people who will praise you or who will defend you from the critics, and perhaps people who will subscribe to your Substack or Patreon — in that case, it just isn’t plausible to argue that going into left media gives you any clear advantage. If all you want are colleagues who will promote your work and perhaps even help you advance your career, you’ll find plenty of fellow-travelers on the right.

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Spend five-minutes listening to right-wing media — or for that matter, to some of our ostensibly “independent” media — and you’ll inevitably be told something quite different than what I’ve laid out here. The media, we are told, is so thoroughly dominated by the left that breaking with the left is always an extraordinary risk to one’s career and reputation. For this reason, even the most odious or insane expressions instances of “heterodoxy” can be construed as brave freethinking. A recent tweet from Glenn Greenwald was typical:

Here, Glenn is promoting a guest appearance by conspiracy theorist and recently convicted defamer Alex Jones on the podcast Red Scare. This is indeed something that a lot of liberals and leftists will object to — but why doesn’t Glenn specify that? Why does he refer to “the Prohibited List” as if there is only one?

Anyone who pays any amount of attention to Glenn knows the answer to all of these questions: he has convinced himself that the liberal-left domination of our media and our discourse is so absolute that any divergence from it is a heroic act of freethinking courage. Glenn routinely argues that if you do not adhere to certain liberal-left orthodoxies, it will inevitably ruin your reputation and your career:

I happen to think Glenn’s criticism of the media on Russiagate was generally sound, and that it was indeed unfair and predictable that this would end in his exile from MSNBC and CNN. I also happen to think, unlike some of his critics, that some of his appearances on Fox have been entirely defensible; his appearance on Tucker to pitch a pardon for Edward Snowden, for example, was utterly benign, even if was never likely to succeed.

But let’s not kid ourselves. Bringing a wildly popular figure like Alex Jones onto a podcast with an audience that clearly approves of this sort of thing isn’t a career risk; if anything, it’s likely to bring Red Scare even more attention and more subscribers. Defending Donald Trump (from literally anything) is not going to get you banned from television; if anything, this makes it more likely that you’ll get appearances on Fox News. Doing any of this is obviously going to bring all kinds of aggressive partisan journalists and posters into your Twitter mentions, but if you think this isn’t something that happens when you have a large media profile and say anything political whatsoever, you are living in another universe.

The truly bizarre thing about this rhetoric is that if we take seriously the notion that left heretics get permanently blacklisted and ostracized, it follows directly that pandering to the right is the only option any victimized journalist will have left. This is true even if we (incorrectly) pretend that right-wing career paths and right wing audiences are much, much more limited than those which can be found on the left. If you’ve been booted off of MSNBC and CNN this makes it more likely that you’ll pander to the right, not less! This doesn’t require courage or independent thought, it just demands a minimally self-interested assessment of your remaining options.

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I’m certain that this paragraph is going to be entirely ignored, but I’ll say it anyway: I am not even remotely suggesting here that our media and our discourse is friendly to heterodox thought. Or that there is not a very clear ideology that both will aggressively enforce, often at great social and financial cost.

In fact, there is a politics for which a lot of these points do hold true: socialism! If you even identify as a socialist, it is vanishingly unlikely that you will be able to make a living working for any media firm, liberal or conservative. Even if you do get a job with one, you will generally not be allowed to make decisively socialist arguments; at best, you will be allowed to say “as a socialist” and then endorse some fairly ordinary progressive position. Today, the socialist boutique media job market almost entirely consists of a few staff positions at Jacobin and a handful of even smaller outlets, along with a relative handful of podcasters, streamers, and bloggers. That’s it.

And of course, if you make standard socialist points about capitalism, you won't just find yourself at odds with partisans on one side of the aisle; you'll run into problems with all of them. Elizabeth Warren may stand and applaud Donald Trump when he says that America will never be a socialist nation, but suggest that this is because they both share the same economic ideology and you'll find yourself faced with an unholy alliance of squishy liberal PMCs and hard right boat dealers.

If you’re looking for a media market without the sort of financial and social incentives that encourage careerism and opportunism, you're never going to find it. But if you’re looking for the one that will win you as little money and popularity as possible, socialism is as good as it gets.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.peoplesline.org/subscribe