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I'm frankly not sure how anyone could read those and not understand that they are both authoritarian. I suspect you don't understand that authoritarian doesn't just mean "rules that I don't agree with are imposed on me". Authoritarian means that rules are imposed on you. Period. The more laws, the more authoritarian. The more government, the more authoritarian. The more intrusion, the more authoritarian.
What's really going on is that modern liberals aren't comfortable with the fact that their policies are authoritarian in nature. They've been taught that "authoritarian==bad". So they find ways to change the labels in order to make themselves feel better about what they are doing. They convince themselves that it's ok to impose social change as long as it's "good" social change. And a graph like that one illustrates this. They're really just measuring the degree to which a social agenda matches theirs and labeling that "libertarian", with anyone who happens to fall in the other direction being labeled "authoritarian". But those are not even remotely the correct labels to use.
What's really going on is that modern liberals aren't comfortable with the fact that their policies are authoritarian in nature. They've been taught that "authoritarian==bad". So they find ways to change the labels in order to make themselves feel better about what they are doing. They convince themselves that it's ok to impose social change as long as it's "good" social change. And a graph like that one illustrates this. They're really just measuring the degree to which a social agenda matches theirs and labeling that "libertarian", with anyone who happens to fall in the other direction being labeled "authoritarian". But those are not even remotely the correct labels to use.
That's your problem. Right there.
You are treating gov't as a separate entity that is coming in to rule the people. Yes, that would be fascism.
The problem is that this is a republic, and each leader is expected to actually represent the citizens of the united states, not their personal agendas or who donates the most to them.
As such, the very gov't is supposed to be defined by the simple term "We the people."
This isn't about some external force ruling us, it's about mutual agreement between citizens to sacrifice certain rights because others are vastly more important. That's what voting is--choosing the rights you want and those you are willing to sacrifice. Because the very notion of a social order demands that we sacrifice. If you don't want to, fine. But society isn't going to heed your rights if you won't heed theirs.
There will never be universal agreement. Welcome to humanity. It's a sad truth, and there's nothing we can do about it. Please take an hour to learn about Social Contract law and then come back. Rousseau, Nussbaum and Kant will all have easy-to-find papers on the subject.
Edited, May 5th 2011 8:44pm by idiggory