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Recent revert

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In this edit @Generalrelative reverted a change I made to remove unsourced content. Could you please identify where the content is sourced int he referenced article? The discussion you link does not address this topic, and is on another wikipedia talk page. Text removed:

The far-right in the United States is composed of various Neo-fascist, Neo-Nazi, White nationalist, and White supremacist organizations and networks who have been known to refer to an "acceleration" of racial conflict through violent means such as assassinations, murders, terrorist attacks, and societal collapse, in order to achieve the building of a White ethnostate.

The cited article does not have any discussion of the composition of the far right. In fact, the topic of the article is about a specific neo-fascist network, and doesn't discuss the far-right or authoritarianism in any substantive manner. Supporting quotes which establish this content are needed here, as this looks like a cut and dried case of bad sourcing. TheMissingMuse (talk) 16:24, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think you meant to link to my edit rather than yours? As you'll see, I was reverting a rather massive removal which included stuff that was undoubtedly well supported. But in the case of this specific passage it appears I restored content which went beyond the cited source. So thanks for alerting me to the issue. In any case, it was quite easy to find a high-quality source for this material. Cheers, Generalrelative (talk) 21:27, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure what you mean by "undoubtedly well supported". The content removed was not supported by the sources. If there are actual sources, then they should be added. We don't keep unsourced content on the hopes that someone sometime might find a source that supports it. TheMissingMuse (talk) 22:32, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think you're confused. Look again at my revert. Generalrelative (talk) 22:51, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you think the content was supported by the citations, you are free to quote the sources. I've read them, and the sources did not support the content they were attached to. TheMissingMuse (talk) 22:58, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Your blanking included a direct quote. I won't be engaging with this nonsense any further. Generalrelative (talk) 23:08, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, a direct quote from a self published site - as was noted in the edit message. See section below for further discussion. TheMissingMuse (talk) 23:14, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sigh. Okay, one last reply:

The Public Eye is a peer-reviewed quarterly magazine published by Political Research Associates.

[1] That wasn't even remotely difficult for me to find. Generalrelative (talk) 23:25, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Peer reviewed articles are fine. That's not what was removed. This link is the source that was removed. If you would like to make a case that that page can be used as a reliable source I'm all ears. If this is a citation that you really want to preserve in this article, I'm happy to widen the conversation to a broader audience. TheMissingMuse (talk) 23:35, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Use of Public Eye

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The legacy website http://www.publiceye.org is used throughout the article citing this source. This is a self published page, and generally not a reliable secondary source. I will be removing this source from the article. If anyone has any specific issues with this course of action, please feel free to raise them here. TheMissingMuse (talk) 23:09, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Public Eye's current webpage is here, and it does not appear to be self-published. It describes itself as "a peer-reviewed quarterly magazine published by Political Research Associates." See e.g. its submission guidelines. You may object to it as politically biased, but your claim that it is self-published is easily shown to be false. Generalrelative (talk) 23:21, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was referring not to the journal, but the cited source: [2] which has no author, and is not a published in a peer-reviewed venue. Citing articles which are published in the journal is fine. Citing moribund links from an unmaintained site with no authorship is not. TheMissingMuse (talk) 23:32, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As no one has yet advocated for preserving the source, I will be moving forward with the removal of [3] from the article in the coming days. If anyone thinks we should preserve that source, please share your perspective. TheMissingMuse (talk) 15:39, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Compatibility with human rights

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Is authoritarianism a human right abuse?, or can it be compatible with human rights? 2806:108E:18:8603:A060:27DC:9CEA:F3D (talk) 00:59, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you have reliable high quality secondary sources that address the topic, feel free to update the article accordingly. TheMissingMuse (talk) 15:41, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of examples section and tables of authoritarian states

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I have now removed the “current” and “historical” tables of examples of authoritarian states. This change was suggested and gained consensus earlier this year (Talk:Authoritarianism/Archive 2#Examples section), with the rationale that the list is hard to maintain at any reasonably neutral point of view and is hard to support properly as much more than original research or synthesis.

It seems sensible that some select examples should be pulled out to be discussed in prose. For anyone looking to reference these tables, I leave the last revision with the tables here. (Note, immediately prior to my wholesale removal, FCBWanderer removed multiple states in this change, in case anyone sees that prior version as more complete.) — HTGS (talk) 01:45, 26 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Theoretical quality and compatibility

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The article is halfway between a dictionary entry on "authoritarian states", listing the different meanings of the term, and a symptoms category from a positivist perspective. I suggest we split this article into a main article with the different definitions of "authoritarian state" (symptom bundle categories) and the different determinations known as "authoritarian" for a state (descriptive categories). Each definition/determination should have an article of its own:

Moreover, the quality of the cited material is very low. Anti-communist propaganda produced by western liberal think tanks and newspapers such as The Economist are presented more prominently than actual academic research on the matter. For instance, Cuba, China, Vietnam and North Korea are presented very low in the Economist's "democracy index" whereas the western countries and their zone of influence are presented very high in the same scale. If we make a scale of countries by political control by western capitalists, we coincidentally find the same scores. Such scales produced by the liberal ideological apparatus should not be taken as reliable sources.

However, the cited academic material is also theoretically weak. In particular, "Information Politics and Propaganda in Authoritarian Societies" is a very bad never cited recent article by Bryn Rosenfeld and Jeremy Wallace. The authors make no difference between propaganda ('poverty in Mexico causes migration to the US'), agitation ('let's build a wall'), campaign ('vote on me to build a wall'), publicity ('we built the most wonderful wall'), advertisement ('buy the wall souvenir') and the like. They also cite multiple papers that use different definitions/determinations of "authoritarian states" and mixes their results. I suggest we rank the cited material in theoretical quality (Do they explain what makes a state authoritarian? Do they include only results from articles with the same notion of authoritarian states?) and group the acceptable material in groups of compatible sources. Each group of material should become a different article with a different name: "Authoritarian state (xxx)", "Authoritarian state (xxx)"...

Finally, if we want to have an article about "Authoritarian heads of government" (that is, Heads of government of authoritarian states), we should create one. However, we should avoid any characterisation of the personality of heads of government here because we are likely to be describing actual people we personally despise. If we want an article about a type of state, we should focus on that and avoid describing people. In particular, I would inform in the article title that this article is about states, not people, by renaming the article to "Authoritarian state". This would reduce the propensity of enthusiastic editors to introduce opinionated statements about mental properties of people into the body of the article. Daniel Couto Vale (talk) 22:21, 13 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Elon Musk's authoritarian tendencies

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‘with modern adheres to the ideology including Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Javier Milei, having merged their libertarianism with their "authoritarian tendencies".’

Produce verifiable citations as evidence of such “authoritarian tendencies”. Hard verifiable facts, not some opinion out of a magazine article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.41.107.190 (talk) 16:43, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Libertarian-authoritarianism is an oxymoron

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No such thing. Libertarianism is in direct opposition to authoritarianism. There is no universe where advocating for a smaller government with less power is authoritarian. 206.174.68.232 (talk) 18:33, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This is the equivalent of listing "freedom" as a subtype of "slavery". 206.174.68.232 (talk) 18:40, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
it's just further proof that the recent edits were made with political bias as opposed to objective fact. Considering libertarianism as "authoritarianism" is just proof that editors aren't looking to share fact but to spread lies and misinformation. Zerochuckdude (talk) 19:54, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There are individuals who truly beleive that authoritarianism breeds liberty.
Despite it being an oxymoron. Its better to be defined as Fusionism to combine authoritarian beleifs, or to redefine it as libertarian. with its perponents being Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Augusto Pinochet
The issue isnt libertarianism, as its core ideology is distinct, but how fusionists such as musk and the gop are looking to redefine it to mean as such.
Often these conservatives will use the word, but not in ways as to what its supposed to mean, but what they want it to mean.
See: Fusionism, Pinochetism, Hoppeanism, Political positions of Ronald Reagan Dieselkeough (talk) 00:14, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Misinterpreting sources

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User:CommunityNotesContributor added this section on what he suggests is a new type of "authoritarianism": "libertarian authoritarianism".

Four sources are cited in these edits:

1. Jacobin 2025 article, which is being quoted correctly. But note that Wikipedia lists WP:JACOBIN as being "generally reliable but biased". Also note this line from the article: "...turned into a leading exponent of what we have defined as libertarian authoritarianism." Hence the phrase was coined in the 2025 Jacobin article - or at least the author here believes this to be the case - which makes it perplexing that a Wikipedia user has supposedly found three previous articles on the same concept. Let's go over them next:

2. BJS 1996 article: "This paper re-examines this question by developing and evaluating multiple-item scales of two core dimensions of mass political beliefs: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values." To paraphrase, according to the author, one core dimension in politics is left vs right, and one core dimension is libertarian vs authoritarian. Those add up to two core dimensions. This paper does not support the existence of an ideology called "libertarian authoritarianism"; to the contrary, the model presented here would assume this combination is impossible.

3. Tilley 2005 article: "This research note explores the mechanisms behind age differences and changes over time in one of the two major value dimensions in British politics, libertarian-authoritarianism. I show that the British electorate has become substantially more libertarian over the last 30 years, but that older people have remained more authoritarian than younger people over this period." Here, libertarian/authoritarianism are, like in the BJS article, conceived as opposite ends of a dimension. Again, this source actually contradicts the content of the section.

4. New Statesman: This article discusses "libertarian-authoritarian personality". Here, authoritarian personality is a set phrase in psychology from Adorno et al. (1950). What the article is referring to, then, is *a person with an authoritarian personality and libertarian beliefs". Suggesting that this article supports the existence of "libertarian authoritarianism" as an ideology is WP:SYNTHESIS at its worst.

To summarize: The 2025 Jacobin article is the only source here, out of four cited, that discusses "libertarian authoritarianism" in the way that was presented in these edits. The two academic sources do not in fact support this definition; in fact, they would consider it paradoxical. Given that Jacobin is regarded as "biased" in WP:RS, given that it admits to coining the phrase on the fly, and given that we have two academic articles which would strongly disagree with this phrasing, this definition of "libertarian authoritarianism" is not supported by RS. Ceconhistorian (talk) 18:39, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I hear what you're saying and I appreciate the analysis and the discussion. Granted I'm not that experienced in "political ideologies" as it were, hence you'd rarely find me editing such pages, I think this was the first tbh. In response to your assessment of sources, I'll start by pointing out that WP:NEWSTATESMAN and WP:JACOBIN are considered WP:GREL, meaning they are generally reliable. Granted Jacobin is highly biased, but it is not WP:MREL either and WP:RSOPINION applies here, that of WP:INTEXT etc. As for the wording, it could have been better, to explain how liberatarian-authoritarian has previously been defined as part of a political spectrum, as opposed to an ideology, these being the two research papers you mention. The second two are based on "libertarian-authoritarianism" broadly speaking, whether that be a personality or an ideology, but I believe are relevant to discussing the ideology in general. I had otherwise first thought to create a standalone article, because I wasn't sure whether it would be best here or at libertarianism, or elsewhere, but given the lack of size issues at authoritarianism this is where I ended up putting the content, rather than creating a 4 source stub. There is otherwise a book published by Polity that I believe would help improve sourcing, but the preview itself doesn't appear that useful. Regards, CNC (talk) 19:15, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
"As for the wording, it could have been better, to explain how liberatarian-authoritarian has previously been defined as part of a political spectrum, as opposed to an ideology". This is blatantly WP:SYNTHESIS. I suggest you actually read the policy page, because you clearly haven't internalized it. *Any* attempt to chronicle the etymology or intellectual history of a term, without citing sources that specifically describe these aspects of the phrase, would be synthesis.
And no, WP:RSOPINION does not apply. When you assert that "[X] is a type of [article topic]", and the article topic falls in the category of political theory and social theory, you're implying that the term/concept has passed some threshold of prevalence and notability within the literature on political theories and social theories. That is a factual statement, not an opinion. It is either true that the term exists and is used in the literature in the way you described, or it is false.
In this case it is clearly false. We have agreed now that 1 of the 4 sources claims to have coined the term, that 1 of the 4 sources is using the phrase "authoritarian personality" to refer to the concept in psychology and not the concept in political science, and neither of the 2 academic sources use the phrase to refer to an ideology; and in fact, it follows from *their* definition that the ideology you're describing is paradoxical.
To be clear: *All* four sources you cited would suggest that the statement "Libertarian-authoritarianism is a concept in political theory" is false. Even the Jacobin source suggests that what you're implying is false, because Jacobin author believes *he* coined the phrase. The book source that you now cite (without reading) also believes that it is coining a new phrase; neither source refers to the other, which means we have zero reason to believe they're even discussing the same concept. Amlinger/Nachtwey in fact seem to be describing a form of radical state-less libertarianism ("They do not long for a glorified past or the strong arm of the state but argue instead for individual freedoms at all costs.") whereas the Jacobin article is about libertarians using state-power and expanding state power. Again, this is why WP:SYNTHESIS is bad.
As you've already admitted to not having any experience in this area, the fact that you're now discussing the creation of a standalone article is even more bizarre. You should also consider whether you're doing the due diligence expected when citing sources considering that they say nothing of what you implied. Getting rid of such misused sources is time-consuming, because I or someone else actually have to go through and read these sources to confirm our suspicion that they're misused. That is not fair to me or other editors.
I am done with this conversation. Ceconhistorian (talk) 20:02, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
OK then, good day to you, thanks for your opinion. The Conversation also had this to say on the merging of the ideologies, but wasn't included in the content. I appreciate other editors opinions on this matter. CNC (talk) 20:12, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There are individuals who truly beleive that authoritarianism breeds liberty.
Despite it being an oxymoron. Its better to be defined as Fusionism to combine authoritarian beleifs, or to redefine it as libertarian. with its perponents being Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Ronald Reagan, and Augusto Pinochet
The issue isnt libertarianism, as its core ideology is distinct, but how fusionists such as musk and the gop are looking to redefine it to mean as such.
Often these conservatives will use the word, but not in ways as to what its supposed to mean, but what they want it to mean.
See: Fusionism, Pinochetism, Hoppeanism, Reaganism, Tea Party movement Dieselkeough (talk) 00:23, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It certainly isnt a new phrase, but perhaps the author did not know it as such. Fusionism has been a common ideology.
E.J. Dionne, Jr., Why Americans Hate Politics, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991, 161
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-frank-meyer-the-father-of-fusionism
https://reason.com/2021/02/10/is-there-a-future-for-fusionism/ Dieselkeough (talk) 00:29, 19 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Suggesting semi-protected state

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.


Its become obvious that this page has been targeted as an extremely biased form of leverage for extremely bad and poor faith political takes. Not only edits attempting to redefine reality as well as publish an entirely false narritive, but also attempting to turn this article into little more than a political blog post or article. The addition of extremely biased references further cementing that the recent edit attempts are not in good faith but to essentially forward propganda and (unfounded) opinions.

I'm requesting the page be semi-protected to avoid further vandalism of poor faith edits by users looking to misuse Wikipedia as their stage to air grievances as opposed to share unbiased and neutral information Zerochuckdude (talk) 19:52, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The page is already semi-protection. CNC (talk) 19:54, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is part of a larger problem on Wikipedia, not just on this article. The only sources allowed here are basically left wing. There have also been studies that Wikipedia has a "significant liberal bias" (link). So its not even necessarily the users that are doing this as they are just going by the rules this website lays out --FMSky (talk) 19:58, 17 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Posts made by right-wing Twitter account “Libs of Tiktok” and other right-wing accounts caused this page to gain traction. Xomegas (talk) 00:13, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And what exactly did Libs of Tiktok do that garnered this traction? Oh, literally just posting screenshots of this article. 206.174.68.232 (talk) 04:30, 18 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.