It's all fucked up. My brother ended up on parole and it was designed to keep him from holding down a job. He'd have random drug screenings, which meant that each morning he'd call in to the system to find out if he had a drug screening. If he did, he'd have to drive to the county where he committed the offense and was convicted (2 hours away from his home) to wait a few hours to pee in a cup. Imagine holding down a job and not knowing until day of that you'll need to take off most of the day. And they wouldn't even let him do his drug screenings closer to home--theory was that the county got paid per parolee.

Anyways, my brother is a jerk but the system is needlessly cruel.

Can you name a non-authoritarian government?

Which goes to show that "authoritarian" is just a vague, vibes based signifier with no useful purpose.

As are all states. The important distinction between them isn't the degree by which authority is used, which is largely decided by the conditions a state is in rather than the form of the state itself, but instead is which class controls the state. The USSR was run by the working classes, the US by capitalists.

Authoritarianism is a meaningless term used by edgy children whose brains haven't fully developed yet. The reality is that all governments rely on coercion to maintain their authority. The state is fundamentally an instrument that’s used by the ruling class to maintain its dominance. The whole notion that political systems can be neatly categorized into authoritarian or democratic binaries is deeply infantile.

Every government derives its authority from its monopoly on legal violence. The ability to enforce laws, suppress dissent, and maintain order is derived from control over police, military, and judicial systems. Whether a government is labelled authoritarian or democratic, the fundamental basis of its power lies here. Therefore, the only meaningful questions to ask are which class interests it represents, and to what extent can it be held accountable to them.

What ultimately matters is which class controls the institutions of state violence. In capitalist democracies, the government represent the interests of the economic elites who fund political campaigns, own media outlets, and control key industries. Western public lacks the mechanisms necessary to hold the government to account, and the ruling class is disconnected from the broader population. That’s precisely what’s driving political discontent all across western sphere today. Meanwhile, in so-called authoritarian regimes, the ruling party serves the working class as seen in countries like China, Cuba, or Vietnam. Hence why there is widespread public trust in these government and they enjoy broad support from the masses.