In a conversation a while back, I needed a word to express the opposite of authoritarian. I couldn’t find one in my memory, which struck me as odd, so I later looked it up. It seems that there is no English word that describes the opposite of authoritarian; the closest thing I found, after perusing several thesauruses, was that authoritarian was considered a synonym of anti-democratic. Presumably “democratic” would be the closest thing there is to an antonym then.
The upcoming election, and the associated media feeding frenzy, brought this back to my mind. You couldn’t walk past a television in the past couple weeks without hearing talk about Sarah Palin, and how she and McCain would essentially be George W. Bush the Third, because they’re all very authoritarian.
A couple days ago, Scott Adams had a post about his recent survey of economists, which included these paragraphs:
[...] The big question this survey raises is why so many economists are Democrats in the first place. Democrats tell me that highly educated and rational folks, such as economists, gravitate toward the best argument. Case closed.
Republicans tell me that liberals, mostly Democrats, drift toward academic jobs where they can best suck on the public teet. It’s easier to be a tenured professor than it is to run a company, so the thing that economists have in common is laziness as opposed to intelligence. And perhaps, think the Republicans, the so-called Independents in this survey are mostly liberals too, essentially Democrats who aren’t joiners. And besides, if economics was a real science, most economists would be rich. [...]
It’s true that academia has long been known to be heavily populated with liberals. Why is that? It occurred to me that it could have a lot to do with the whole conservative authoritarian theme. Authoritarian governments don’t like people to think for themselves, because that leads to people questioning their authority. Hm… sounds an awful lot like most organized religions, especially the fundamentalist type, yes? “We have the One and Only Truth, and you must obey! Never question what we say, because it comes directly from God!” Thus the well-known and long-standing links between fundamentalist groups and the conservatives, perhaps.
When you think about it, the names “Democrat” and “Republican” mean absolutely nothing — this is both a democracy and a republic, after all. The parties could, with equal validity, call themselves Piscis Austrinus and Corona Borealis. So I always read the party references as liberals and conservatives. Or, using the link between conservative and authoritarian, we could define them as those who believe in authoritarianism and those who believe in democracy. Except, of course, that the party that claims to believe in democracy is still trying to grab political power so it can tell everyone else what to do, which means that they’re acting pretty authoritarian too. At least the conservatives are honest about their authoritarianism.
So what political party should an intelligent person favor? Damned if I know. I don’t like either party, nor any of the lesser-known parties, and I don’t care for any of the Presidential candidates I’ve seen to date. The best we voters can do is elect the lesser evil, it seems… that appears to be Obama, from what I’ve seen. But of course, I encourage people to think for themselves. 
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