Your worldview is incredibly distorted my friend. OP is trying to bridge the divide.

Uh, he's not wrong. You have to jump through some serious mental hoops to avoid classifying the current American right as Populist. They clearly have no qualms about using government to control social norms (e.g. abortion, marriage). There's not much anti-authoritarian about that.

If you don't understand the other side, or worse mischaracterize them, how can you possibly hope to bridge the divide?

>>>If you don't understand the other side, or worse mischaracterize them, how can you possibly hope to bridge the divide?

An excellent question to pose to those left-of-center...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/21/democr...

> An excellent question to pose to those left-of-center

This is literally what the OP was about.

The American right is increasingly becoming the party of liberals, as is the case for most other countries on Earth. The authoritarian policies of the right from the last 50 years (anti-gay-marriage, War on Drugs) have very quickly lost favorability. The two main authoritarian policies that the right still sticks to are regarding immigration and abortion.

They would argue that anti-abortion is not any more authoritarian than being anti-murder, as it simply falls under the same law. The disagreement with a pro-choice advocate would be whether or not the fetus/baby is considered alive (arbitrary), and whether the woman's right to bodily autonomy supersedes the fetus/baby's life (arbitrary). So I wouldn't really call anti-abortion authoritarian so much as an arbitrarily different definition of life and arbitrarily different prioritization of rights. The authoritarianism of being anti-murder is already in place. I'm pro-choice, for what it's worth.

Immigration is also a little different. Strict immigration policies would be outwardly authoritarian, but you aren't imposing any imperative on your citizens.

Authoritarianism of the left-wing, however, is a different story. It's obviously not a bad thing so long as you support the authoritarian policies, but the role of the state is enormous as compared to what is supported by the right. Higher taxes (the abstraction of all state power), hate speech laws, affordable housing, rent-control, welfare, food stamps, affirmative action, diversity quotas, gun control, environmental regulation, trade tariffs (funny to see Trump utilizing policies advocated for by Bernie Sanders), free education, etc.

It is not even remotely debatable whether the role of the state is diminished in the right wing as compared to the left, that is almost definitionally the distinguishing characteristic between the two at this point.