Elections are one way of selecting government officials. Authoritarianism is a political philosophy that can be pursued no matter how one was selected. Yes, many/most authoritarians arise either not in democracies, or else in situations where the elections are mostly/entirely a sham, but that is not a requirement.
You could, at least in principle, have an authoritarian surveillance state where the government watches and controls everything you do...and the people could consistently (and freely!) be electing the officials enacting that state. In other words, authoritarian and democracy/election are not antonyms.
"regime" just means government. You are taking common associations and turning them into hard and fast rules when they aren't. "Biden regime" was a completely accurate (and frequently used) description of the last administration (and almost every other preceding administration).
As for your second sentence, while it is often dramatically overstated, I think that Trump having authoritarian tendencies is pretty obviously true. The extent to which he has successfully instantiated those tendencies is up for considerable debate. I think the answer is probably not "not at all".
In case it needs to be said, I think that almost every modern presidency has, (to quite varying extents) had some amount of authoritarian tendencies, in the sense that they have all sought to increase the unchecked power of the executive branch at the expense of both the other two branches, and the rights of the populace. I think Trump would, were he able, pretty dramatically extend this trend, but he won't have started it, and it remains to be seen how much farther he succeeds at going than other recent presidents.
Nothing you pasted here suggests that those attributes are required for the definition of "authoritarian regime", it is just a characterization of "the most notable authoritarian regimes" as it itself says in the text.
You're right that most people in this thread are likely native english speakers, but that just means that we can understand that the weird narrow read of the words "authoritarian regime" is silly and, based on other comments you've made, very likely just you being purposely obtuse for partisan reasons.
I’m not sure why you feel the need to respond to me on multiple threads. As mentioned elsewhere, I am not the source of the common meaning of the term, I do not edit the encyclopaedia, the newspapers, take the photos or anything else you will see on the front page of Google when you search for “authoritarian regime”.
You know what an authoritarian regime commonly means, and you know what you were trying to do, and you just don’t like being called on it. Someone is indeed using HN for partisan advocacy and we both know it’s you.
> I am not the source of the common meaning of the term,
The accuracy of your claim regarding common meaning is being disputed. You might notice that well over half of the quote you pasted from Britannica is referring to totalitarian, not authoritarian, regimes.
Nowhere does it say anything like "the term authoritarian regime is commonly taken to imply".
As mentioned, the most notable examples all conform to the common definition as does every other result on the front page of Google for the term. You are welcome to dispute all of them if you want to, but I’m not going to spend time on it.
You are using hyperbole at best and simply lying at worst and you know this. You can jump on any English language search engine, discover what the common meaning of the term ‘authoritarian regime’ is and reflect which behaviour you’re involved in.
Bing produces a very nice summary for the term which also doesn’t describe the US government. You can read that and argue with it if you like.
I don't think the way you're approaching this is in keeping with HN guidelines.
You seem to have jumped straight from "everyone agrees with my view" to "the people who disagree with me are acting in bad faith", skipping the much more likely "other people hold views that differ from my own".
As a native English speaker who lives in the US I don't need to check a search engine to understand the common meaning of the term. Sometimes people have different impressions of these things. About the only thing you could attempt to argue is that I'm in the extreme minority. I don't think you'd get very far with that though because it's unlikely that you have the evidence to back up such a claim.
For all your apparent outrage the Oxford example that you cited is the closest you've come to presenting valid evidence in support of your position. However if you examine the paragraph just above your quote you will see that it is rather academic in nature. Having glanced at it I can't say that the description presented matches what I encounter in common usage by laymen. (I include myself in that category. I am by no means a political scientist or remotely well studied.)
More generally, I think you've picked a fundamentally unwinnable position here. All it takes for me to be correct (and you to be demonstrably in the wrong) is for people in the area where I live to commonly use the terminology in the way I'm describing. And indeed they do, because I'm in a fairly far left part of the country.
Now you can certainly object that the population at large where I live is misusing the term. But without a central governing body for the language that's going to be extremely difficult to argue. Either way it won't change common usage here. It's simply the difference between "commonly used in that manner" versus "commonly used in that manner, incorrectly".
Because you're responding about different things in different threads, so I'm responding to those responses.
You're just wrong about the common meaning of the term, and you seem to think that just asserting the same thing over and over is somehow going to make you right about it, but it won't. And I'll keep pointing out that you're wrong about it as long as you keep repeating the same thing.
I'm not being partisan. You're not being partisan in this thread either, you're just repeating this silly assertion about what "authoritarian regime" means. So I'm continuing to rebut that.
I’m quoting it. There’s not much I could possibly do to misrepresent it, and as I’ve mentioned, I don’t control every other result on Google which is also entirely similar.
This is an interesting misconception, I had never considered one would think authoritarians can't be fairly elected. Is the thinking that the electorate would just never elect an authoritarian?
The term was 'authoritarian regime', which is generally used for autocratic leaders.
Although 'authoritarian' is also false - political freedoms for the general population are exactly where they were prior to the election, as I'm sure you are aware.
I guess I'm not nearly as sure of what others are aware of, so I'll just provide https://www.project2025.observer as a great resource for tracking actions of the current administration.
Project 2025 is a project from the Heritage foundation, there was a conspiracy during the election to say this was the platform of the Republican Party, the GOP platform is Agenda 47.
Dude, you really need to take the partisan blinders off.
They are actively, and extremely obviously, executing on the Project 2025 plan, which they wrote up for exactly this reason. This is primarily being driven by Russell Vought, whose plan this is, through his role at the head of the Office of Management and Budget. There was no "conspiracy" about this, there was only a candidate who brazenly lied about his connection to that plan.
Stop trying to gaslight us. We're not idiots, it won't work.
Yes there is, the idea that Project 2025 was the GOP platform is provably false. You can read Agenda 47 yourself on the GOP website. The false allegation relies on the fact that very few people will know to do that.
As you believe Vought is conspiring - you have stated this yourself, the only gaslighting is pretending you have not - and presumably that publishing Agenda 47 was also a conspiracy to hide a secret alternative platform, provide evidence of the conspiracy.
Look, if someone writes up "here's what our party's candidate is gonna do when we win the presidency", and then that party's candidate wins the presidency, hires the person who wrote that up to be the budgetary gatekeeper for the administration, and proceeds to do all the stuff that they wrote up, then that was the plan.
If the candidate said "that isn't the plan!", then they were just lying about that.
This isn't some wild coincidence. Vought isn't "conspiring", he's just straightforwardly executing what the plan was all along.
The Republican party and its candidate just lied about what the platform was. That happens, politicians and their parties lie.
But what I won't abide is people who lie to me about what is obviously happening in the present, which I can easily see with my own eyes. That is what you're doing here. It's just propaganda. It just makes you a liar.
To your first sentence, again, I really think you just have these definitional questions wrong. You seem to be using a vibes-based reading of "authoritarian regime" rather than a "what the words mean" based reading.
To your second paragraph: I'm not going to go into a bunch of examples of things the administration has done, though it would not be hard to do. I'll just reiterate that the thing this thread was originally about is the chilling effect that threats and intimidation has on people's speech. That is just an indirect way to infringe on the right to free expression.
(It's true that many authoritarian regimes seek to eliminate or corrupt elections, but being fairly elected is compatible with being authoritarian.)