The political compass is an attempt to reduce incredibly complicated political questions into two simple lines, and people accept it because it aligns with oversimplified narratives and cultural preconceptions.
"Liberty" and "authority" have little meaning beyond "good" and "bad." If authority is defined more rigorously, or if we use more neutral terms like "centralization" or public vs private, then it becomes a lot less clear that what we're talking about is contrary to "liberty." The private sector, and private individuals, can be just as restrictive of liberty.
Perhaps the clearest example of this is the American Civil War. The southerners were the champions of decentralization, they spoke constantly about how they were fighting for "liberty" against the supposed tyranny of the northerners - and the reason they wanted "states' rights" and decentralization is that they would be able to keep people enslaved. It was big, centralized government, that evil "authoritarian" force imposing it's authority that resulted in a greater degree of liberty. But that is not just some freak exception.
If someone can't go out at night without fear of being attacked, that person is no more "free" to go out than if they feared legal repercussions. Governments are, at their worst, no different from a criminal organization, and yet there is this tendency to assign special status to restrictions imposed by the law, rather than being on the same level as restrictions imposed by private individuals or organizations.
And again, we can see how "big government" or "authoritarianism" can increase liberty in the context of regulations, of pollution, of food safety, and of untested drugs. If I can trust regulators to stop a restaurant from serving anything unsafe, then I'm free to order anything off the menu, whereas if not, then everything's a gamble and I might feel restricted to foods I expect to be "safe," if I don't avoid the restaurant entirely.
There once was a time when states viewed things like murder as a personal dispute between families, and didn't generally get involved. This led to all kinds of generational feuds, with people killing each other over a long forgotten dispute between their great-grandfathers. Was that "liberty?" Is that something we should idealize and try to return to?
I'm sure there are people who will read this as me being "pro-authoritarian" and ignoring all the bad things done by states. But that's missing the point. The point is not that centralization or state power are always good, the point is that it's not automatically bad. Having a knee-jerk reaction against it is just oversimplifying complicated issues, and doing so in a way that lots of powerful people want you to do. Because the ruling class understands that they can wield private institutions and privatization just as they can wield public institutions.
You can't just blindly apply an idealist ideological framework of "anti-authoritarianism" to every problem and expect that to produce good results. You have to look at things on a case-by-case basis, applying class analysis.
I guess "hierarchical" may be more apt than "authoritarian" for what I was trying to say.
Depends if they were mandated by an authority or by the people, and how they are enforced.
Ignoring semantics. Yeah, you can look at these policies. I think most of the policies were borne out of threatening authority though. I also think many of those authorities around the world are feeling less threatened, and many of the good policies are being weakened or rolled back.
I am anti-authoritarian and anti-hierarchy, because 1) it creates a single point of failure 2) it's easier to corrupt a few people than many or everybody 3) the people most interested in practicing corruption are the people who seek power 4) corruption is often rewarded.
Those are valid concerns, however, that ignores all the examples I've presented. If centralization is always bad and decentralization is always good, then how are there so many cases (or any cases at all) where a centralized government produces better results? Shouldn't that be impossible, even theoretically?
The fact is that decentralized systems have flaws too. They have a lot of problems operating at large scales, with collective action problems, and they can often lead to unnecessary redundancy. Like I said, your concerns about centralized systems are valid, but there are cases where even a corrupt or imperfect central government can solve problems that decentralized systems struggle with. That's why I argue that you have to look at things by a case-by-case basis.
Public transit is yet another example of this. A centralized government can recognize that ease of transit can promote economic growth and by extension tax revenue, and so it can afford to invest in public transit and it will pay for itself. A decentralized system will always struggle to do that. Maybe a private company runs it and recoups expenses by ticket sales, but that makes it less accessible and reduces the economic benefits. Or maybe people contribute out of the kindness of their hearts or something, but then the most generous will wind up with the least money/time/resources.
How am I supposed to accept that decentralization is always the correct answer when I'm surrounded by counterexamples with no explanation? It really seems like it's based more on ideological preconceptions than real life examples and evidence.