Memes

Yep!

It's less that "authoritarian" is made up, and more that it's useless. Hitler and Mussolini represented the capitalist class and oppressed workers and other social groups. Socialist states represent workers, and oppress capitalists and fascists through land reform and collectivization. Both wield authority, but some for good and some for bad.

What they are saying is that "Authoritarian" is not a precise term that distinguishes anything and was just made up as a way to try to accuse AES states of being just as bad as fascist ones. It's a horseshoe theory term because any actually accurate term you would use to describe Hitler's or Mussolini's ideology would exclude the ideology of socialist states.

I would consider authoritarian a useless word for describing them. Sure, you could call them that and it would fit, but it says very little about them and fails to distinguish them from other states.

All states are authoritarian. Holding and exerting authority is the point of a state. The state exists as a tool for a class to express its authority over the other.

This same issue applies to the term dictatorship as well. When we hear the term authoritarian we must ask authority for whom. When we hear the word dictatorship we must ask what group is dictating and to what end.

Until the state is abolished every society is authoritarian and a dictatorship. So what's the point of the descriptor?

Edit: if I have been too vague I'm happy to elaborate further

It's not about if an ideology uses authority to entrench itself. Every state and organization with any power in the world does that. It's about who wields that authority against who, and for what purpose. We generally consider Hitler and Mussolini to be exceptionally "authoritarian", but in reality the only thing exceptional about them was that they directed that authority inward instead of just outward, the latter of which we in the west are all more accustomed to. They took the full-spectrum colonial violence typically reserved for non-white people outside their borders, and directed it also towards white people within their borders. This (and only this) is what we have been taught to view as an unacceptable aberration.

TLDR Authority itself is not "good" or "evil". Authority is just a weapon like any other, and what makes it heroic or repugnant is who wields it against who.

Authoritarian is to hold power, in the basic sense. It is to have a state, and to enact that state power. Anarchist comrades will call any state or ideology authoritarian if it does not go against the state. I am not as well read on this as other, but this is the gist.

Hitler's government qualifies as "authoritarian" in the same way that FDR's government does. It can describe Starmer's UK. Or Sheinbaum's Mexico. It can be applied as easily to Lai Ching-te's Taiwan as Xi's China. It's a nothingburger of a word, mostly implying you don't like the policies of the person in charge.