“Authoritarian state” is a bullshit category. Authoritarian states are just states insufficiently subservient to Washington. It’s no more or less coherent than “terrorist state,” which the US uses in the same way.

“Authoritarianism” is the contemporary word for “totalitarianism,” which is just an erudite-seming term for horseshoe theory, which is horseshit. Previously:

• ‘Horseshoe theory’ is nonsense – the far right and far left have little in common
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory#Academic_studies_and_criticism
• Funny thing about Hannah Arendt’s construction of “totalitarianism”: She came from a bourgeois family and so was unsurprisingly anti-communist, and she was funded & promoted by the CIA.
  Imperialist Propaganda and the Ideology of the Western Left Intelligentsia: From Anticommunism and Identity Politics to Democratic Illusions and Fascism
  One of the centerpieces of the cultural cold war was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which was revealed in 1966 to be a CIA front. Hugh Wilford, who has researched the topic extensively, described the CCF as nothing short of one of the largest patrons of art and culture in the history of the world. Established in 1950, it promoted on the international scene the work of collaborationist academics such as Raymond Aron and Hannah Arendt over and against their Marxian rivals, including the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.