Well, yeah, historically and now "authoritarian government" is pretty redundant. The only meaning it might have is to draw an arbitrary line and consider only t

Well, yeah, historically and now "authoritarian government" is pretty redundant. The only meaning it might have is to draw an arbitrary line and consider only the governments on one side of the line to be "authoritarian," but when people do that they seldom bother to articulate where they're drawing that line and why. So I completely agree that the word in practice does not usually have much useful meaning.