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Re: taking the long view. May I say that this seems a very healthy attitude!? We really need more than simply "2 sides" - other nations have 5, 20, 50, even upwards of 100, but when you get down to "solely 2", you enter a phase shift where neither side has to DO anything, and both can simply claim that they are "not the OTHER side", and that is enough. This often leads to the death of a nation, unfortunately for those of us inside of it right now.:-(

even including many who think they aren’t.

I think you touched on something DEEP there. I think it applies to all of us - almost certainly you and I included, on topics that we haven't thought as deeply about (yet). How do we know what we know, you know? Especially when so much of it is manufactured for us, sometimes before we were born, other times fed (and even created) on-the-fly. It takes enormous efforts to break out of that cycle. And as far as I can yet tell, it offers no rewards whatsoever, beyond the pleasure of the doing itself. i.e., seeing may be believing, but so what, if you cannot DO anything about it?

For myself I don't think I am authoritarian... per se, but I probably am from your perspective. e.g. I think there should be a balance b/t the rights of the citizen and the state, and I am okay with the latter having my fingerprints. Unfortunately for me, those have already been stolen by a hack years ago (along with my SSN), so I may experience the direct consequences of this belief first-hand, though regardless of my belief that would have happened anyway? So I am not sure precisely sure what to believe, b/c implementation seems to be just as if not more crucial than theory. In any case, I try to be neither a pessimist nor an optimist, but a realist, thus I don't tend to side with libertarianism purely b/c it has no chance of ever becoming reality in the USA, ever since WWII change our direction forever. After all, once you feed bureaucracy, it literally NEVER goes away, at least of its own accord? Then again, the eventual outcome of capitalism is slavery (money=votes -> plutocracy -> hidden form of feudalism), and socialism likewise (those on top somehow always end up more "equal" than those down below, except perhaps in a very homogenous country), but in something like the USA that has a mixture of both there is the chance that the state's power can be useful in counter-balancing the excesses of corporate greed, and provide an alternate means of control other than mere dollars, especially for those who lack them in excess amounts?

But in the end it is all just humanity, thus has both its good and bad sides, and yes more than just those two:-).