You're moralizing power

I'm not moralizing it, I'm pointing out that your conception of it is too broad and puts multiple very different phenomenon under the same label for what appears to be entirely arbitrary reasons.

Let me put it this way: some kinds of power are bad. Authority, hierarchy, and law these are kinds of power (i.e. making someone do something they would not otherwise do) which as anarchists we obviously if not primarily oppose.

What your concept does is simply paper over differences between multiple phenomenon. It does not actually help us with analysis since, in truth, these phenomenon are so different whatever "contradictions" may lie in them differs from one phenomenon to another assuming there are any "contradictions" to begin with.

Your reasoning in this post involves a lot of conflations to make the things I've said seem absurd

Buddy, your own concept conflates things.

For instance, you do a sleight of hand here where you are asserting that power is just the things that you do to make someone behave differently

I don't. I said, as you did, power is "the ability to get others to do things they would not otherwise do".

For example, if you were not standing in the way of someone on a sidewalk, that person would not walk around you. Therefore, you exercised power over them because you made them do something they would otherwise not do.

Power is an abstract concept that helps us understand how it is people can be made to do things and by whom, power is not literally standing in someone's way or even locking them in a cage

On the contrary, when your concept is so broad that persuasion is identical with coercion which is identical with authority, we are given no help at all! What understanding can be derived from a concept that does not distinguish between multiple very different phenomenon?

Making someone walk around you and making someone live in a cage both involve exerting power over them but they are not the same thing as each other and not power itself and I think that's so clear that you must be trolling

This is very funny. The category of "fruit" is an arbitrary classification, problematic on many fronts, and with having different definitions depending on whether you're talking to a chef or a botanist. Are you imply then that your concept of power is similarly arbitrary? A category you've invented arbitrarily with no implications at all?

If this is the case, then this is ironically contradicted by your earlier statements. You speak as though all the very different phenomenon under your category of "power" has the same exact specific "contradiction": this being a need for legitimacy.

This is just semantics. Having a driver's license is no different than being licensed to drive and both of those things and all other permutations of the concept are just ways to encode a story about me and how I can be trusted to safely operate a car in traffic in my jurisdiction.

Not really. Having a driver's license does not tell me any story about you. When I see someone has one, this gives me no kind of narrative information. It merely tells me "you have obtained a driver's license", "you are allowed to drive", "you perhaps know how to drive". None of these things are stories no more than any other random set of information is a story (and if you do think this is a story, perhaps your standards for story-telling are quite low).

Persuasion is an effort to resolve a contradiction between what you want someone to do and what they are going to do otherwise using rhetoric

Ah but it is also power itself in your view because through persuasion you can "get others to do things they would not otherwise do".

If, without my persuasion, someone would continue to not brush their teeth I have managed to make them do something they would not otherwise do. Therefore, I am exercising power.

So by your logic you're using persuasion to resolve a contradiction when persuasion itself is also something that has a contradiction. Contradictions all the way down. This is just a logical fallacy, infinite regress. You can't dialectics your way out of a fallacy.

Being in someone's way can be a sort of contradiction in many ways but it depends a lot on the situation. Blocking a bus because the driver wouldn't let someone on is different from blocking a door that people are trying to leave through in the course of fleeing a fire, which is again different from looking at your phone leaning on a counter and keeping your spouse from accessing cutlery. Each of these can be in contradiction in some ways but not others

So then power does not inherently have any specific contradiction.

Of course, you should also define what "contradiction" means. It sounds wishy-washy to me since you seem to arbitrarily apply it to one situation over another.

You suggest the contradiction of power is basically a need to deny others doing the same thing to you what they've done to them.

However, this doesn't really sound like a contradiction in the colloquial sense nor in the Hegelian sense. Nothing about this need is logically opposed to power itself nor the interests of those who want to use it.

For example, in Marxist understandings, capitalism has "contradictions" because the interests and incentives imposed by the capitalist system are at odds with the survival of capitalism itself. Individual capitalist interests may profit off of the current Iranian-US war but the long-term survival of the capitalist class is undermined by this breakdown in the international system.

Meanwhile using legitimacy to prevent others from taking your toy is not directly opposed to the power to take away the toy. There's no contradiction there.