What is a metaphysical ought? — frank

Something like this:

To determine what is, what it's like, appears unutterably higher and more serious than any 'It ought to be so': because the latter, as human criticism and presumption, seems condemned from the start to be ridiculous. It expresses a need which demands that the disposition of the world should accord with our human well-being, and the will to do as much as possible towards this task. On the other hand, it was only this demand 'It ought to be so' which called forth that other demand, the demand for what is. Our knowledge of what is, was only the outcome of our asking: 'How? Is it possible? Why precisely like that?' Our wonder at the discrepancy between our wishes and the course of the world has led to our becoming acquainted with the course of the world. Perhaps it's different again: perhaps that 'It ought to be so', our wish to overwhelm the world, is - - -“
… the standpoint of desirability, of unwarrantedly playing the judge, is part of the character of the course of things, as is every injustice and imperfection - it's only our concept of 'perfection' which loses out. Every drive that wants to be satisfied expresses its dissatisfaction with the present state of things - what? Might the whole be composed entirely of dissatisfied parts, all of which have their heads full of what's desirable? Might the 'course of things' be precisely the 'Away from here! Away from reality!', be eternal discontent itself? Might desirability itself be the driving force? Might it be - deus.( Nietzsche, The Gay Science)

. Liberalism or secularism as a structure of politics ought to be neutral as to whether following a religion is better than not doing so — J

I love the juxtaposition of ‘ought’ and ‘neutral’ here. It illustrates , without recognizing it , that built into the assumption of norms of neutrality, objectivity and non-bias (like Rawls’ veil of ignorance) is a metaphysical ought. Secularisms and liberalisms which clothe themselves in the garb of neutrality share with religious points of view a grounding in an ethical ought. Such notions of the objective, the equal, the neutral are secular offshoots of religious thought, repackaging Godly platonism as humanist platonism.

↪J Secular culture provides a framework within which you can follow any religion or none. But the proselytizing liberalism that Timothy is referring to goes a step further in saying that none is better than any. — Wayfarer

If ‘Secular culture’ amounts to a philosophical framework, then it has specific implications for religion. That is to say, even if it includes within itself the possibility of a religious viewpoint, it will entail its own implicit preferences with regards to religion. You, for instance, have decided that we are better off with religion than without it, so of course you’re going to prefer the secular vantage to what you call ‘proselytizing liberalism.’. But is there room in the secular tent for fundamentalist religions that are anti-Enlightenment and openly hostile to democracy?

As to the ‘proselytizing’ nature of liberalism, it’s not as though Timothy isnt proselytizing from his pulpit when he attacks liberalism. At least I’m self-aware about it when I try and sell postmodernism. I don’t go around claiming some fatal pathology or irrationalism in the political and philosophical perspectives I don’t agree with. He is right to see such accusations being leveled against religion from certain quarters of liberal thought, which is why I see his tussle with proselytizing liberalism as a bitch-slapping contest between sister schools of platonic metaphysics.

↪Joshs Yep, he and Rorty never saw eye to eye. My sympathies are almost entirely with Habermas, who seems to me a much more careful and interesting thinker than Rorty, though the latter's historical importance is unquestionable. Habermas is also at a disadvantage here, because his writing is often turgid, while Rorty was a sparkling stylist.

I suppose the most trenchant criticism one could offer of Rorty is that, despite his sincere efforts, philosophy has not come to end. — J

I prefer Rorty to Habermas. Rorty was able to glimpse a world beyond modernism. He understood, albeit in a shaky fashion, what writers from Sartre, Gadamer and Wittgenstein to Foucault, Heidegger and Derrida were up to. Reading Rorty allows entrance into the most important thinking of our era , not only through his conversations with Continental thinkers, but also in the way he took up American writers like Davidson, Kuhn, Brandom, Dewey and Dennett. I think Habermas misses the boat on most of these writers, and falls back on a metaphysics that each of them was trying to escape from.

I would say that while philosophy of the sort that Habermas was up to has indeed come to an end (or should do so), I think Rorty’s lack of sure-footedness in the terrain of post-Cartesianism led him to become too suspicious of philosophy, not recognizing the validity of philosophical concepts pointing beyond metaphysical skyhooks of the sort that Habermas remained wedded to.

He really wants liberal societies to be troubled by the "cosmic demands," and take religious perspectives on values more seriously. — J

Not surprising from someone who Rorty relentlessly critiqued for his need of Kantian transcendental underpinnings, or ‘skyhooks’ as Rorty called them.

Liberalism is just "what happens when you remove the old forms of constraint."

Except it isn't. The atomized liberal consumer doesn't cease needing what they previously needed community to provide them, new (often mandatory) voluntarist versions of this same infrastructure need to be created, resulting in the hyperbolic growth of the state and market influence spreading into every area of life — Count Timothy von Icarus

You make this sound like it’s a bad thing. State and market influences are a reflection of and response to where the community decides it wants to make use of the state and the market.

For instance, without community, there is no one to care for the injured or sick. People are left isolated and without resources after disasters. Older citizens cannot expect to rely on community in their decline — Count Timothy von Icarus

My mother expected to rely on the community in her decline. Specifically, she assumed she would move in with one of my brothers and their families. But that was no-go. Both of my sisters-in-law refused to allow that. It was a matter of a generational change in attitude toward the responsibility of grown children for aging family members. I don’t know anyone in my age group who expects or wants to be taken care of by a family member when they become unable to care for themselves. Perhaps we’re not as ethically enlightened as you are.

Aside from this, the reliance on markets to fulfill the former functions of community also has the effect of making the effects of economic inequality more global and all-encompassing. This was made particularly obvious during the pandemic, as the wealthy could comfortably "shelter in place," relying on a legion of anonymous low wage workers to bear the supposed risks for them — Count Timothy von Icarus

Somehow you don’t convince me that this is all about sensible economics for you. I think you’re using inequality as a rationalization for your real agenda, which is about advocating for a certain religiously inspired ethic of social responsibility. How convenient it is that going back to the days of living with Grandma and Grandpa until they croaked happens to save money too!
I want you to keep something in mind. None of my preferred philosophical touchstones accept the concept of the solipsistically autonomous individual. On the contrary, they see the self a more radically intertwined with and inseparable from the normative attributes of the larger society than you do. So my objections to your arguments are not about choosing the individual over the community, but rejecting your model of how the self and the social relate to each other, and especially your need for a transcendent ground for community ethics.

For others who aren’t prepared to thrive in such a world, it has been a damaging change.

You act like this is a minor issue. As far as I can see, it's one that dominates electoral politics and is tearing apart the liberal order in the world's economy and greatest military power. That's not an isolated small scale issue, it's quite possibly the begining of the historical failure of liberalism.

Plus, it presupposes the liberal notion of freedom as: "freedom to do as one currently pleases." — Count Timothy von Icarus

No, it’s a very major issue. It’s just not an issue whose causes are interpreted the same way by all parties in the U.S. , no matter how badly you want to convince yourself that this is a sign of the “historical failure of liberalism”. In case you haven’t noticed , the country is profoundly divided over this any many other issues.

But this of course radically ignores the ways in which massive state intervention and diplomatic efforts were made to secure the vast (and helpfully unregulated and desperate) labor pool of the developing world so as move the economic engines of now "distressed areas" across oceans at great ecological cost to future generations in order to secure greater profit margins and lower prices in the short term (and so higher consumption), with both profits and consumption gains skewing heavily to elites. Globalization isn't an accident though, it's occured with heavy state intervention according to an explicit ideology. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Globalization lifted many more people out of poverty worldwide that it put into poverty. mEven without offshoring, automation alone would have decimated the industrial heartland. This wasn’t strictly a failure of liberalism. It was a failure on everyone’s part to anticipate how rapidly technological change would destroy communities. Having this fore-knowledge wouldn’t have prevented the loss of jobs , but it may have allowed for a less traumatic transition. Populists considered this a failure of both liberalism and conservative. After Brexit, and fairly soon in the economic wake of the current trade debacle , populism will also be considered a failure. My guess is once the dust settles, while it didnt come out smelling like a rose, liberalism will emerge as the least disastrous of the various political avenues which have been explored.

I want to add that I think the idea that mining the causes of globalism reveals a predominance of motives of greed and narrow self-interest is a kind of conspiracy theory. There have always been those who are fundamentally suspicious of human enterprise, those who are quick to jump on the mistakes we make when we try to venture in new directions in order to better ourselves and our world. Rather than chalking up those mistakes as the price we pay for the audacity of human inventiveness, their suspiciousness makes them look for hubris and an abdication of ethical responsibility. Climbing too high, pushing too far gets us into trouble, they say, because we dare to become god-like when instead we need to be humble in the face of our mortal sinfulness. The damage globalism has done to those unprepared to adapt is God’s punishment for the hubris of humanity, our distancing ourselves from the ethical source, which we must always remember is not to be found in the immanence to itself of thought.

You sound like David Brooks. Both of you argue for a return to a community and family-centered life, claiming that societal drift away from such traditional anchoring has led to an epidemic of isolation , loneliness and despair. I think that’s true, for those who think in traditionalistic terms. A do-it-yourself culture of intentional community only works for those who are capable of a more complex and dynamic style of interaction with the world. I believe more and more people have evolved psychologically in that direction, so for them the shedding of the old bonds of social, religious and institutional obligation is a choice rather than an imposition. For others who aren’t prepared to thrive in such a world, it has been a damaging change. You can do good work by finding those people in your community who are not ready to take that step. They will be grateful to be led to a ready-made social structure they can fit themselves into.

For the many others like myself, who have worked hard to break way from the strictures of what to then are repressive and conformist social and family bonds, it is your preferred form of social organization that leads to alienation and unhappiness, and we will fight tooth and nail to remain free of it.

This is particularly true because liberalism has been extremely evangelical, spreading itself through hard economic coercion, military funding, supporting coups, and even invading foreign countries to set up liberal states by force, while also generally refusing to recognize the legitimacy of any competitor systems. This is particularly true in the era of globalization, but it's been there from the beginning when revolutionary France was invading its neighbors and setting up "sister republics" by force, or sending the "Infernal Columns" to genocide devout Catholics loyal to elements of the ancien regime (i.e., their own local clergy, nobility, and customs). And even then it had its tendency for totalizing automation. When they couldn't behead priests fast enough with the guillotine they built barges with removable planks so they could fill them with chained prisoners and sink them all at once. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Would you describe the spread of a scientific theory or a philosophical worldview in these terms? Did it ever occur to you that human beings might have decided through processes of reasoning that liberalism actually made sense as way to guide their interactions with others?

. The idea that it must instead belong to some separate, "private sphere of religion and spirituality," is itself a positively indoctrinated dogma of liberalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The fact that the philosophical orientation you follow disagrees with the cartoonishly defined category you are passing off as liberalism doesn’t make the latter a ‘positively indoctrinated dogma’. It just means that it relies on different metaphysical assumptions , and you don’t like those assumptions. I suspect I wouldn’t care much for whatever alternative you have in mind, but I’m not threatened enough by it to go around accusing it of being an indoctrinated dogma, unless of course those that adhere to it want to think of it as a dogma. You do seem to be on some sort of anti-liberal crusade. Perhaps that’s because of its dominating hold on academia?

But of course you are right, we can and should exercise rational discernment in such matters. Whether we always do is another matter. A lot of this stuff is habit so overcoming pathology means intentional training. The problem is that the disease can also involve efforts at intentional training (e.g., some tolerance and DEI trainings have been shown to have the opposite of the results they are intended to have, or to be supported by pseudoscience, and yet they remain common practices because to challenge them is seen as being against "diversity, equity, and inclusion," and who would want to be against — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, it seems to be a contradiction in terms to indoctrinate for ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. But the urge to yoke aspirational goals to a sovereign principle is a secularized holdover from the long-held belief in a divinely-anchored sovereign material and ethical nature, which the use here of ‘pathological’ and ‘unscientific’ depends on.

But it is a well documented fact that people have particularly strong reactions to cheaters and norm violations. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Perhaps because the correlation amounts to a circular argument. The choice of words like ‘cheater’ and ‘violator’ has already decided on condemnation and blame, which emerge out of the affectivity of anger. One could say, then, that it is a well documented fact that people have particularly strong reactions to people who make them
angry.

There is no such thing as a life without purposes, however humble those purposes may be. All purposes are geared towards either sustaining life, or fulfilling desires, even if only, in extremis, one's own life and desires. — Janus

Emotional crises such as grief and depression involve the loss of a sense of purpose. In these states we are plunged into the fog of confusion and chaos. Purpose is bound up with the sense of agency, of being able to act coherently by making sense of events in a consistent way, and this is taken from us in such moods. We lose our compass for action. Even though we are still alive, life loses its salience, relevance and meaning. The specter of physical death pales in comparison to this psychical death of meaning.

This isn't a debate or an opinion piece, it's me explaining my axiomatic framework — James Dean Conroy

We’re not here to test out your axiomatic system. We’re here to debate philosophy. That’s why it’s called a philosophy forum.

The idea is not to have AI step in and judge, but to use it as an intellectual aid. It’s about breaking down complex concepts, asking questions to explore further, and helping clarify difficult points. It’s there to enhance understanding, not to control or decide the course of the conversation. — James Dean Conroy

Tell you what. You use it to help you do that, and then when you’re ready you can engage directly with us in discussion.

↪Joshs

Josh, try the steps in my post above. That will then sit there all day and explain ay gaps for you.

Humour me, please.

If you do that, I'll happily sit here and go through everything.

Let me know what it says. — James Dean Conroy

I’m not a mod here, but I tend to think that encouraging the use of Chatbots as interlocutors in our philosophical discussions is not a direction in the Philosophy Forum wants to go.

Antinatalism can’t sustain itself. It relies on the infrastructure and surplus created by life-affirming systems while denying their value. It’s parasitic on order. — James Dean Conroy

What is the motive for anti-natalism? What is the motive for suicide? With respect to the latter, most psychologists would tell you that suicide is ‘life-affirming’ in that it is an attempt to preserve a self-affirming value. So rather than being ‘parasitic’ on order, anti-natalism celebrates and attempts to maintain a positive value, the avoidance of pain and suffering. Desire is always desire for the order of value and meaning, even when it involves the literal destruction of life.

Are you going to say you don't primarily want to survive, you wouldn't care if you knew you were to die tomorrow? — Janus

I’m not afraid of death, I’m concerned about quality of life. Survival for survival’s sake carries no appeal for me. I would rather not be alive than live a life with no purpose. I won’t know when I’m dead so it has no relevance for me.

. Do you think if murderers really believed that they would suffer in hell for acts of violence, that they would commit them — Wayfarer

Do you think that all murderers necessarily think of themselves as murderers rather than, for instance, as committing acts that according to their moral compass was justified? By the same token, are not lawful forms of punitive justice acts of violence? Do you think the enforcers of such acts can be convinced they will suffer in hell for them?

And how are people to know or trust that what they want is what will lead to happy good lives, when liberalism teaches that only gray or illusory or socially imposed lines are all that can define anything we might want or pursue? Liberalism is a good method to achieve a goal, but useless as a goal in itself. — Fire Ologist

Whoever claimed that liberalism was a goal in itself? Certainly not those people of faith who cherish the
ethical goals their Judaism, Christianity or Buddhism imparts within the umbrella of the liberalism they espouse. Scratch beneath the surface of this thread on liberal ‘myopia’ and it’s just another debate concerning which underlying philosophical worldview one prefers. Myopia isn’t unique to liberalism. It built into the normative commitments any political or philosophical view expresses. So you’re unhappy with liberalism? Name some alternative political thinkers and approaches you prefer.

So the critique here is a bit of a strawman...

This thread is really to talk about this framework. In particular I was looking for logical analysis. — James Dean Conroy

Were you also looking for a critique of your framework? I don’t understand how my comments on what you call an ‘evolutionary systems model’ don’t have any application to the framework you want to discuss in this thread.

You have to admit, though, that survival, that is life, is the ultimate—without it there are no other goals, which makes other goals secondary insofar as they depend absolutely on survival.

And I'm not just talking about human survival, human life, but all life — Janus

But no part of organism survives in a literal sense over time. It is a unified pattern of functioning that survives, and this ‘survival’ is only an abstraction. What we call ‘this’ living thing is not a thing, it is a system of interactions with a material and social environment. This whole ecology is the unit of ‘survival’, not a ready-made thing thrown into a world like a rock. The whole ecological system ‘preserves’ itself by changing itself in a self-consistent manner. One could say, then, that it doesnt survive so much as transform itself in an ordered way.

For context, this was something that was born from an evolutionary systems model, not philosophical musing about morals then retro fitting. — James Dean Conroy

As an evolutionary systems model, it’s taking too reductive a stance to grasp the site of evolutionary selective pressures and order creation. The unit of evolutionary survival is not a lifeless static slab of meat, nor is it the ‘gene’. There is no such thing as a gene in isolation. A living thing is a self-organizing system whose goal is not simply static survival , but the ongoing maintenance of a particular patten of interaction with its environment. To this end, all living things are cognitive sense-makers. That is, their interactions with their world is characterized as a normative set of purposes and intentional aims. What constitutes a threat to these purposes is defined by the nature of these purposes. In other words, the organism seeks to maintain the nature of its functioning in the face of changing conditions. What is good is what is constant with the ongoing maintenance of its patten of activity, what is bad is what interrupts its activity. Human beings do t drive to maintain a body, we strive to maintain a way of life, a system of anticipatory understanding that allows us to make sense of events.

Translated into human psychological terms, we consider what is good in terms of what is consistent and compatible with our normative ways of making sense of our world, and what is bad as those events we are unable to effectively assimilate into our schemes of understanding. To say that all this is in service of the survival of the gene is to miss the fact that the ‘gene’ is only an arbitrarily abstracted element of an integrated unity of functioning, the organism as a whole in its normative sense-making. Furthermore, the organism doesn’t simply adapt itself to its environment , it modifies and defines its environment on the basis of its functioning. Adaptivity and evolutionary selective pressures move in both directions , not just from world to organism but also on the basis of the organism’s effect on its environment.

Understanding evolutionary drives this way unites our psychological desires ( what good and bad mean to us) and the aims of living things in general. Your approach, by contrast, disconnects what is good from an evolutionary standpoint (surviving and becoming more ordered) from what is good from a psychological perspective. In your model, there is no reason to assume that persons are motivated in the direction of survival, order, or anything else for that matter. Some may want to live, some may want to die, some may crave order, some may be drawn to chaos.

Nobody read it then? — Jake Tarragon

I’m guessing people are probably more interested in his book ‘On Tyranny’ right now.

↪Joshs
I remember when I first discovered that one of the things the 1% does with their money is control the public conversation to reinforce their position. I was so shocked I was ready for the revolution then. I remember wanting to be part of a firing squad.

Give me a revolution and I'll salute it. — frank

I’m not interested in a revolution. I’m interested in protecting people in my community that I care about. And you didn’t answer my question:

What would you do if you were a university president threatened with loss of grant money, or a news service or law firm threatened with loss of access? Would you fight back or acquiesce?

My only regret is that I have but one life to give for my country. Go Joshs. Do that protest! Quote some Hegel to them. That'll leave them befuddled. — frank

And what do you plan on doing? Anything? What would
you do if you were a university president threatened with loss of grant money, or a news service or law firm threatened with loss of access? Would you fight back or acquiesce?

In my opinion, the time for action is already here. Trump has gone too far so many times that he should be dragged out of office and the nation initiates a re-election. It's better to do that now rather than — Christoffer

Have you been attending the 50501 protests? There’s another one planned for next Saturday. I think you’ll find that they will grow significantly in size over the course of the year. https://www.fiftyfifty.one/

This is what we need to do here:

https://theweek.com/speedreads/854197/1-million-people-could-take-part-puerto-rico-protests

In this case I think the effectiveness would be in the legacy of the protests. Trump has already shown a penchant for using for force against protestors. Some people would likely die in the clash — frank

I wonder how many died of the 1 million who demonstrated in Puerto Rico? I’ll bet some would have thought it was worth it.

That's what's unusual about this situation. People watched Trump try to derail an election and elected him again. This is what a lot of Americans want. — frank

I watched him try and derail an election, too. And yet I wasn’t convinced that he is a full-blown dictator until a few months ago. If it took me that long to figure it out, you can imagine that it will take even longer for those non -authoritarian types who voted for him reluctantly to come to that conclusion. We just had no precedent in this country for an all-out authoritarian takeover of the highest office. We haven’t learned how to read the signs. I would even give the benefit of the doubt and assume he doesn’t want an Orban or Putin-like figure running our country. But he only sees scattered pieces of the puzzle and they don’t add up to tyranny for him. Instead, they can be brushed off as the aggressive power-plays of politics as usual.

Thom Hartmann is certainly afraid:

But why are you afraid? — NOS4A2

I don’t know you, and haven’t followed most of your previous comments on politics, so I dont know what your political perspective is in general. There has been much written about the New Right, which is a big tent including Peter Thiel, J.D.Vance, Curtis Yarvin, Blake Masters, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk. Some of them, like Musk, Thiel and Mark Andreesen, are enamored of the ‘technocracy’ movement which believes in government by a technocratic elite. Others (Yarvin) are in favor of something more like a monarchical leadership. A. inner of them have high respect for Victor Orban? What do you think of him, and where you do stand with respect to these figures and this movement? Is there one among them who is a kind of guiding light for you? You certainly don’t sound like someone who considers the Reagan or Bush neo-liberal free market vision to be an inspiration for you.

To me, it's about a response to the way that people end up being nothing more than machines in a liberal world. There's something deathly about liberalism. The Left is about finding a way back from that, while hopefully keeping some of the awesomeness that liberalism created.

As for conservatism, did you see the people carrying signs saying "Hands Off"? That is the very essence of conservatism: to maintain the status quo, to hold on to what we know works. Our species is alive and well in this moment because of our conservative side, that preserves traditions and hands them on to the next generation. — frank

Tell me , Frank. Why does this sound like it could have come directly out of a New Right manifesto? Have you been dipping into Yarvin and Land?

↪ssu

I remember you predicting that of all the wars that Trump is lusting to have, a war with Panama was the second likeliest one. Given that the US and Panama recently partnered to secure the canal and deter China, with a special nod to Panama’s sovereignty, I’m curious if your fears abated or if they still remain — NOS4A2

How about your fears? Do you fear that we now have our first dictator as president? Do you not find this EO terrifying:

Addressing Risks Associated with an Egregious Leaker and Disseminator of Falsehoods Presidential Memoranda
April 9, 2025

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/04/addressing-risks-associated-with-an-egregious-leaker-and-disseminator-of-falsehoods/

Thom Hartmann is certainly afraid:

The highest form of freedom in a democracy isn’t just the right to vote or protest—it’s the right to speak truth to power. To call out corruption. To challenge lies. To stand firm when the powerful demand silence. This is the freedom that sustains all others.
And it’s the one Donald Trump tried to crush Wednesday with the stroke of a pen.

When he signed an Executive Order (EO) directing the Justice Department to investigate Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor—two public servants whose only crime was telling the truth—Trump didn’t just abuse his office. He weaponized the government against honesty itself.
This wasn’t law enforcement: It was political vengeance. This wasn’t democracy: It was a warning shot from the edge of autocracy. And if we let this slide—if we treat it as just another Trump headline—we are inviting the next strongman to do the same, only worse.
The freedom to speak truth to power is either sacred, or it’s gone.

Thus, Donald Trump just moved America miles down the road toward our becoming a police state. There’s no other way to describe it.
​His EO demanding criminal investigations into Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor—and his public statement that Taylor is a “traitor” guilty of “treason”—are nothing short of a blatant assault on the rule of law and a perilous step toward turning America into a dictatorship.
This isn’t just about settling personal scores; it’s a calculated move to instill fear, silence dissent, and dismantle the very foundations of our democratic institutions.​

Can you imagine yourself being called a traitor by the president of the United States and thus potentially facing prison? Having to hire expensive attorneys that may well force you to sell your home to pay for defending yourself? Not to mention having to protect yourself and your family from the rightwing enforcers who are probably at this moment doxxing and threatening Krebs and Taylor?
This echoes tactics used by autocrats throughout history: Stalin’s purges, Nixon’s enemies list (though less successfully executed), and more recently, Orbán in Hungary, Duterte in the Philippines, or Putin in Russia. If normalized, it risks further turning the U.S. into an illiberal democracy or autocracy, where elections occur but power is retained through fear, manipulation, and coercion. Or worse, a violent kleptocracy like Russia.

Of all the many outrages that Trump is visiting on the nation, this must be among the worst. — Wayfarer

Absolutely. And one of the most chilling things I’ve ever heard are these comments from Miles Taylor, who , along with Krebs , was singled out by Trump for investigation, in his case for writing a book about his experience serving in Trump’s first administration. In this short interview before the election, he warns the American public that the second Trump administration would be structured like Germany’s third reich. I’m horrified to admit that, while I have always despised Trump, a year ago I would have considered that forecast a bit over the top. Now I know that Taylor’s prediction was spot on.

↪Joshs
Would you say leftism is closer to Hegel than to labor unions? — frank

You’d have to talk to the individuals in the unions, but in general I’d say that blue-collar unions will be dominated by social conservatives. Probably a bit different for teachers’ unions.

Has anyone considered that all of this is Stephen Miran's plan to devalue the dollar? His Mar-a-Lago accord spells out both increased tariffs and threatening to leave military collaborations, precisely what Trump has done — Christoffer

This idea has been discussed. Most conclude
that Trump isn’t following the plan.

No one outside of Trump’s inner circle considers Miran’s ideas and plans to be coherent, credible, or realistic.
Even more damning to the narrative that Miran is the strategic genius guiding Trump’s actions is the fact that Trump himself isn’t following Miran’s roadmap. Instead of targeting specific trade imbalances or building pressure toward a coordinated currency adjustment, the administration’s tariff strategy in 2025 has been indiscriminate and poorly sequenced. Allies like Canada and Mexico have been hit just as hard as rivals, undermining any hope of building a coalition for the mythical Mar-a-Lago Accord.

The rollout has been chaotic, with inconsistent exemptions and retaliations flying in every direction. If Miran truly intended for tariffs to be a form of surgical economic leverage, Trump is wielding them like a sledgehammer in a glassware shop. It’s yet another contradiction in a portfolio full of them: Miran provides the blueprint of a modern Taj Mahal, Trump builds a treehouse with a blowtorch, and Republicans and their cheerleaders pretend it’s an architectural masterpiece. (Michael Barnard)

Deleuze would agree with Nick Land regarding accelerationism. Land was a Marxist, and Land became anti-Enlightenment — frank

No, Deleuze would not agree with Land about accelerationism. Land hadn’t the vaguest idea what the essence of Deleuze's philosophy was. I read The Dark Enlightenment, and it, like the New Right in general, is the very antithesis of Deleuzianism. There is nothing ‘hollowed out’ about the philosophical underpinnings of leftism, expect for those who were never capable of understanding its concepts in the first place. This is easy to demonstrate.
The New Right is just traditionalism dressed up in the garb of cool-kid hipsterism. To them leftism is group-think, because they don’t have what it takes intellectually to join the group.

I think right now you're kind of frozen by the realization that we might be watching the end of democracy in the US.The only thing that could stop it is if some black swan appears out of the Democratic domain and takes the presidency away from Vance. Otherwise, I think through Trump's administration they're going to be filling vacancies with loyalists — frank

I’m not frozen. I have full confidence that progressive America will not only survive , but continue to thrive and grow. The reason for Trump in the first place is the growing dominance of progressive voices in Americana culture, overwhelmingly so in the cities and universities. Nothing Trump does will change that. He is holding onto a thin political majority at the moment, but the damage he is doing to the economy will peel away those non-MAGA voters he counted on to win the election. Tyrants always end up pushing things too far and causing their own downfall. Trump’s stupidity has already begun to alienate the financial community and many in the business
community.

↪Tzeentch Right right, so the "Blob" that has been controlling foreign policy for decades and basically has no interest in changing what it's been doing suddenly has radically changed tactics. You do realise these articles don't support the notion anybody is "controlling" Trump behind the scenes, — Benkei

Of course nobody is controlling Trump behind the scenes. Elon Muak’s tech mafia mistakenly thought they could do so, and Wall Street thought they had him in their back pocket, but when you put an autocrat in charge he will eventually give you the middle finger. Just ask Putin’s oligarchs.

↪frank
I think the present moment is a test for how leftist you really are. If you're white-knuckling the volatility we've had so far, shaking your fist at stupid Trump, then you have a very conservative mindset. He's handing us an economic revolution. If you're a leftist, you're like: go Trump! Get those tariffs!
— frank
Are you saying you believe that Trump is producing an economic revolution? And that you believe this revolution he is hatching is a beneficial thing for America? — Joshs

Read Mark Blyth's comments. He agrees with me and the president of the UAW. ChatteringMonkey mentioned some of this earlier in the thread — frank

Frank, I don’t know how you personally define political conservatism and leftism, but I believe there is much confusion over who exactly they apply to, depending on what country you’re in, what you do for a living, and so many other factors. From my perspective, it is far more helpful and clarifying to define conservativism and leftism from a philosophical vantage.The left and the right seem to have arrived at a kind of consensus that progressivism is grounded philosophically in thinking that can be traced back to German Idealism, and especially Hegel. The various strands of progressivism that include Marxism, wokism, Critical Race Theory and intersectionality, Liberation Theology, Neo and Post-Marxism ( Habermas , Adorno) and Postmodernism (Foucault, Deleuze) all emanate from these philosophical sources. The conceptual scaffolding of post-Hegelianism is the glue that holds together the newer thinking about gender, race, class, and ethics in general , as well as progressive critiques of neo-liberalism and how such political tools as tariffs may fit into such critiques.

So where does Trump fit into this picture of leftism? He doesn’t. Trump’s thinking is profoundly conservative. To understand the philosophical sources for Trump’s view of the world, the glue that holds together his approach to economics, politics and social issues, one must go back 400 to 500 years. Trump is a pre-Enlightenment figure who rejects Enlightenment values (more precisely, he doesn’t understand them). I would even say his approach is theocratic. And he is not alone in this thinking. A strain of anti-democratic thought runs through MAGA. Check out Curtis Yarvin:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Yarvin

David Brooks and Bret Stephens are among many Conservatives ( George Will, David Frum, etc) who have abandoned the Republican party because of its shift to the anti-Enlightenment , autocratic-theocratic right. I highly recommend Brooks’ recent piece for the Atlantic, ‘I Should Have Seen This Coming’.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trumpism-maga-populism-power-pursuit/682116/

I dont know whether the president of the UAW is a leftist or conservative from a philosophical point of view, but keep in mind that political leftism in the U.S. used to be associated with pro-labor urban blue-collar workers loyal to the democratic party. The large majority of those voters are now Trump supporters, because their philosophical worldview was never progressive, but conservative. Being pro-labor and pro-tariff today isn’t enough to warrant the label ‘leftist’. One must dig beneath the surface and examine what tariffs mean to someone who advocates them, how and for what purposes they intend to implement them. Both conservatives and progressives embrace tariffs in general. The ways in which they differ is a function of how the differences between a conservative and progressive philosophical worldview translate into how and why tariffs are integrated with trade and investment.

For all I know, you and Shawn Fain may be sympathetic to anti-Enlightenment thinking. The other possibility is that both of you are making a colossal and dangerous mistake, confusing Trump’s profoundly backward-looking worldview for a forward-looking progressivism (‘economic revolution’), and as a result hitching your wagon to one of the biggest dangers to American democracy this country has ever seen.

It is only at the most superficial level that Trump’s tariff plan resembles any kind of progressive tariff proposal. At a deeper level, Trump’s tariff goals are antithetical to everything progressivism stands for. Even Mark Blythe acknowledges that Trump may not be a good model to follow on tariffs:

I think there’s a real danger that what I could be doing, and a lot of other people are doing, are basically looking for designs within disorder. This could simply be sane-washing the way that the Trump administration is essentially just going for a grift, whether it’s on taxes, whether it’s hollowing out the state, we don’t know.

Every word you write supporting Trump contributes in a small way to the risk that our democratic system may unravel. We progressives know that our only chance of warding off the damage Trump may do to the country and the world is to convince those like you who mistakenly believe Trump’s ideas are can somehow be aligned with legitimate attempts by thoughtful economists and politicians to solve issues like offshoring that nothing he aims to do is in any way compatible with progressive aims.
Frank, please don’t be an unwitting accomplice to discarding the values I always believed this country stood for.

I think the present moment is a test for how leftist you really are. If you're white-knuckling the volatility we've had so far, shaking your fist at stupid Trump, then you have a very conservative mindset. He's handing us an economic revolution. If you're a leftist, you're like: go Trump! Get those tariffs! — frank

Are you saying you believe that Trump is producing an economic revolution? And that you believe this revolution he is hatching is a beneficial thing for America?

Trump finally blinked.

But let's remember that now Trump has that trade war with China and still he has those tariffs with everybody at 10%. That 10% + China trade war will have an effect on the US economy.

It's not going to be the absolute disaster of a lifetime. Just your normal Trump disaster. :wink: — ssu

Something to consider: Economists have pointed out that it isnt tariffs per se that are so damaging to markets and businesses. Tariffs have not historically led to recessions all by themselves, even Smoot-Hauley. It’s the uncertainty associated with an on-again off again policy-making style dictated by the whims of one man. How can businesses plan if they don’t know whether this latest announcement is a just a pause, or an elimination of reciprocal tariffs? How can markets and corporations trust that , whichever way Trump goes, he’ll stick to that plan? Why should they when he has already reversed himself multiple times? Such unpredictability is disastrous for the economy.

Krugman is not saying we're back to 2008. He's saying he's concerned. If you want to go further and say we actually are experiencing a crisis of that magnitude, you'll have to explain why you think the markets can't recover on their own — frank

It’s not just Krugman who’s concerned. And this is why markets may not be able to recover on their own:

President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs are hiking up the cost of American consumer goods and roiling the markets. The word roiling undersells what is happening, though. Investors are dumping American government bonds, normally the safest of safe harbors; the plunge in bond prices is causing knock-on effects in market after market. A financial crisis—today or in the coming weeks—is a tangible possibility.
In the event of such a catastrophe, the Federal Reserve would step in with trillions of dollars of liquidity, buying up the assets that traders are dumping and acting as a purchaser of last resort. In time, Congress might try to help support the economy too, by cutting taxes or sending out checks. But such accommodative policies would pump up consumer prices, already rising because of the tariffs. And they would do nothing to change the fundamental fact driving countless panicked and chaotic trades: Investors do not trust the United States and its political system anymore.
Annie Lowrey, Atlantic Monthly

During a recent speech at the American Bankers Association, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said this:

“For the next four years, the Trump agenda is focused on Main Street. It's Main Street's turn. It's Main Street's turn to hire workers. It's Main Street's turn to drive investment. And it's Main Street's turn to restore the American dream." — NOS4A2

And yesterday he told Trump to given clear objectives to investors about his ultimate intentions for the new tariffs or stock markets will keep spiralling down. You notice that it is Trump’s intentions, not Bessent’s, that are behind the current tariff policy. Economists who know Bessent well say that his approach to tariffs is substantially different than Trump’s, and he is frantically trying to avert an economic and political disaster by getting Trump to moderate his approach, and at the very least, to explain its endgoals coherently.

Oh good grief. He's saying that investors are spooked and we might have a recession — frank

Is that how you interpreted this?

… I was looking for guidance about inflation and instead found the telltale signs of an incipient financial crisis….
There are growing signs that we’re at risk of a tariff-induced financial crisis. There are multiple indicators of that risk…

So even though stock prices are dominating the headlines, the real, scary action is in the bond market. The nightmare scenario, which we saw play out in 2008, is that falling asset prices cause a scramble for cash, which leads to fire sales that drive prices even lower, and the whole system implodes. Suddenly, that scenario doesn’t look impossible.

Maybe we’ll steer away from the edge of the abyss. But Trumponomics has already proved worse than even its harshest critics imagined, and the worst may be yet to come.

Seems to me financial crisis and recession are two different things.