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.

Are you suggesting he's manning his own boat? Think about all the areas in which he is acting. I think he's one of a committee, or more likely the figurehead, allowed his tantrums. Otherwise it's all his show, and I do not think he is remotely near that able. — tim wood

That’s exactly what I and many economists who know Trump’s advisors are suggesting. There are only a couple of issues Trump is interested in, and the rest he leaves up to others, like when he gave Jared Kushner carte blanche to do what he wanted in the Middle East. The one issue he has obsessed about since the 1980’s is how the rest of the world has cheated and taken advantage of America. On this point he has been extremely consistent, and it is on this issue that he is manning his own boat. That Rose Garden tariff chart reflects his own discombobulated thinking about how to get revenge upon the world’s ‘unfair’ treatment of the U.S., not that of Navarro or any of his other advisors. He likes to run his own show, so everyone else can coming crawling to him as the great dealmaker and shakedown artist.

Isnt the fear at the moment that the markets are headed for a liquidity crisis, which happened during the 2008 financial crisis?
— Joshs

That was because $55 Trillion disappeared overnight. Trillion with a T. We're just experiencing uncertainty associated with a looming recession with possible stagflation. You're comparing a thunder storm to a hurricane. — frank

I’m not doing the comparing. Economists are.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-cost-of-chaos-this-is-getting

the overuse of false analogies such as these only reveal to me how far they have to reach to justify their acts. — NOS4A2

Do you believe that Victor Orban is a dictator? How about Putin? If so, tell me in detail what qualifies these men as autocratic rulers? What strategies and tactics did they use to gradually change a system with checks and balances into an autocracy? What signs would you look for in Trump to convince you that he thinks in similar ways about power as Orban and Putin?

The question: given what he is doing and has done, and what he says and how he says it, and the company he surrounds himself with and what they say and do, what makes sense as to what is ultimately intended? Putting all the parts together, what is the most likely structure that they all fit? — tim wood

Are you suggesting he’s playing 5-dimensional chess?(*facepalm*). The policy coming out of the White House is not the product of tightly coordinated strategy among Trump and his advisors. Trump is an incompetent who doesn’t read history, economics or anything else for that matter. He only hears from his advisors what he wants to hear and ignores what he doesn’t. No one in his circle of ‘experts’ lasts for very long, especially if they dare to disagree with him. Notice how Bessant or Navarro or Hassert will say one thing about the reasons for the tariffs and Trump will immediately contradict them. One dangerous, autocratic idiot is running the show, and the role of his Cabinet is to try to sane-wash his idiocy.

↪Benkei Bravo.
I’ve just heard a respected economist explaining how if the bond markets run away the federal reserve will have no choice but to raise interest rates, which may lead to an inability to service U.S. debt and will drive inflation. — Punshhh

Isnt the fear at the moment that the markets are headed for a liquidity crisis, which happened during the 2008 financial crisis? In such a crisis, panicked investors sell everything, even bonds, so instead of what usually happens during a downturn, that investors turn to bonds as a safe haven, lowering their yields, they are sold along with everything else and their yield jumps. In 2008 the Fed has to step in and provide liquidity.

As Paul Krugman explains:

…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.

Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute released a new report on so-called “assassination culture” online, with Anti-Trumpism figuring prominently.

I’ll posted a brief quote below to give a sense of the undercurrent of political violence we’re dealing with — NOS4A2

When I read this post, my first thought was not, ‘Gee, what kind of violently disturbed person would seriously consider assassinating a political leader?’ It was ‘ What context of background assumptions would motivate someone to write this post?’ Let me explain. Let’s say you were living in England in 1943 and a Cambridge University research institute released a report on assassination culture, with anti-Nazism figuring prominently. Would you be disturbed enough about such behavior to write a post (we’ll pretend the internet existed then) about it, or would you empathize with such sentiment even if you were personally opposed to murder in general?

My question to you, then, is what kind of assessment would you have to make of a particular political leader in order to justify your empathetic response to the desire of others to assassinate them?

I’ll make this more direct. I was born and raised in the U.S., and if you live in my country, I want to you to justify your motivation to me. I’ll share mine first. I don’t condone killing anybody, but here is my justification for being sympathetic to those who harbor the desire to see Trump wiped out.

In my lifetime, Ive seen presidents make decisions that many consider unconstitutional, or act in ways that constituted executive overrreach. I’ve seen presidents claim to represent the country as a whole, but pursue sharply partisan goals that alienated half the population. I’m a liberal democrat, but I never doubted that Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, and even Nixon, wielded their power not only for the sake of goals that went well beyond their own narrow self interest, but in principle were against the idea that having power meant eliminating all opposition to their will.

I have come to the realization that Donald Trump has a fundamentally different view of power than these presidents, and all previous presidents with the possible exception of Andrew Johnson. Trump’s view of power is that only one man, himself, can be allowed to control the country. All sources of potentially dissenting opinion are to be viewed as disloyalty and must be squelched. This includes all independent institutions, such as the press, academia, government agencies, law firms and judges, and corporate ceo’s. He will initially be viewed by his base of supporters as acting on their behalf and under their control, but eventually their voices will be squelched as well.

The fact that this is his view of power doesnt mean that he can succeed in decimating the checks and balances of democracy. He needs the help and acquiescence of many others to accomplish this. But in order to make sure this does not happen, others must realize that Trump, if not challenged, will act to remake America in the direction of Netanyahu’s Israel, Orban’s Hungary, and Putin’s Russia.

Having that realization doesnt mean encouraging ‘assassination culture’, but it requires taking seriously the unprecedented danger to American democracy that Trump represents. My impression is that your unsympathetic post about assassination culture reflects the fact that you are not convinced that Trump is an authoritarian personality.

Beyond that, the problem is party loyalty. Only a handful of Republicans could bring themselves to vote against their party's candidate: a morally bankrupt criminal Republican is more acceptable than any Democrat — Relativist

That’s not party loyalty. The Republican party which existed for decades was destroyed by the MAGA populist movement, and many of its brightest lights either fled to the Democratic party or became independents. It is precisely because loyalty to the old Rebublican party dissolved that a former Democrat like Trump could become the new embodiment of the party. To the extent that a percentage of his voters were not MAGA populists, this was because they thought that when it came to running the economy he would govern like a free market, small government pro-business Republican, which is precisely what he did in his first term.

As Paul Krugman writes:

Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby. They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.

And if Trump II really had been like Trump I, America’s oligarchs would be very happy right now.

They're not paying the tariffs, so is he just fucking stupid in all this believing the money will flow into the nation and not just out of the pockets of its businesses and citizens? — Christoffer

Big time stupid ( or as Paul Krugman calls him, ‘a feces-flinging chaos monkey’). And big-time dangerous. How did it come to this? Lots of people left behind by cultural and economic changes wanting to believe in a fantasy of a return to the days of abundant high-paying low skill industrial jobs. And a slimy used-car salesman who believes in that same fantasy uses his best skill, selling snake oil, to become the prophet of the deluded. But his own delusions of grandeur and need for absolute power will ultimately betray his own followers (and the billionaire ‘tech-bro’ supplicants who hoped to get even richer by ass-kissing the King, but are now seeing substantial chunks of their fortunes wiped away in the carnage he is unleashing).

If so, then why don't people do anything about it?
— Christoffer

How, though? He’s been empowered by the popular vote to do what he’s doing. — Wayfarer

This is how:

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/15-ways-you-can-fight-for-democracy

↪Punshhh ↪Joshs

The tariffs and the return of "industrial policy" that differed radically from the neo-liberal orthodoxy that had dominated the GOP for decades were discussed throughout the campaign. You can find all sorts of articles on this from before Trump was elected, and he had rhetoric focused on the trade deficit in his speeches on a regular basis.

It's certainly true that when voters pick a candidate they are rarely selecting on a single issue, but it's hardly a move that has come out of left field. Both polling and my person experience living in an area that went hard for Trump suggest that the most common attitude for supporters is that they are willing to "try it out" and suffer some "short term pain for long term gain." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Based on his first term , voters learned to take what Trump said ‘seriously but not literally’. Whatever he had been babbling about for 40 years concerning tariffs and reproducing 1950’s industrial America, what he actually did in term 1 was to slap mild tariffs on China, and renegotiate Nafta by changing a few apostrophes and commas here and there. More importantly, he lowered taxes for wealthy corporations, tried to get rid of Obamacare and made other efforts to please the pro-business small government libertarians. These corporate types, who could care less about making things in America again and just wanted to free themselves from high taxes and Biden’s regulatory crusade (Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, etc) had every reason to believe Trump’s second term would be a repeat of the first. I certainly thought it would be, and like many was stunned to find out that he actually took his half-assed 19th century mercantilism seriously and was willing got to go the distance with it (at least so far). His current all-out tariff war may not have been a surprise to North Carolina MAGA supporters, but it sure as hell was to many wealthy businesspeople who voted for him, and are now regretting it mightily.

Second, it's perhaps dysfunctional that major policy choices are made wholly by presidents in this way. That's an outgrowth of decades of dysfunction in Congress, which can no longer govern — Count Timothy von Icarus

The reason he is getting no opposition from Congress is because they are terrified that if they do oppose him Trump will direct the wrath of his MAGA army on them. Unlike the first time around, MAGA and Trump together have made sure that Trump is surrounded by only yes-sayers in his second administration and in Congress. There is no one left to act as a check on his power, or to question his decisions.

This leads to a profoundly important issue concerning you, me and everyone else who cares about the future of this country as a democracy. You’re trying to make an equivalence between Trump’s actions and the seemingly dictatorial overreach of Democratic leaders like Binden. If this were a ‘normal’ president, I would agree with you. Such overreach can be found throughout the history of American government. One of the most egregious examples of this was the period surrounding World War I, where under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson severe restrictions of free speech were allowed to occur, with long imprisonment for those, such as Eugene Debbs and Emmas Goldman, who opposed the war. Even the Supreme Court sanctioned such restrictions.

But Timothy, it is absolutely vital to make a distinction between zealous executive overreach in the name of policies and principles that have wide popular support (even if that support is purely partisan) , and something quite different. In the first case, the overreach is motivated by, and continues to feed itself, through the aims of a community consensus. It is not just that the decision-making leader sees themselves as speaking on behalf of a ‘we’, they have no interest in usurping the authority of this ‘we’ so as to concentrate itself in an ‘I’ that tolerates no challenges to its sovereignty. Such a notion would be repugnant to most U.S. presidents, with the exception of Andrew Johnson , and I believe , Trump. Unlike some, I am not saying that Trump’s desire for supreme power is motivated by purely selfish interests, such as greed or self-aggrandizement.

I think he truly believes he has a way to ‘make America great again’. But I think this is also the case with Victor Orban, Erdoğan, Putin and Maduro. What distinguishes the authoritarian from the kind of executive overreach you cite is a personality that needs to be the sole decision maker, and considers all dissent as disloyalty. They strive to replace a law-based system of government with that of edicts from one man at the top. If Trump were to be given absolutely free reign, he would use intimation and threats to weaken and then destroy the ability of law firms and judges to move against him, would cement a grip on academic institutions, media and other organizations which attempt to maintain independence from his control. To be successful at such attempts he cannot do all this by himself. He need the acquiescence of these institutions, their willingness to preemptively give up their independence to avoid his punishments. And it is not as though he is alone in his preference for despotism. An admiration for figures like Orban and an outright rejection of Enlightenment values runs through MAGA.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/03/enlightenment-trump-far-right-europe/682086/

Could I be wrong about Trump? Sure. In fact I was reluctant to ascribe these extreme dispositions to him for a long time, perhaps partly out of denial. I just couldn’t allow myself to imagine that a majority of Americans would elect as president someone who sees power as absolute one-man rule. But the last three months have convinced me. I suspect that you may never be convinced. I would like to say that it is enough for me that people like you oppose him for whatever reasons you come up with.
But if I am right about Trump, simply passively sitting back and waiting till the next election may not protect our democracy. I have no doubt now that, left to his own devices , this country would end up looking as repressive as Hungary. But this country has a more robust civic culture than Hungary, and as long as we all act to resist his attempts at intimidation and support independent institutions, we can avoid that fate.

Seems like you wouldn’t make these cuts if you were interested in revitalizing American industries. — praxis

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao banished intellectuals to the countryside and decimated academic institutions, so that there would be no smart people around to challenge his power. Parallels here?

"Hey tariffs will make things cost more but at least there's less government spending on social security" isn't the win you think it is — Mr Bee

Neither are cuts spending on research and innovation in medicine, AI, energy and all the other things that China is pulling farther and farther ahead of us on.

Corporations will go wherever they can get short-term profits, which is why they will also flock back to Russia without state intervention to stop them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My point is that if I own a corporation in the U.S. and I am interested in expanding, I would consider my best strategy to be to sit on my hands and wait this thing out rather commit my company to a move with the assumption that I can plan on the basis of whatever Trump declares to be the tariff situation this month, this week or this afternoon.

From Thomas Sowell:

Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he was president in the 1930s, said that you have to try things. And if they don’t work, then you admit it, you abandon that, you go on to something else and you try that until you come across something that does work.
That’s not a bad approach if you are operating within a known system of rules. But if you are the one who’s making the rules, then all the other people have no idea what you’re going to do next. And that is a formula for having people hang on to their money until they figure out what you’re going to do.
And when a lot of people hang on to their money, you can get results such as you got during the Great Depression of the 1930s. So if this is just a set of short-run ploys for various objectives limited in time, fine, maybe.
But if this is going to be the policy for four long years, that you’re going to try this, you’re going to try that, you’re going to try something else, a lot of people are going to wait.

Meanwhile, Trump won the most votes in a free and fair election, and his party won both chambers of Congress. People are getting what they voted for. It's not a failure of "too little democracy" (i.e. "too much authority") when a proven incompetent populist demagogue wins power, quite the opposite — Count Timothy von Icarus

I never claimed that he didn’t win fair and square. Hitler won in a fair and free election, too. That doesn’t mean he didn’t govern by edict rather than rule of law. As to people getting what they voted for, a sizable chunk of those who voted for Trump thought they were getting someone quite different than what he has turned out to be. The ones who put him over the top did not vote for 19th century mercantilist protectionism.

There may be a temporary increase in demand, but in the longer term American companies will not be able to compete with foreign companies who re-assemble cheaper supply chains excluding the U.S.

It's probably more likely to be the opposite, provided the tarrifs remain in place. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Explain to me how we build cheaper cars when we have to make all the components here, while other countries will forge their own trade deals to integrate production among multiple countries for the lowest prices. Of course the heartland would be better off if it werent for offshoring and automation. There would still be millions of workers in assembly lines with high wages under labor protections. But even if all the companies that left came back, they would offer many fewer jobs than decades ago.

I'm not predicting rosy days, I'm just saying an emotionally neutral viewpoint is not predicting disaster. Maybe a recession. — frank

Voters need to feel like it’s a disaster for their quality of life. That’s the only way to be rid of Trump.

Black swan events happen often enough that every company takes risks to expand. But if anything, a lot of American companies should look for an increase in demand resulting from the tariffs. — frank

Natural disasters and cyclical recessions are one thing, but businesses don’t expect Black Swan events to be caused by the policy whims of a dictator, which is why there is little urge to invest in authoritarian regimes where policy changes on a dime.
There may be a temporary increase in demand, but in the longer term American companies will not be able to compete with foreign companies who re-assemble cheaper supply chains excluding the U.S.

That said, one expert opinion is that recession probably wouldn't be caused directly by the tariffs, but rather by the fear inspired by them — frank

It’s not just fear. It’s impossible for a company to invest in expansion if there isn’t predictability over a 5 year horizon, which is how long it takes to build new plants, etc. Trump continually changes his mind about tariffs, wanting to subject every country to the prospect of renegotiation based on his whim. As a result, businesses are suffering from paralysis right now, which leads to a freeze on hiring and other effects which can lead to recession.

Some believe the U.S. is strategically positioned to leverage tariff-induced chaos in order to push for a "Mar-a-Lago Accord" that could simultaneously weaken the dollar and preserve its status as the world's reserve currency, ultimately leading to re-industrialization — praxis

The article you linked to is called ‘sane-washing’, trying to to turn an utterly incoherent attempt to rationalize Trump’s
logic-free actions into a coherent plan.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trump-tariffs-threats-incentive-for-canada-mexico-and-everyone-else-to-break-free-by-j-bradford-delong-2025-03

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2025/03/25/trump-trade-wars-mar-a-lago-accord/

↪Joshs
Have you spoken with an expert in economics or geopolitics about these predictions? There are a number of educated opinions on Reddit, although the moderator on AskEconomics just locked the thread because it was getting too rambunctious. — frank

I have been obsessively reading everything I can get my hands on by economists, both liberal and conservative. None of them are foolish enough to ‘declare’ a recession before it begins, but there is a consensus that what is happening now is a profound shock to the global economy the likes of which hasn’t been seen in 95 years.

Yesterday was the beginning of the end for Trump. His displaying of that ridiculous chatgpt-generated chart in the Rose Garden was the moment he jumped the shark. This what’s going to happen next:

The U.S. will fall into a deep and prolonged recession which will put many out of work, and a steep bear market will wipe out retirement portfolios. Heightened inflation will add insult to injury. Those Trump voters who thought they were getting a free-market champion will be out for blood. Congressional Republicans will remove their heads from Trump’s butt as they realize they have more to fear from their constituents than from displeasing Great Leader. By the time we get to the mid-terms, the country will look like something from a Cormac McCarthy dystopian wasteland, which will return some power to the Democrats. In 4 years, the MAGA brand will a toxic , shrunken vestige of what it once was.

If so, then why don't people do anything about it? Why is everyone just accepting that all of this is going on — Christoffer

If you live in the U.S. , why don’t you do something? You can start by joining the nationwide protests planned for tomorrow.
https://handsoff2025.com/

↪praxis

I thought you might want to show where no tax for anybody who makes less than $150,000 a year is proposed. I couldn’t find it.

I guess use your imagination then. How would that tax cut benefit the 1% in your view — NOS4A2

Heres an interesting take on that alleged no taxes for anyone making less than $150,000 a year’, from New Republic’s Timothy Noah:

In a meeting with Republican congressional leaders in June 2024 Trump said he favored an “all tariff policy” that would allow the United States to abandon the income tax. He said it again in October 2024, first to a bunch of guys in a Bronx barbershop (“When we were a smart country, in the 1890s…. [we] had all tariffs. We didn’t have an income tax”), and then to Joe Rogan. (Rogan: “Were you serious about that?” Trump: “Yeah, sure, why not?”) Trump said it yet again in his inauguration speech (“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens”). One month later, Trump’s tariff-crazed Commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, discussed the idea in some detail:

“His goal is to have external revenue. You know, the way I think about it, we all are so used to paying taxes, we’re so used to it, we have like Stockholm syndrome. You know, “Don’t stop the Internal Revenue Service, God forbid!” … Let [other nations] pay a membership fee. We all understand that model. Let them pay…. I know his goal is: No tax for anybody who makes less than $150,000 a year. That’s his goal. That’s what I’m working for.”

This drew a little more attention than Trump’s remarks. Maybe that was because Lutnick’s scheme was one-quarter less insane. In Lutnick’s formulation, the IRS would still tax people whose income exceeded $150,000. Still, exempting everybody else would cut loose at least three-quarters of all current taxpayers, at a cost to the Treasury of about $1 trillion per year. (The under-$150,000 cohort would still have to pay payroll tax, which for most in this group exceeds what they pay in income tax. But I digress.)

A $1 trillion hole in tax receipts is smaller than the nearly $3 trillion hole left by eliminating the income tax entirely. But $1 trillion is still an insane amount to have to raise in tariffs on $3.3 trillion of imports. Lutnick said later that none of this would happen until the budget was balanced, at which time everybody heaved a sigh of relief, because there’s no chance in hell Trump will ever balance the budget. Trump’s immediate reason to hunt tariff revenue is to try to cover the cost of his tax proposals: extend the 2017 tax cut, restore the deduction for state and local taxes, eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, et cetera. The cost of these approaches a whole ‘nuther $1 trillion per year.

Have you noticed that Trump never gets a number right? He will never acknowledge arithmetic. I don’t feel certain Trump’s even signed on to Lutnick’s compromise idea of eliminating the income tax only on incomes below $150,000. But to pursue any version of this scheme, Trump needs to slap tariffs on everything that moves, while leaving his underlings to supply a rationale. Just about any justificaiton will do.

The left died. This is what's taking its place — frank

Not for long.
I completely agree with this assessment for Atlantic columnist Jonathan Chait:

Public-opinion polling on Trump’s economic management, which has always been the floor that has held him up in the face of widespread public dislike for his character, has tumbled. This has happened without Americans feeling the full effects of his trade war. Once they start experiencing widespread higher prices and slower growth, the bottom could fall out.
A Fox News host recently lectured the audience that it should accept sacrifice for Trump’s tariffs just as the country would sacrifice to win a war. Hard-core Trump fanatics may subscribe to this reasoning, but the crucial bloc of persuadable voters who approved of Trump because they saw him as a business genius are unlikely to follow along. They don’t see a trade war as necessary. Two decades ago, public opinion was roughly balanced between seeing foreign trade as a threat and an opportunity. Today, more than four-fifths of Americans see foreign trade as an opportunity, against a mere 14 percent who see it, like Trump does, as a threat.

As the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way point out, “Authoritarian leaders do the most damage when they enjoy broad public support.” Dictators such as Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chávez have shown that power grabs are easier to pull off when the public is behind your agenda. Trump’s support, however, is already teetering. The more unpopular he becomes, the less his allies and his targets believe he will keep his boot on the opposition’s neck forever, and the less likely they will be to comply with his demands.The Republican Party’s descent into an authoritarian personality cult poses a mortal threat to American democracy. But it is also the thing that might save it.

↪Joshs Americans are in for a real ride now. At least for others, it's just the exports to the US going down the drain... for the US consumers, a bit different. — ssu

I’m all in favor of these tariffs. Trump only won the election because his core MAGA supporters were joined by libertarian free-market neo-liberal business types who believed Trump basically shared their economic perspective, and just used tariffs as a bargaining chip. They didn’t realize the Trump who made them money in his first term was a Trump whose real goals were being constrained by those around him. They didn’t think they were electing an imperialist mercantilist. A lot of them don’t even know what that is, it’s been discredited for so long. But they are likely to learn now the hard way, with a deep recession and steep bear market. If that happens, I think they will vet all future candidates for office to make sure that no imperialist-mercantilist platform ever gets voted in again.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford said he spoke with Prime Minister Mark Carney about that prospect on Wednesday morning ahead of President Donald Trump’s ominous Liberation Day announcement on sweeping new tariffs.

Ford suggested that Carney told him a zero-tariff situation was possible if Trump agreed to drop all tariffs.

Trump doesn’t believe in trade. He has said he thinks trade is ‘bad’, that there is always a winner and a loser. As a mercantilist, the last thing he wants is tariff-free open trade.

Some hinge propositions are of the form "...counts as...", and as such their role is in setting up the language game. "The piece that only moves diagonally counts as a bishop"; "This counts as a hand"; "'P' counts as true if and only if P". — Banno

Is this what’s called anaphoric or prosentential logic? I’m
thinking of Brandom here.

, I often "take it as true" that my colour judgements are synonymous with the optical colours, due to learning the colors by ostensive definition; in spite of the fact that the definition of the optical colours makes no mention of my color judgements. — sime

Doesn’t this kind of truth depend on a comparison or correspondence, even if only ‘taken as’ correct, between color judgement and optical colors?

What are the philosophical / epistemological / logical grounds for hinge propositions being exempt from doubt?
— Corvus

I guess you could doubt them, you just exit the language game when you do — frank

In order to doubt anything, one must rely on that which is beyond doubt. In other words, one cannot exit all language games and still be capable of doubting.

For example:
i) That Paris is in France cannot be doubted means that we started with a doubt and then concluded that our doubt was baseless.
ii) That Paris is in France is exempt from doubt means that we are not even allowed to doubt at — RussellA

One way of understanding ‘exempt from doubt’ is the way I suggested here:

In the second way of thinking, only the epistemological ‘I know’ represents my conviction (justifiable or not) that what I believe to be the case corresponds to what is actually the case. The hinge ‘ I know’ is not a conviction that what I believe corresponds with the way things actually are. It functions prior to correspondence, and the split between hypothesis and experience. Both what makes hypothesis and any possible experience that could validate or falsify it intelligible are already framed by the hinge conviction. — Joshs

The two language games I'm referring to are seen in one use of 'I know.." as an epistemological use, the other use as an expression of a conviction. Something I believe to be an indubitable truth, which doesn't have a justification like normal propositions. There is no justification; it's a lived conviction shown in our actions — Sam26

Let me offer two ways of thinking about this distinction between ‘I know’ as epistemological and ‘I know’ as hinge conviction, and you tell me which one you prefer. According to the first way, in both the epistemological and the hinge ‘I know’, truth is a correspondence between what I believe to be the case and what is actually the case. But the hinge ‘I know’ doesn’t have a justification or proof for its conviction that the way things really are corresponds to the way I believe them to be.

In the second way of thinking, only the epistemological ‘I know’ represents my conviction (justifiable or not) that what I believe to be the case corresponds to what is actually the case. The hinge ‘ I know’ is not a conviction that what I believe corresponds with the way things actually are. It functions prior to correspondence, and the split between hypothesis and experience. Both what makes hypothesis and any possible experience that could
validate or falsify it intelligible are already framed by the hinge conviction.

I don't understand what "the superordiante concept" might be. This in relation to the yin-yang. Here addressed as though it in fact occurs. — javra

For instance , one could take as the ground of one’s superordinate concept of the masculine-feminine binary a biologically determined , universal set of behavioral traits. One always knows what masculine or feminine mean, because their biological origin makes them
impervious to cultural influences. One could, on the other hand, view the superordinate concept as socially produced. In this care we only know what the words masculine and feminine mean via our participation in specific cultural contexts and historical eras. These are just two of many possible ways of understanding the superordinate concept.

A thing will have masculine and feminine aspects. Take one of the masculine aspects. Does that masculine aspect have feminine meta-aspects? This is a way of saying, that while an object level phenomenon has masculine and feminine aspects, the aspects themselves are dichotomously masculine or feminine. — fdrake

And what can we say about the superordinate concept imparting to ‘masculine’ and feminine’ their intelligibility? How is it grounded, and what is its genesis?

This is clearly part of Trump's Project 2025 program. Did Musk set you up to this? — T Clark

I believe Project 2025 states that all facts must be derived exclusively from social media sources.