DocWatts

Richard Wolff has a number of books on socialism that are far more accessible and directly relevant to contemporary conditions.

True, but I don't think handing someone who's curious about socialism a very long and difficult that's text full of anachronistic 19th century references, as helpful for the vast majority of people. Similiar to how it wouldn't be helpful for someone who wants to learn the basics of Idealist philosophy to have Hegel's Phenomenology of Sprit dropped in their lap. Someone like Richard Wolff would be a better recommendation, as he does a good job of updating the insights of Marx for the modern world we actually live in. And in a way that's far more accessible and immediately relevant to contemporary conditions.

For what it's worth, my problem with anti-abortion as an ethical position isn't due to someone having a personal belief that abortion is wrong. Reasonable people can disagree on at what stage in an embryo's development we should consider offering it the status and protections of personhood. The problem is that as far as anti-abortion advocacy is tied to conservatism, it's an incoherent position where its regard for the supposed sanctity of life ends once a person is born. The unborn are an easy group to advocate for; they don't demand anything, aren't complex, and can't disagree with you. This incoherent stance is further compounded by the heartless and cruel way that not an iota of compassion is given for the actual struggles of families, let alone the difficulties that people forced to bring a child into this world against their wishes endure. If the majority of anti-abortion advocacy was closer to how something like Veganism is typically practiced, as a personal choice not to participate in something they view as immoral, I would have a far easier time respecting someone who holds that position.

I think that the bulk of the political alienation that you're alluding to stems specifically from the failures of neoliberalism, which emerged as the predominant political paradigm from the 1980s onward. Neoliberalism is the paradigm that emerged out of the Democratic party largely abandoning the interests of the working class in order to more successfully compete with the GOP after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, in a context where a legalized form of bribery (ie lobbying) has a huge impact on who wins elections. The result of which is that both political party's interests became more concerned with advancing the interests of Capitalism at the expense of the living standards of ordinary people (with the Democrats and Republicans being the 'soft' and 'hard' versions of this, respectively). No coincidence that this period inward coincided with a decline in living standards for ordinary Americans, and a feeling that politics is theatre without substantial impact on a person's day to day lives. Trump was able to cynically exploit the deep seated resentment against this paradigm (along with a burgeoning white nationalist movement) to propel himself to the White House in 2016, while Hilary Clinton was (correctly) identified as a poster child for neoliberalism.

No, I meant liberals; while there's some overlap between the two, Liberalism and Progressivism are distinct ideological poles. Think of the difference between Barrack Obama and Bernie Sanders as a good demonstration of this, then compare and contrast their differing perspectives on an issue like healthcare (a more regulated private market vs getting rid of private insurance in favor of Universal Health Care). They're both lumped together in the Democratic Party because of the peculiarities of the American two party system, but they're distinct enough that in a parliamentary system they would probably be different political parties. Conservatives, on the other hand, tend to have nothing but disdain for Progressives, whom they view as extremists.

I think it's more accurate to say that more Liberal or Centrist minded folks are more likely to think of Progressives as generally well meaning but naiive (which interestingly enough is a common criticism against Liberals from Progressives). And also that Progressives can be unreasonable in their demands, which is a fair criticism.

I would argue that's more true for people with a more developed perspective taking framework, but on much of the Right there's also a deep seated hostility and suspicion of the motives of people professing egalitarian Values. If your own moral framework conceives of society as a zero sum dominance hierarchy of groups fighting other groups, it makes sense that you would be suspicious of someone claiming to want to dismantle or flatten power hierarchies. In that person's mind, what an egalitarian is really trying to do is, far from make everyone equal, is to place thier own group at the top of the hierarchy by knocking everyone down a peg.

People tend to interpret the motivations of others though thier own moral and ethical framework, and how much this distorts one's views of others is directly correlated to how developed a person's perspective taking framework is. For someone who's at a stage of development where thier circle of concern doesn't expand far beyond thier immediate social circle or ethnic group, of course they interpret Progressive politics as a front to privledge one's own group (blacks, gays, the poor, etc) at the expense of others. The reason they end up thinking this way is because that's exactly what they would do. Progressives understand there are differing motivations between these two camps, while conservatives are more likely to project their own motivations on to thier opponents. Of course both camps are far from perfect in this regard, just that conservatives tend to be far worse at it than liberals or progressives.

Most of the supposed failures of liberalism can be chocked up to the failures of neoliberalism and capitalism. Liberalism is a necessary foundation in order to have a functioning pluralistic society. National experiments which have attempted to bypass liberalism have been unmitigated disasters (ie the Soviet Union). Of course there are limitations to liberalism, which is why it needs to be transcended and included in more forward looking models of socio-political organization (whether that's socialism, or process-oriented social democracy). And in it's extreme forms (ie libertarianism), it's absolutely detrimental to society.

How this will actually play out is that affluent people will still be able to get abortions, either by using their connections to bypass existing laws or by traveling to places where it's still legal. The brunt of this will be felt by the working class and the poor (which are disproportionately non-white communities). The practical effects of which will be an increase in cyclical poverty in those communities, and more people being fed in to a revolving door prison system. An interesting unintended side effect of federally legalized abortions was also a noticable drop in crime nationwide (from less unwanted children being born in to desperate circumstances), so expect that trend to reverse over time. https://www.prb.org/resources/new-study-claims-abortion-is-behind-decrease-in-crime/ And of course all of this is aside from misery for millions of women and families who will be forced to carry unwanted or unviable pregnancies to term.

That pretty much nails it. At the end of the day fascism is a symptom of a failing democracy. Trump's MAGA Cult is exactly what one would expect a proto-fascist movement adopted to the American system to look like. Does that mean that most conservatives are fascists? Of course not. But tens of millions of conservatives have been manipulated in to supporting what's effectively an Americanized form of proto-fascism.

The difference between someone like John McCain or General Mark Millie (regardless of what you think of thier politics) and someone like Trump or Desantis is a good demonstration of the difference between healthy conservatism and the proto-fascistic direction the Republican Party has decided to embrace.

From a few years back, from a Methodist Pastor with more wisdom and compassion than any on the Right who pushed for this outcome:

What are the features of 'actual' fascism that aren't already present to some degree on the American far Right? Fascism by necessity adapts itself to the society that it's operating in, so isn't it possible that what we're seeing are elements of fascism being adapted to the American socio-political context? After all the context and constraints here are quite different than in places like the Germany, Spain, or Japan of 80 years ago, so one would expect the face that fascism wears to be quite different. After all, literal neo Nazis have figured out how to adapt to a changed cultural landscape by trying to sanitize their ideology, and make it more palatable to modern sensibilities (as evidenced by more benign sounding 'race realism' being used as rhetorical cover for fascist ideology, to list just one example). I understand that we shouldn't be using fascism as a pejorative, but drawing out some of the parallels that exist seems completely legitimate if done with care (emphasis on the 'if done with care' part).

Never been more disgusted to be living in America, and considering the route that the country's taken over the last five or six years, is saying a lot. Not only is America a barely functioning democracy where an ideological minority representing %20 of the country can roll back half a century's worth of Civil Rights, but it can also be a heartless place to live that's happy to compound any misfortune you may encounter in your life (such as having to terminate a pregnancy for any reason).

Hell, a sizeable part of the last few thousand years of human thought has been an attempt to make sense of the seeming lack of Justice in the world. Concepts like Karma and Heaven/Hell are attempts to construct an ontological justification for how Reality is often absurd and unfair. Each of us is thrown in to the world into a context that we didn't choose, and have only a limited ability to alter that context. Yet we can still choose to cultivate an authentic existence within this context by living an engaged life, and by taking responsibility* for the aspects of Reality that we do have some degree of control over. * (Responsibility, in this sense of refers to cultivating an ethical existence and taking an active interest in the well being of others; not the hollow shell of 'personal responsibility' that Libertarian philosophies employ as a justification for selfishness)

This ^ ^ ^ What was being referred specifically is the rational, conceptual mind. Rationality is a powerful tool, but at the end of the day it's a map of Reality (with its own limitations) rather than Reality itself.

Progressives and liberals (and non-MAGA cult conservatives for that matter) need to be focused on keeping democracy from collapsing in the United States. Everything else comes secondary to that. Of course to do that, they need to have an articulable vision for the country that gets people out to the Polls, and that cannot be only a negation of the dangerous lunacy of Trump and his Cult. Focusing on a few things that have a direct and easily understandable impact on people's day to day lives is the way to go here, and this should be focused in on like a laser beam. The catch 22 however is that to actually pass things that will help people in their day to day lives, such as proposals to cap the price of insulin at $35 or extending the child tax credit, they need more than a razor thin majority in Congress that can be derailed by one or two Senators defecting.

@Leo Gura I think this is an entirely reasonable move, and more measured than just banning accounts. Good call.

If you'll excuse one more post on this topic, I found this valuable because the role that the US and Western institutions had played in the collapse of the Russian economy in the 90s doesn't receive nearly enough attention in the West. Darryl Davis of the Martymade podcast does an excellent job in providing an informative, empathic perspective on the immense suffering of ordinary people during the collapse of the Russian economy after the fall of the Soviet Union. Suffering that was directly linked to predatory 'shock doctrine' imposed on Russia at the behest of the US and Western institutions such as the WTO. Darryl draws on what's in my option some very valid parallels to the opportunistic short sighted policy imposed on Germany after World War 1, and the opportunistic application of disaster capitalism to a shocked and bewildered population in Russia. https://martyrmade.com/thoughts-on-ukraine/

Also, the metamodernist paradigm is highly congruent with the Autonomous stage. Here are the best books I've found on the subject so far.

HealthyGamerGG, which is a YouTube channel that focuses wellness and mental health, has a lot of content around the Strategist stage. The guy who runs it is a psychologist who had training as a Vedic monk, so a lot of content focuses on understanding the ego, and on integrating Western and Eastern perspectives on wellness.

Not a bad take in theory, but in practice I can image this being used in a way that paints a false equivocation between, for instance, policing the use of pronouns from the Far Left, and calling for the use of political violence to overturn an election from the Far Right. At least in the current context, the center of gravity as far as the level of radicalization on both sides and its ramification for the rest of society isn't remotely equivalent. The question of just how radicalized a person is who falls just outside of that %10 demarcation on both ends matters here. Case in point, it becomes a lot more complicated when a roughly a quarter to a third of Americans have been propagandized in to believing Trump's lies about the 2020 election being stolen

Emil Ejner Friis, who wrote a book about how metamodernism and systems theory can be applied to politics, wrote an excellent article on the subject: https://metamoderna.org/attractors-the-guiding-stars-of-historys-winners/

Brings to mind what someone like Marx intuited more than a century ago, and why a 23 page pamphlet he wrote was able to reshape the world's political landscape. "Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it." Not that Integral should seek to emulate Marxism, whatever critiques that can be made of the meta-ideology Marx tried to articulate, he was wise enough to keep his theory integrated with the day to day concerns of the 'normies' of his era.