Boydstun

SL, I gather Tyson is thinking of the axioms as being presupposed in anything one might claim or question. That is, they are common factors in whatever objects one might be thinking about and in whatever objective thinking one might have. I agree with him that Rand's axioms have that character. That the axioms apply to to every object and every occasion of correct thinking is shown by showing the contradictoriness one gets into if one denies them for any object or occasion; Tyson correctly realizes this. Additionally, Tyson is correct in thinking that Rand's axioms are not conceived as for the purpose of deducing any more particular knowledge, unlike we do in geometry and unlike Spinoza or Wolff do in metaphysics. Rather, the Objectivist axioms are to be touchstones of correct thought. Cross them, and one has gotten disconnected from reality. The circumstance that the axioms are implicit in any more particular knowledge means only that one is implicitly affirming the axioms when affirming the more particular knowledge; it does not mean that one can deduce the more particular knowledge from the axioms. I think the distinction between axioms conceived as touchstones of knowledge rather than as springboards to further knowledge is the distinction between kinds of axiomatic foundationalisms worth noting, not Tyson's distinction between "deductive foundationalism" and "presuppositional foundationalism."

David Tyson sensibly takes inference to include these varieties: deduction, induction, and abduction. He takes recognition of presuppositions to also be a kind of inference. This last strains the English word inference. Tyson’s program, however, of setting up two distinguished kinds of foundationalism, presuppositional v. deductive, can get underway (and crash just as well) without casting recognition of presuppositions as a kind of inference. Tyson makes his distinction of those two sorts of foundationalism as follows: “Deductive foundationalism evaluates whether a certain item of knowledge is foundational [α] in terms of being most prior through deduction or entailment, and foundational knowledge is [β] held in the form of deductive axioms that serve as premises from which necessary conclusions can be inferred by deduction or entailment. “Presuppositional foundationalism evaluates the foundational status of knowledge [α’] in terms of being logically most prior, and foundational knowledge is [β’] held in presuppositional axioms, which serve as presuppositions that provide the necessary conditions that make the rest of knowledge possible.” (155) Tyson makes the intellectual-history claim that until the last century deductive foundationalism was the model of knowledge. He claims that Euclidean geometry and Aristotle set that model. On that model, there is basic knowledge that supports, or founds, all other knowledge and justifies it. If the relation between the basic knowledge and non-basic knowledge is deduction and entailment, we have deductive foundationalism. If the relation between basic and non-basic knowledge is by presupposition, we have presuppositional foundationalism. Tyson does not cite the precise places in Aristotle for what is here being called deductive foundationalism. But Tyson refers us to a nice online survey of foundationalism by philosopher Ted Poston, and there we are told to look to Posterior Analytics. As I recall, it is at II.19 that we find the influential model of knowledge (most snobbish sort of knowledge—science), and this is not the same as the structure of knowledge we find in Euclid, though both employ deduction in their ramifications. One version of foundationalism that Poston discusses is that of Descartes. Tyson places Descartes’s foundationalism under his class “deductive foundationalism.” True to Tyson’s criteria for that class, Descartes did allege that the philosophic bases he established in Meditations were necessary support for scientific knowledge such as geometry. Descartes rightly got some flack over that particular “founding” since it is plain that geometers proceed the same whether or not they know that the soundness of procedures in geometry rest on the demonstration that there is a non-deceiving God settling that soundness of them. As for the knowledge-structure of Meditations itself, Descartes regarded putting it into a deductive form wherein there are postulates, axioms, and definitions from which his conclusions are drawn–he rated such as that inferior to the process he chose in Meditations for bringing the reader into the light. Then too, the procedure that Descartes touted for justifying his scientific successes (such as his theory of the rainbow) was not the procedure set out by Aristotle for scientific knowledge. So I don’t think Descartes is suitable as instance of Tyson’s deductive foundationalism. Spinoza or Wolff are suitable, I notice. Μοre precisely, the metaphysics of Spinoza and of Wolff fall under [β] rather than [β’]. The distinction between [α] and [α’] is none, so I don’t expect any philosophy can be brought forth which falls under the one but not the other. Tyson attempts to fortify his distinction between deductive foundationalism and presuppositional foundationalism by having the former establish the correctness of its axioms by intuition and having the latter establish the correctness of its axioms by showing them to be undeniable on pain of self-contradiction. To which should we consign Spinoza’s axiom “Whatever is, is either in itself or in another.”? I do not recommend Tyson’s distinction between “deductive foundationalism” and “presuppositional foundationalism” as a clarifying one for analyses of foundational philosophies. There are bits of misinformation in Tyson’s paper which I should squiggly-underline. He tries to demarcate the distinction(s) in philosophy between implication and entailment as technical terms, and stumbles (158–59). Solid online information on entailment is available in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Check within the entry on Bolzano and the entry on Relevance Logic. Tyson sows confusion when he writes: “5. Entailment is progressive and synthetic (not regressive and analytic)—that is, it moves forward from premises to conclusion by deductive inference. (Example: Euclidean geometry, which draws theorems and other conclusions from axioms, is synthetic.[6])” Note 6 is a quotation from Morris Klein introducing the distinction between synthetic and analytic geometry, which is unrelated to the distinction in logic, from Aristotle, between the synthetic and the analytic. The result is the impression that Euclidean geometry is only synthetic geometry, not analytic geometry. And that is incorrect. Euclidean geometry as Euclid presents it and we learn it in high school is a synthetic geometry, but it can also be cast as an analytic geometry, as when we write (in a coordinate system) the equations of two intersecting lines, equate them, and solve for the location of the point(s) they have in common.

Readers Digest, January 1944, pp. 88-90 The greatest threat to mankind and civilization is the spread of the totalitarian philosophy. Its best ally is not the devotion of its followers but the confusion of its enemies. To fight it, we must understand it. Totalitarianism is collectivism. Collectivism means the subjugation of the individual to a group — whether to a race, class or state does not matter. Collectivism holds that man must be chained to collective action and collective thought for the sake of what is called ``the common good.´´ Throughout history, no tyrant ever rose to power except on the claim of representing ``the common good.´´ Napoleon ``served the common good´´ of France. Hitler is ``serving the common good´´ of Germany. Horrors which no man would dare consider for his own selfish sake are perpetrated with a clear conscience by ``altruists´´ who justify themselves by-the common good. No tyrant has ever lasted long by force of arms alone. Men have been enslaved primarily by spiritual weapons. And the greatest of these is the collectivist doctrine that the supremacy of the state over the individual constitutes the common good. No dictator could rise if men held as a sacred faith the conviction that they have inalienable rights of which they cannot be deprived for any cause whatsoever, by any man whatsoever, neither by evildoer nor supposed benefactor. This is the basic tenet of individualism, as opposed to collectivism. Individualism holds that man is an independent entity with an inalienable right to the pursuit of his own happiness in a society where men deal with one another as equals. The American system is founded on individualism. If it is to survive, we must understand the principles of individualism and hold them as our standard in any public question, in every issue we face. We must have a positive credo, a clear consistent faith. We must learn to reject as total evil the conception that the common good is served by the abolition of individual rights. General happiness cannot be created out of general suffering and self-immolation. The only happy society is one of happy individuals. One cannot have a healthy forest made up of rotten trees. The power of society must always be limited by the basic, inalienable rights of the individual. The right of liberty means man's right to individual action, individual choice, individual initiative and individual property. Without the right to private property no independent action is possible. The right to the pursuit of happiness means man's right to live for himself, to choose what constitutes his own, private, personal happiness and to work for its achievement. Each individual is the sole and final judge in this choice. A man's happiness cannot be prescribed to him by another man or by any number of other men. These rights are the unconditional, personal, private, individual possession of every man, granted to him by the fact of his birth and requiring no other sanction. Such was the conception of the founders of our country, who placed individual rights above any and all collective claims. Society can only be a traffic policeman in the intercourse of men with one another. From the beginning of history, two antagonists have stood face to face, two opposite types of men: the Active and the Passive. The Active Man is the producer, the creator, the originator, the individualist. His basic need is independence — in order to think and work. He neither needs nor seeks power over other men — nor can he be made to work under any form of compulsion. Every type of good work — from laying bricks to writing a symphony — is done by the Active Man. Degrees of human ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same: the degree of a man's independence and initiative determines his talent as a worker and his worth as a man. The Passive Man is found on every level of society, in mansions and in slums, and his identification mark is his dread of independence. He is a parasite who expects to be taken care of by others, who wishes to be given directives, to obey, to submit, to be regulated, to be told. He welcomes collectivism, which eliminates any chance that he might have to think or act on his own initiative. When a society is based on the needs of the Passive Man it destroys the Active; but when the Active is destroyed, the Passive can no longer be cared for. When a society is based on the needs of the Active Man, he carries the Passive ones along on his energy and raises them as he rises, as the whole society rises. This has been the pattern of all human progress. Some humanitarians demand a collective state because of their pity for the incompetent or Passive Man. For his sake they wish to harness the Active. But the Active Man cannot function in harness. And once he is destroyed, the destruction of the Passive Man follows automatically. So if pity is the humanitarians' first consideration, then in the name of pity, if nothing else, they should leave the Active Man free to function, in order to help the Passive. There is no other way to help him in the long run. The history of mankind is the history of the struggle between the Active Man and the Passive, between the individual and the collective. The countries which have produced the happiest men, the highest standards of living and the greatest cultural advances have been the countries where the power of the collective — of the government, of the state — was limited and the individual was given freedom of independent action. As examples: The rise of Rome, with its conception of law based on a citizen's rights, over the collectivist barbarism of its time. The rise of England, with a system of government based on the Magna Carta, over collectivist, totalitarian Spain. The rise of the United States to a degree of achievement unequaled in history — by grace of the individual freedom and independence which our Constitution gave each citizen against the collective. While men are still pondering upon the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, every page of history cries to us that there is but one source of progress: Individual Man in independent action. Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. A savage's whole existence is ruled by the leaders of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. We are now facing a choice: to go forward or to go back. Collectivism is not the ``New Order of Tomorrow.´´ It is the order of a very dark yesterday. But there is a New Order of Tomorrow. It belongs to Individual Man — the only creator of any tomorrows humanity has ever been granted.

Two good overviews of ethical egoism in moral philosophy today are these which I link below. The first one explicitly presents the place of Ayn Rand in this area of philosophy. The second is also informative, but toes the line on not mentioning the existence of Ayn Rand (or L. Peikoff or Tara Smith) in an academic presentation. First Second

I would not vote for Asa Hutchinson for President, and that is on account of his position on the legality of elective abortions. I do like his emphasis on balancing the federal budget.* His advice on the Trump candidacy is sensible.* Hillary Clinton did not drop out of the general election when, nine days before election day, it was announced by the FBI Director that the investigation into her emails while Secretary of State was being reopened due to a new source of information. But reopening an investigation is less advanced in legal process than an indictment, and she was in the general election, where withdrawal would mean putting Trump into Presidential power point blank. As it worked out, even that reopening of her case destroyed her lead in the race, and we got Trump. Mr. Trump is, of course, innocent until proven guilty at trial, but just as many voters did not want to be going into the new term with a legal shadow over a Pres. H. Clinton, so they would not want to be going into the new term with an even darker legal shadow over a Pres. Donald Trump.

METAPHORS PORTRAYING FOUNDATIONALISM Evidence of Necessary Existence Tibor Machan Objectivity V1N4 (1992) Existence, We Stephen Boydstun The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies V21N1 (2021)

Tyson, I notice, seems to miss the pervasive normativity in Objectivist analyses of concepts. That is, Rand's presuppositional analysis of concepts prescribes ingredients for deductive implications of the concepts. This is not a confusion or ambiguity between presupposition-analysis and deduction-analysis, but a distinctive way of analysis. Someone may be using the term and concept consciousness such that it does not presuppose there are some existents that consciousness is of or they may not take such episodes as the most fundamental occasions of consciousness, but they are mistaken in those outlooks.

The final issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies V23(N1,2), July 2023, includes a paper by David Tyson (pp. 154–217) explicitly citing this thread. He argues that "presuppositional foundationalism" is good for describing Rand's form of philosophical foundationalism. He is concerned to distinguish this way of foundationalism from what he calls "deductive foundationalism." One oddity of his well-researched study is that he seems not cognizant of how Rand gets from the axiomatic status of the concept existence to the axiomatic status of the concept consciousness. (See ITOE App., 249.) I'd say it is an incorrect correction of the structure of Rand's philosophy to shift all notion of consciousness to be introduced later on, say where Rand/Peikoff introduce the fact of life and character of human life. The character of consciousness as part of life are sensibly located with those later introductions, but not fundamental grasp of the grasp that is consciousness.* (At odds with Rand, I introduce, additionally, elementary grasp of the fact of other consciousness and grasp of the basic fact of being alive [self and other] back at the level of axioms and "corollary axioms.") Concerning FOUNDATIONALISM in philosophy more broadly: Founding Philosophy by Stanley Rosen Philosophy without Foundations by G.B. Madison Phenomenology and the Foundationalism Debate by John J. Drummond Foundations, Rationality, and Intellectual Responsibility: A Pragmatic Perspective by Sandra B. Rosenthal Deconstructing Foundationalism and the Question of Philosophy as a Systematic Science by William Maker Self-Referential Arguments in Philosophy by Steven Yates Evidence and Justification by David Kelley Systematic Pluralism and the Foundationalist Controversy by Walter Watson

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NYA, things-in-themselves taken as things not in relation to any things not themselves are non-existent (ITOE 39). If one is thinking of things-in-themselves as not what the name says on its face, but as things as they are independent of any consciousness of them, then one has taken things-in-themselves as saying things-as-they-are-independently-of-mind. That last thing exists. But we should call it what I called it there and not call it things-in-themselves. Kant's talk of things-in-themselves smuggles things as existing independently of mind, which is a legitimate conception, and mixes it together with the idea of things as they are, out of all relation to other things. Were there things existing out all relation to to other things, then naturally they could not stand in the known-knowing relation with consciousness. But as Rand argued, no such thing-in-itself exists. All existents have identity, and all stand in some relations to existents not themselves. I concur. Kant contrasted the phenomenal world and appearances composing it with his things-in-themselves, but in his outlook, that is not a contrast between the illusory and what truly exists. For Kant the phenomenal world is a reality and one worth caring about and learning more about. An analogy would be with Locke's view of material substance, which he took to exist and to support the traits of the material world, though he thought that only those traits are knowable. He thought that the substances cannot be known by the human mind. Leibniz took issue with Locke's view on that, and the history of science since then vindicated Leibniz and has ground Locke's view into dust. The point of the analogy between Kant and Locke is that just as Locke held both substance and its traits to be real, so too did Kant hold both the phenomenal world and the noumenal world (and things-in-themselves) to be real. "Still less may appearances {Erscheinung} and illusion {Schein} be regarded as being the same. For truth and illusion are not in the object insofar as it is intuited, but are in the judgment made about the object insofar as it is thought. Hence although it is correct to say that the senses do not err, this is so not because they always judge correctly but because they do not judge at all." (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason A293/B349-50; see also B70. Against the idea that Kant’s “appearances” are illusions, see Anja Jauernig, The World According to Kant [New York: Oxford University Press, 2021], pp. 248–57 and 267.)

To that one, we might pin a particular story: Plato of Athens: A Life in Philosophy

Salva, Welcome to Objectivism Online. I suggest that highest goodness of your life has come to consist in having this child. Part of that goodness is the opportunity to love someone so greatly and to have occasion of this special love that nature has set up in the life of humans. In your life as an agent and as a subject of experience, your own life remains as highest context of your valuations after having a child, as it was before having a child. I suggest that the child and your lives together has become a paramount project within your life as an agent and as one experiencing a human life. But there is more to it. It is for the sake of continued life of the child that you would be willing to lose your own individual life to save continued life for the child. When Rand writes in the VoS Introduction that each person should be the ultimate beneficiary of all of their value-pursuits (a proposition she argues for in “The Objectivist Ethics”), I think an exception should be added in the case of one’s children (and perhaps their are other specific kinds of exception-cases that should also be added). That is, what might be called uniform beneficiary-egoism is not entirely correct. In needing to forfeit one’s continued life for something, one remains in the human business of making one’s life as a whole-story, purposed sequence. What might be called uniform agent-egoism remains correct. Stephen

What do you think, Infra? What do you think is a correct basis of a right of an innocent human being not to be killed? Do you think right bases of rights are emotion-free? Rand took individual rights to rest on the circumstance that individuals are ends in themselves endowed with capability for autonomous thought and direction. Respecting rights of others is from recognition of that circumstance and the rightness of treating things as the kind of things they are. Layers of strategic-game consideration could be added to that in defense of respecting individual rights, but the fundamental is that each life is an end in itself. Do you think this basis for the right of an innocent human being to not be killed is a sound basis? I think it is. Additionally, proper responsiveness to others (or to oneself) requires operational emotion. There are no human desires, valuations, or thought were all varieties of emotions unplugged. Just as there would be no thought as purported by Descartes in Meditations were it really possible, as he pretended, to unplug entirely from body inputs and sensory inputs. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Welcome to Objectivism Online, Infrabeat.

I finally finished it yesterday. There was a ten-day interruption, as I needed to be in Colorado a while due to death of a nephew,* but finally these old hands got the job done.

Freud “The author's approach emphasizes the philosophical significance of Freud’s fundamental rule–to say whatever comes to mind without censorship or inhibition. This binds psychoanalysis to the philosophical exploration of self-consciousness and truthfulness, as well as opening new paths of inquiry for moral psychology and ethics.” Love and Its Place in Nature: A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis “Expanding on philosophical conceptions of love, nature, and mind, Lear shows that love can cure because it is the force that makes us human.” Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis “Jonathan Lear begins by looking to the ancient Greek philosophers for insight into what constitutes the life well lived. Socrates said the human psyche should be ruled by reason, and much philosophy as well as psychology hangs on what he meant. For Aristotle, reason organized and presided over the harmonious soul; a wise person is someone capable of a full, happy, and healthy existence. Freud, plumbing the depths of unconscious desires and pre-linguistic thoughts, revealed just how unharmonious the psyche could be. Attuned to the stresses of modern existence, he investigated the myriad ways people fall ill and fail to thrive. Yet he inherited from Plato and Aristotle a key insight: that the irrational part of the soul is not simply opposed to reason. It is a different manner of thinking: a creative intelligence that distorts what it seeks to understand. “Can reason absorb the psyche’s nonrational elements into a whole conception of the flourishing, fully realized human being? Without a good answer to that question, Lear says, philosophy is cut from its moorings in human life. Wisdom Won from Illness illuminates the role of literature in shaping ethical thought about nonrational aspects of the mind.” Imagining the End – Mourning and Ethical Life “Imagine the end of the world. Now think about the end―the purpose―of life. They’re different exercises, but in Jonathan Lear’s profound reflection on mourning and meaning, these two kinds of thinking are also connected: related ways of exploring some of our deepest questions about individual and collective values and the enigmatic nature of the good. “Lear is one of the most distinctive intellectual voices in America, a philosopher and psychoanalyst who draws from ancient and modern thought, personal history, and everyday experience to help us think about how we can flourish, or fail to, in a world of flux and finitude that we only weakly control. His range is on full display in Imagining the End as he explores seemingly disparate concerns to challenge how we respond to loss, crisis, and hope. “He considers our bewilderment in the face of planetary catastrophe. He examines the role of the humanities in expanding our imaginative and emotional repertoire. He asks how we might live with the realization that cultures, to which we traditionally turn for solace, are themselves vulnerable. He explores how mourning can help us thrive, the role of moral exemplars in shaping our sense of the good, and the place of gratitude in human life.”

If you can afford it and have the time, attend as much of the following in Miami as possible. You can meet people and some gay folks will be among them: OCON 2023

David, When I enrolled at the University of Oklahoma in 1966, it was known around the state as a hotbed of communism. I was already a democratic socialist. None of that mattered. I wanted to study physics, and I did, and soft stuff paled into nothingness by comparison. I didn't become a communist. I didn't attend a football game. I studied physics and mathematics mainly. It was not for economic advancement. It was for love of the field and the good of my soul. I was woke, by the way, to the history of racism in the US against Black people. From our own family and the generation before, whom I knew. Racist, racist, racist—that was and is part of America. But in that era, we raised consciousness (to borrow a phrase of Marx, if I remember correctly) and together brought about a cultural and legal revolution in racial equality before the law and in inter-racial relations in America. I approve of that woke. I said I didn't become a communist. I had become a socialist on my own, not by any knowledge of economics, but from the simple fact that the institution of private property allowed people to be selfish, and I thought that behavior to be morally wrong. My moral views were not without contradictions, and I had not really thought through the abolition of private property which I favored. That is where I was, when: there in college, underground, on my own, I read Ayn Rand. That changed my moral and social views, putting it mildly. I'm confident there are still plenty of state Universities and other Universities in which a young person can get a good education in physics, mathematics, and the many other marvelous areas of knowledge I was exposed to. And in Business too, which I was not exposed to. The day-to-day of what goes on there in learning and research, I'm pretty sure, is not the stuff that political interests in the wider society strive to highlight in their tidings of the doom of civilization due to colleges. When I went to college, I spent my life savings from past jobs very soon. I was able to make some money from what was called the work-study program. I worked in the machine shop of he physics department. I was not eligible for a government-insured bank loan, because my father's income was above the cut-off level for the program. I had been raised by my father and his second wife; he was the sole bread-winner of that family. When came the time I needed his financial assistance to continue, he did not come through. (And unfortunately in those days, if you were not in college, you were eligible for the draft for Vietnam.) In a while, I had to drop out due to lack of funds. I was able to have a roof and buy food and cigarettes by monitoring alarms for a detective agency in the college town. Being out of college did not stop my studies, of course, just as today. I incline to agree with your first paragraph, David, notwithstanding the rough spot I got into with respect to my dream and young efforts for some previous years to get my own money to pay for it. My parents had been divorced when I was two years old. My mother, whom I had met briefly in late high school, learned of my situation and offered to help. In the years since they had divorced, she had learned to drive, got an education degree in a town near the little country town where she and my father had become high school sweethearts in the 1930's, and gotten a job as an elementary school teacher across the Red River in Texas. Without her assistance, I'd not been able to go to college and get a sound start on my way to the mind I have today. She was not under any legal obligation, and I should say she was not under any moral responsibility outside the opportunity for seeing me flourish to do what she did for me. She simply responded to my plight and potential and was a very good heart.

Tina

I suggest that moral responsibility for training and education of children lies firstly with the child's parents, although not as part of a package of responsibility attaching merely to having caused the child's existence. That Objectivist position focussing on causal relationship, down from the era of N. Branden in the 1960's, was off the mark. Moral responsibility for training and educating the child lies firstly with the child's parents, I suggest, because of the moral goodness of responsiveness to persons and the potential person they may become, responsiveness to persons as persons. That responsiveness is, I say, the core of moral relations among people (and indeed, differently, relations of a self to itself). That is the preciousness that is the moral in a social setting. This position is a cashing out of the concept of moral justice, treating a thing as the kind of thing it is—that moral virtue. What a thing is includes its internal systems, but as well its distinctive external relations, actual and potential. The relations of responsiveness to persons as persons have a specially intense and distinctive character in the relation between the persons who are parent and child (natural parent most strongly, of course, but strong with adoptive parents as well). Additionally, there is a moral goodness in the benevolent protectiveness—that responsiveness—between any adult and any child. That such responsiveness fosters continuance of the species human as human may well be the underlying biological reason for this responsiveness. But that is not the reason the responsiveness of parent or other adult to the child and responsiveness of the child to them as persons is moral. Rather, the nature of value in the life of individual humans together, which is their best situation in the world, is the source of the moral goodness of such responsiveness to persons as persons.

In the present era, do parents have a moral responsibility to finance a child's college education? How much college? Is it morally irresponsible to have children if one is not assuming responsibility for financing the child's future college education, in the event that the child turns out to be college material?

As I recall across my lifetime, the candidates of the two parties spent most of their political campaigns sloganeering that the reason to voted for them was that they were not the other guy. The Democrats this time will surely be keeping the abortion issue salient, which is not a puffed-up issue, like which public restroom to go to, but a real one, coming down to metaphysics and theory of individual rights. Close to 20% of we voters, on either side, have taken it for our decisive issue in any Presidential or Senate race for decades, even when the Parties had not emphasized it in the general election. I surely wish one of the Presidential nominees would make a balanced federal budget their top issue in the 2024 campaign (and not in some plan for a mythical ten years down the road that never comes). We can be pretty sure, however, that most of the campaign money in the general election will be spent on smearing the opponent, and mostly with simply name-calling. It was not so long ago that there was intelligence on both sides in at least the Presidential television debates. In that, I think a really good debate would be between Nikki Haley and Elizabeth Warren. Wrong as either is, they are intelligent and good debaters. However much the leading candidates for the nominations at present would like to take steps towards dictatorship (or however much they simply turn a blind eye to the circumstance that their policies contribute to that drift), they and most of their followers qualify only as proto-fascist, not themselves would-be dictators. Proto-fascist was the term Ayn Rand applied to the George Wallace campaign for President in 1968, for specific reasons she spelled out, and it is the term right for the attitude and some positions bannered by Mr. Trump and some factions among his supporters. On the Democrats' Left side of American politics in recent years, their idea of socialist ideals (mostly mere slogans in the case of the Representative from Queens) is enormously scaled back from what left-socialism in America meant in the first seven decades of the last century. Today's watered-down "let's help suffering people and the environment and feel virtuous" (with other people's money, and truly not virtuous even if the money had been their own) is hardly the old American democratic socialism.*