For various reasons, politics is an arena in which humans' irrationality, mean-spiritedness, intellectual atrophy, etc., are on a pretty full and ugly display. Politics either helps make people uglier or reflects an ugliness looking for an outlet, or both, and it has a hell of a lot to do with the way of handling the fact of human disagreement - physical force - in a manner that falls short of war proper. But the activity of political polemics is called that for a reason; it resembles warfare in an arena where reasonable and good-faith disagreement are not to be had.
I would say Trump sets a pretty low bar for what counts as reasonable and good-faith in politics. It would be appalling were an entire political wing of the country double down on the things that elevated Trump to power - in other words, to go below the bar Trump sets. So as much as Trump might disgust one, there may well be other political actors and factions out there who have gone out of their way to be more disgusting, more irrational, more dishonest, more anti-America and anti-freedom.
Anyway, about Trump: his new '20 campaign slogan, "Keep America Great," makes the obvious assumption that within 3 years Trump has turned a 240 year old nation that wasn't great into a 243 year old nation that has attained greatness. The dishonesty of this should be so evident on its face as to not require explanation. It isn't even a question of whether his actual policy agenda has been good much less made America great "again," it's a question of whether it's even plausible that a country could go from not-great to great within 3 years. It's telltale evidence that hardcore Trump supporters are more akin to cultists than to rational interlocutors accountable to fellow citizens.
America's founding generation made a great nation (with major flaws), so we have some historical evidence of what it takes to make a country great. What would keep that country great is if its People do cultural maintenance, which requires (if nothing else) intellectual maintenance. To the men who founded America, the notion of a country going from great to not-great or vice versa, within a 3 year time span, would have been ludicrous. (Unless, that is, I'm thinking much too highly of the founding generation.)
I've pointed out numerous times that pretty much all the key figures of America's founding generation were members of the American Philosophical Society. One of them was president of the APS at the same time he was president of the USA. What work was done at the APS is less significant in this context than what membership in it reflected about the mindset of the key founders. Philosophy is (and there are different ways of making this same one point) about intellectual perfection, as an organizing principle of right human living. There is something about the philosophical disposition that has the philosopher being guided in life by a vision of the good, with a more thorough and systematic understanding of "good" that goes above and beyond the goals/aims of a less reflective life. (That life and especially human life is a goal-directed phenomenon doesn't tell us about what the standard of value is. If that standard is something like "life qua man, or the conditions of living proper to a rational being," then to fill that in with substantive content, you need philosophical study. At the very minimum, even so much as confronting and grappling with the standard-of-value subject is a gateway into thinking about life philosophically, which is (I think) to think about the good life. (In an unexamined life, the good might well be thought synonymous with, say, pleasure. In an examined life, the concept of virtue comes to the fore.)
What does any of this have to do with Trump's delusional/dishonest campaign slogan? (Again, an alternative political faction would have to be pretty darn disgusting, irrational, etc., for Trump to look preferable by contrast.) It seems kind of far removed.
Well, in a sense I guess it does. There certainly does look like a very large disconnect between philosophical talk of the good life and the act that Trump and his cult (and many of the rest of the political actors) are up to.
In another sense, it's not far removed. Because the connection here is that founding generation and APS thing. We have pretty good historical evidence that perhaps the most momentous founding of a nation in history was directed by a group of avowed wisdom-lovers.
It's not just about better living through philosophy. It's about better politics through philosophy (which may or may not turn out to be anarchistic - that has to be examined...). But it's not just about better politics. As I mentioned above, the irrationality, ugliness, injustice, etc., in human life comes to a head in politics (and whatever in politics that leads to war) but it makes about as much sense to think that this irrationality is confined to politics, as it is to think that a country's greatness can make a dramatic 3-year turnaround (absent a change in something really fundamental, such as, oh, the country taking as long as 3 years to adopt the no-brainer philosophy for children program). (The only thing that would keep philosophy for children from being by far the biggest no-brainer of all time is a philosophy-for-everyone program. As with new-language-acquisition, however, it may be more developmentally efficient to begin the program with kids.)
(And how many knockdown, drag-out no-brainers in life can you think of? Well, if you're having a hard time with that one, you can always compare/contrast with philosophy for children as a reference point.)
Back to the non-parenthetical line of reasoning: irrationality and injustice in human life stems from ancient programming; humans have a capacity for reasoning while at the same time having a ton of evolutionary baggage that - absent a program for putting this baggage in its proper place - impedes the pursuit of intellectual perfection. And all this baggage infiltrates all sorts of aspects of human life. (In psychology, this problem is referred to as cognitive bias, and these biases are rampant (and generally less so among philosophers worth anything).) Outside of politics, we have bad lifestyle choices, lack of organization, etc. Modern human life creates demands that weren't there in the primitive human condition. How are the homeless people in the big CA cities these days supposed to navigate the modern environment given its demands on cognition, effort, etc.? Not to say that human life in its primitive condition was easy, but it seems like it was simpler: the habituating/imprinting necessary for human life to happen in its primitive condition is not the same habituation/imprinting necessary to live in modern human society in, e.g., big-city CA.
America can be only as great as the people in it. Modern life introduces complexities that didn't exist in the primitive human condition, in which case humans need to adapt to function optimally today. The main locus of adaptation is within the human cognitive faculty, not the least important of which is the rational/intellectual center of thought. To make humans better enough to make America better enough, philosophy as an organizing discipline is key.
Hence, from this standpoint of understanding where we need to go, "Keep America Great" is a slogan-level red flag of intellectual bankruptcy and irrationality. Just in case you were wondering whether anything about Trump (qua political leader) was a red flag before, "Keep America Great" should remove any doubt. Once America again begins electing the likes of Washington, Adams, Jefferson and Madison, then we talk about keeping America great.
