He might think that, but it’s not always the case that people vote all one way or all the other. They’ll often go out of their way to vote for the other side if somebody has a lot of personality.

What? Of course you can base your political views on rationality. For example, climate change is literally an existential threat to life on this planet, so the rational thing to do would be to support policies that preserve the biosphere and therefore dramatically reduce carbon emissions. This is rooted in the core biological desire to reproduce and care for your offspring. Similar arguments can be made for all basic human and animal needs, like food, shelter, etc.

If your point is that everything is contrived and therefore irrational, then that precludes this entire conversation to the point of uselessness.

Nobody bases their political views rationally. I promise you, the foundations of your values are based on stuff you believe, but cannot demonstrate.

Some people are pretty strict utilitarians. So, they wouldn’t say that “society should help the vulnerable” or “society should enable the strong”, but that society should try to maximize utility, which is also often called “happiness”, but it shouldn’t be confused as being exactly the same as the layman’s term of “happiness”.

I am not a strict utilitarian, but utilitarianism can be a useful tool, and it absolutely can be used to rationally examine your example statements. The only part of it that is a belief is that it’s better to maximize utility, and then the question of quantifying utility, but there is much more logic in that than you seem to think exists in a system of values.

I don’t need to read that book in particular to know what you’re saying is basically true. However, it’s a misleading truth because it’s actually a huge scale, and not a binary yes/no as you’ve presented it.

You have people on one end who devote their lives to truth, like philosophers and scientists. Yes, their deepest underlying reasons are emotional, but they still generate truth. And then you have people all the way on the other side of the scale, who seemingly have no grasp on reality as presented, and rely solely on emotion, similar to an animal.

But when you turn a scale like that into a binary option, that’s the misleading part. Just because everybody’s basic motivation is emotional doesn’t mean that everybody is equally irrational.

He actually made several attempts at running for president before 2016, all of them ended in failure with 0 delegates because nobody took him seriously as an independent. At some point in time, either he or his political strategists must have figured out that running as an independent is doomed because you must convince people to vote in a way that they are not accustomed to, whereas if you win one of the two mainstream party nominations you automatically get party hardliners for free, no matter how bad of a candidate you are.

It didn’t matter that Trump as he was in 2015 had nothing in common with either Democrats or Republicans at the time, he just picked the party that was most likely to fall into lockstep around him, and the Republican party was primed for a newcomer after two Obama defeats in a row. All it took was for him to make a serious run as a Republican and humiliate his competition out of the race, and suddenly the Republican party begins to warp their values and philosophy around him instead.

He only likes politics because it’s a springboard to get him in front of a camera. Running and losing means he got to have his fun and spend some of his money saying outrageous things and having the media talk about him non stop leading up to the election. Winning just means 4 years of the media being mandated to hang on his every stupid word for all his press conferences and such. It’s exhausting once you realize how simple his angle is and how society is hardwired to feed into his narcissistic tendencies with a nonstop media circus that only makes him stronger every time they report on him.