If you have watched the presidential debates, you may have noticed that Hillary used a particular phrase to counter Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”, which alludes to a time when the USA were an international powerhouse and a force to be reckoned with. Trump doesn’t specify when America was supposedly great, but just recall, for instance, the Apollo program, or Bobby Fisher becoming world chess champion. The former was a triumph for US engineering, and the latter was a demonstration of US superiority in an area where it was believed that the Soviets were unassailable.

For the sake of the argument, let’s just assume that America used to be great, eventually becoming not-so-great. Greatness is associated with a quantitative measure of superiority, or simply demonstrating that you are the best in the world. I think that “Make America Great Again” is a fantastic slogan. However, look at Hillary’s response! She mangled Trump’s slogan and turned it into, “We are (already) great, because we are good!”, which is presumably alluding to handing out free money, promoting diversity, and letting droves of illegals into the country. There is an undertone that seems to be ignored: in order to be “good” you need to be able to afford it. If you attempt to be “good”, but don’t really have the money for it, you end up in a situation like Germany, where millions of mostly illegal immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa get free shelter, food, housing, and health care (and pocket money on top!), while the infrastructure of that country crumbles. I couldn’t find an English article on the abysmal state of German school buildings, which is a particularly pressing issue, but I found a nice one that highlights the disastrous state of German infrastructure in general.

The point is simply that if you want to afford to be “good”, “do the right thing” or, as Hillary mentioned in the third debate, “don’t turn away women and children” (aren’t people getting tired of that kind of emotional blackmailing already?), you need to have your finances in order. If you don’t, the invading forces end up being better dressed, housed, and fed than the poorest of the indigenous population. If you think this is “populism”, then consider that nobody seems to give a fuck about the homeless in Germany because that is apparently not politically correct. Yet, our injustices are politically correct, thus we are good and great, even though this invariably means that we may never be great again. It seems we have arrived at a contradiction, but when did the political left ever care about logic?