Trump’s Ideology Trashes Human Dignity

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 26 Jan 2026

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

Within a World System that Crushes Human Dignity

21 Jan 2026 – It is important to remind ourselves that the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights was perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the 20^th century. That century was otherwise a long nightmare of torture, murder, and mutual slaughter (see Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, 1999). The resounding foundation of the 1948 Declaration resides in its Preamble  affirming that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”  Glover shows in great detail that ignoring this principle characterized the genocidal nightmare of much of the 20^th century.  Nevertheless, the UN Declaration was the culmination of a two century-long work of “enlightenment,” deriving from the initial 18^th century recognition of human rights by such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, and Immanuel Kant.

The human dignity movement has yet to transform human civilization into one of peace, justice, and freedom. It struggles against immense systemic forces that I describe below. Yet it is our one real hope for a decent future for humanity on planet Earth. In the words of historian Samuel Moyn in his book The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), a world civilization based on human rights must succeed or humanity will fail and human civilization will come to a miserable end. My recent book Human Dignity and World Order (2024), shows that the dignity marking our common humanity needs to take the form of democratic world government under the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. There is no way this can happen under our current fragmented world system, described below.

In ethical terms, all fascist and neofascist movements embrace a perverted “principle of utility” (or “Utilitarianism”) to justify their cruelty and contempt.  The principle of utility declares that “Action X is right if it promotes the greatest good of the greatest number.”  Hence there is nothing that is intrinsically wrong. “Action X” can be anything at all, such as torture or genocide, which is to be justified by some imagined “greater good.”  This is the very opposite of what Immanuel Kant had posited as the essence of morality: “Always treat every person as an end in themselves, never merely as a means.”  To treat persons as ends in themselves means to recognize their inviolable dignity, Kant explicitly affirmed, that is, their intrinsic human rights.

If persons have dignity, they cannot be used as a mere “means to an end” as utility attempts to do. Hence, the “common good,” must be the good of all as mediated through the dignity of each. Philosopher Alan Gewirth shows in The Community of Rights (1996) that each person person has dignity and worth because we are free agents capable of projecting a future and actualizing that future. Our innate “freedom” is practically a synonym for “dignity,” since neither of these concepts can be commodified or reduced to a merely natural process. As philosopher Emmanuel Levinas declared: a human being contains more than is possible to contain.” We transcend our natural, manipulable physical selves in multiple ways. Our dignity, like our freedom, can be termed “cosmic” or “ontological.”

Kant’s thought, of course, was framed within a Christian tradition with its roots in the Gospels. When Jesus gives “the Great Commandment” in Matthew 22 to “love God with all your heart, soul, and mind and love your neighbor as yourself,” he declares that the entire revelation from God (and the covenant with God) is summed up in this commandment.  And when, in Matthew 25, the cosmic Christ declares “when you have done it to one of these my brethren you have done it unto me,” it becomes clear that every person partakes of the image and sacredness of God and therefore possesses an inviolable dignity no matter how insignificant they appear to be within society. The so-called “Christian” followers of Donald Trump entirely ignore these foundational principles of their religious tradition. Sometimes they even distort their false God into a utilitarian like Trump by believing that Trump may be evil but he is being used by God to bring in the Parousia, hence, we have another instance of individual dignity being sacrificed to some imagined “greater good.”

“Utility” means that any “X” can be sacrificed for the greater good; hence, even an innocent person can be sent to the gallows if the authorities believe that some greater good will be served by this. Similarly, during the Cold War, the CIA blew up school buses in Italy and committed other terrorist atrocities in order to blame this on the “Communists,” for in the CIA’s perverted thinking, the sacrifice of a few school children was nothing compared to the great good of defeating Communism.  Similarly Donald Trump blew up boats and their passengers in the Caribbean with no evidence of wrongdoing and no due process, claiming the greater good of inhibiting drug trafficking to the USA.

The targeting of some out-groups as enemies immediately denies their human dignity.  The Trump ideological cover begins with targeting “illegal immigrants,” which then soon spreads to all immigrants, which also, we have all seen, spreads to all who look non-white. But once some group is excluded from their intrinsic human dignity, the slippery slope has begun.  Dignity is simply no longer recognized as the basis for governmental authority and legitimacy.  If some citizens are murdered (like Renee Good) as part of the effort to “cleanse” America of impurity, then no one is any long exempt from being the “X” that is to be sacrificed on the way to some imagined “greater good.”  Nothing is forbidden in the quest to “Make America Great Again.”

After Kant’s stunning 18^th century focus on the recognition of human dignity as the core of morality, along came Hegel in the 19^th century with his vast metaphysical vision of “freedom” dialectically emerging from the processes of human history. The “cunning of reason,” he said, was using the wars and destruction taking place everywhere in the service of this great goal. Here we have another version of the perverse doctrine of utilitarianism—history is sacrificing many in its metaphysical quest for an emergent better world. 20^th century French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas pointed out that Hegel’s “totalizing” vision violates the “infinity” (infinite worth) within each person, that quality which gives us our inviolable dignity and demands “thou shall not kill.”

Thomas Jefferson was also part of the emergent 18^th century recognition of human dignity. All persons, he declared, were “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  This principle became embodied in the US Constitution.  The Constitution is a flawed document, to be sure, in which citizen representation in the federal government is very undemocratically apportioned, but nevertheless, it embraced the notion of the due process of law as a right of all persons within its territory.

Let us be clear. Early modern science through the 19^th century appeared to reduce humanity to nothing but another physical species among the proliferation of life forms on Earth, even challenging human freedom under its trilateral concepts of mechanism, determinism, and atomism (discussed below). Nevertheless, a counter narrative had been emerging since such Renaissance in works such as Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), followed by Blasé Pascal’s intuition of an “infinity” in humans that defies our apparent insignificance within the vast cosmos (1662). This counter narrative on human dignity came to a widespread awareness in the 18^th century “Enlightenment” and led to the democratic revolutions against tyranny in France and the USA. Today, the 20^th century paradigm shift to evolutionary holism has at last provided a scientific framework compatible with our recognition of dignity and freedom.

The USA Constitution recognizes citizens’ rights that government cannot suspend, and these rights are ultimately protected by due process of law for any and all persons accused of something by governmental authority. It is this right to due process that Trump’s ideology is attempting to suspend, first for persons in the country who are not citizens, but immediately following upon this, for all who look different or are legal immigrants, and ultimately for all who get in the way of the immense drive for some perverted “greater good” (like the killing of Renee Good) and many other victims of the militarized ICE war on everything in America that these neofascists dislike (such as “Democrats” or “protesters”).

A number of eminent contemporary philosophers of law have reached similar conclusions about the necessity of law protecting human dignity through specifying due process with respect to human rights (e.g., John Finnis, Ronald Dworkin, Lon Fuller, and David Luban). Luban, in Legal Ethics and Human Dignity (2007 ) argues that law recognizes each human being as a personality “with a story to tell” and that the court system makes possible each person telling their story even in the face of governmental authority. He says that “there is nothing absurd about connecting human dignity with legal personality and human rights” (67). In fact that is the very essence of a legitimate legal system.

It is well known that USA first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a leading force in the formulation of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A sense of human dignity was perhaps also behind the “New Deal” of her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who felt that workers should share more equitably in the wealth they helped create by receiving social security, employer based health insurance, and other benefits from their participation in the common welfare of the nation. This attribution of dignity to American workers was to be undercut, not only by subversion from the US oligarchy of wealth, by also by the US imperial struggle with the “evils of communism” in which the dignity and rights of people around the world were discarded by US invasions, overthrows, subversions, and sanctions.

It is also true that the communism of the Soviet Union used state power to crush human dignity among its citizens and to ensure ideological conformity.  It claimed (in a twisted interpretation of Marx) that the ideology of human rights was a bourgeois subterfuge to cover exploitation and domination. To an extent this was true, of course. The rhetoric of human rights by the US imperialists was unconscionable. Nevertheless, we all intuitively know that a world system based on universal human rights is possible.

In this respect, the motto of the French Revolution extoling “liberty, equality, and fraternity” (or “community”), remains intuitively correct, and neither Soviet communism nor American capitalism approximated this three-dimensional ideal. Liberty requires recognition of human dignity, but so do equality and community. In the name of the dignity of each, the private accumulation of wealth must be apportioned properly by enforceable laws to create real “equality before the law.” And the promotion of community necessarily means that the majority of the community recognize that their dignity is protected by the laws and not sidelined for the benefit of the rich (like Jeffrey Epstein), or  some “MAGA” ideology, or some preferred oligarchy. The philosophical consequence this French revolutionary ideal is a democratic socialism in which the private accumulation of wealth is limited to where it no longer destroys both equality and community (as it does today in the USA).

Therefore, to place Trump’s ideology within a larger context, the corruption that has infected the Executive Branch of the US government has its roots in the self-defeating world system that we have inherited from the early modern, post-Renaissance development of science.  Thinkers in the 17^th century were beginning to draw conclusions about the nature of the world that the scientists were discovering.  Their views were synthesized by Sir Isaac Newton’s great Principia Mathematica of 1687.  The universe, they believed, was a giant mechanism, deterministically following the iron laws of “bodies in motion,” and it was fundamentally atomistic, in which the parts could always be dissected into their component elements to revel how things worked.

The immense paradigm shift of the 20^th and 21^st centuries has proved all three of these ideas wrong: the universe is not mechanistic but organic. For organic realities, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The universe is not deterministic but includes an emergent freedom and openness to evolutionary change, and the universe is not atomistic but holistic, with everything interdependent with everything else. Nevertheless, the basic components of our world system today were institutionalized in and around the 17^th century with its dogmas of mechanism, determinism, and atomism.  Most scholars point to the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 as the beginnings of the system of sovereign nation-states.  The atomism of dividing the world into autonomous territories with absolute borders recognizing no effective laws above themselves seemed natural to many thinkers of the 17 and 18^th centuries.

Our world system remains an interlocking mechanism of corporate capitalism and militarized autonomous nation-states, institutionalized as such more than 350 years ago. As political scientist Christopher Chase-Dunn writes: “The system of unequally powerful and competing nation-states is part of the competitive struggle of capitalism, and thus wars and geopolitics are a systematic part of capitalist dynamics, not exogenous forces” (1998, 61).  These two components of our world system derive from the discredited early-modern paradigm that could find no conceptual room for human dignity or human rights. In the 17^th century, British thinker Thomas Hobbes summed up our human condition as a “war of all against all.” MAGA is essentially an attempt to go back in history at least to the 19^th century where imperialism and naked power in the service of ideology were not seriously questioned, a war in which the only determining factor is not moral principles based on human dignity, but who has the most power.

The standard notion of capitalism formulates a mechanism for extracting profit and wealth.  Invest capital in an enterprise, procure resources and the elements of production (including labor or “human resources”), distribute the product effectively for sale in a competitive market, and reap private profit from the process. No limits are placed on the quantity of private wealth deriving from this mechanistic process.  The wealth adheres to atomistic corporations and individual wealthy persons who may use this private wealth as they see fit, which (the theory maintains) will nearly always be in the interest of themselves and their enterprises. Hence, “human resources” are just part of a mechanical equation for accumulating unlimited private wealth.  Our intrinsic human dignity is recognized nowhere in this system.

Like capitalism, the system of sovereign nation-states adheres to the early-modern model of mechanism, determinism, and atomism.  Each atomistic sovereign nation pursues its “national self-interest” within a competitive framework in which all other nations are doing the same. Like the wealthy atoms of capitalism, some nations become more powerful than others with the result of imperialism and/or wars with other nations promoting their own self-interest. As with capitalism, nations struggle with one another for wealth, power, resources, and markets. Within this nation-state-capitalist system, the emergent counter-movement focusing on human dignity challenges every one of these early modern assumptions.

Recognition of human dignity is fundamentally compatible with the new paradigm emphasizing organism, freedom, indeterminism, and evolutionary holism. This formula that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” is a principle emerging from the holistic evolutionary process that applies to the whole of human civilization and to every person under the principle of unity in diversity. Holism means all—everyone, as well as the wholeness of our planetary ecosystem. That is why the Earth Constitution, structured democratically on this principle of unity in diversity with its guarantee of universal human rights to all persons everywhere, must be the true North Star of all our thought and action.

All forms of neofascism attempt to impose special interests and fragmented prejudices on all the others. They cling to an outdated paradigm involving endless war and power-struggles, and refuse to “grow-up” to a level where love, compassion, tolerance, and evolutionary holism supersede the war of all against all with its dehumanizing assumptions. The cosmic gift to human beings is precisely this capacity for evolutionary holism in which are are tasked to bring out of history a planetary civilization of “peace, justice, and freedom,” or, in similar words, a planetary civilization of “liberty, equality, and community.” Our struggles against Trump take on a larger meaning beyond defending democracy within one nation-state.  In essence, they are struggles on behalf of universal human dignity for all of humanity.  The key turning point in this struggle will involve the ratification of the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 26 Jan 2026.

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