Moving Beyond Personalism: How the Obsession with Donald Trump Undermines Hopes for Progressive Change

EDITORIAL, 11 May 2026

#950 | Richard E. Rubenstein – TRANSCEND Media Service

When Donald Trump is criticized, as he so often is, for being a greedy, lawless, cruel and boorish autocrat — when the U.S. president’s mental stability as well as his moral character is called into question – he has a ready answer: TDS.  “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is his half-serious label for an alleged mental illness that afflicts his critics (a.k.a. “leftist lunatics”).

The trouble is that the label is partly justified.

In a book written almost a decade ago called Resolving Structural Conflicts (Routledge, 2017), I contended that there were two basic approaches to understanding political conflicts.  The perspective that I called partisan moralism pictures personal issues such as a political leader’s intelligence, sanity, and moral character as the prime determinants of conflict, while the systemic approach that I favored considers economic, political, and cultural institutions – most of them imposed on masses of people by powerful elites – supremely important.

“It’s the System, stupid,” was my motto.  The oligarchical capitalist system generates unprecedented increases in social inequality and economic insecurity.  The military-industrial system enriches itself through imperial expansion and endless warfare.  The political system is increasingly indentured to mega-donors and the corporate media.  And the cultural system is debased by a tribal ethnonationalism that solves nobody’s personal or social problems.  The assumption that I made (like many on the Left before me) was that those whose needs are not satisfied by existing systems will see that it is these bad structures, not just bad leaders, that need to be changed.

What I did not anticipate was that a new popular movement advocating social transformation would emerge on the Right, not the Left, and that, in the United States, it would be led by a partisan moralist par excellence – a figure whose personal characteristics would come to dominate the political consciousness of most of his followers and most of his opponents.

But this is what happened.  Rather than seeing that systemic failures had opened the door to the manipulation of popular discontent by right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation and leaders like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, most Democrats found themselves attributing the changes associated with the MAGA movement to Trump’s evil influence. That is, they became partisan moralists par excellence themselves, obsessing over the bad leader’s immorality, illegality, and mental instability. The problem was not that these characterizations were false or the products of TDS.  It was that those focusing on Trump’s character defects failed to identify the systemic sources of discontent and to propose transformational solutions of their own.  That there is still no Democratic or progressive equivalent of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2024 is a result of this personalist obsession.

A dramatic example of this obsession, in my view, is the insistence by many of Trump’s progressive critics that he be punished for alleged crimes, re-impeached, or removed from office because of alleged mental incapacity.  I disagree with former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz – an apologist for the Gaza genocide who has now joined the Republican Party – about almost everything.  But Dershowitz was right to argue ten years ago that criminalizing political differences polarizes politics to the point that democratic norms, already undermined by autocrats like Trump, can come close to collapse.  When Trump was first elected president, instead of calling for an F.B.I. investigation of his alleged ties to Russian intelligence, the Democrats should have investigated their own failure to satisfy working people’s basic needs.  Even now, most of their leaders refuse to accept responsibility for this gross error, which set a vengeful president on the path of retribution.

Rather than continuing on this tit-for-tat path of criminalizing differences, the opponents of the Trump/MAGA regime need to design programs radical enough to start solving fundamental social problems, yet practicable and saleable to the vast majority of working people. Three missing programs seem particularly worth noting.  What are the progressive solutions to the problems of endless warfare, socioeconomic insecurity, and political corruption?  Or to put this more positively, how can we begin to move toward a nation at peace with itself and with the world, a society in which work and its rewards are fairly shared, and a political community based on mutual affection, respect, and democratic norms?

A post-imperial program. Living at peace with the world depends on recognizing (in the words of the conservative historian, Niall Ferguson) that the U.S. is “the empire that dare not speak its name,” and determining to dismantle it.  Many Democrats still consider the topic taboo – or else they implicitly deny that the nation the wish to lead is a bellicose, world-dominating superpower like the other empires of world history.  A post-imperial program, on the other hand, will declare that imperialism is undemocratic, unconscionable, and, for those interested in religion, unchristian. It will recognize that military-industrial supremacy not only deforms U.S. foreign policy but also cripples public services such as health, education, and job creation. It will propose cutting military expenditures to the level needed to provide genuine national defense and will indicate how federally supported production for war can be converted to production designed to satisfy basic social needs.  Such a program will also answer the question of how the 5 million or so jobs now dependent on military production and activity can be saved and expanded under a new economic regime.

A post-oligarchical program will help to answer the jobs question.  Its aim (transcending current calls to “tax the rich”) will be to adopt humane, effective measures to limit the wealth, power, and political influence of the oligarchs and to empower working people to make decisions formerly reserved to the holders of great wealth.  A genuinely populist economic program will guarantee all workers a livable minimum annual income and will explore the question of public vs. private ownership of enterprises vital to satisfying basic social needs. To avoid both the market fetishism and speculative excesses of late capitalism and the administrative abuses of old-style socialism, it will propose funded public, private, and mixed programs designed to furnish people with meaningful, remunerative jobs in the information age.  It will fulfill decades-old promises to eliminate extreme urban and rural poverty and will work to raise general levels of education, health, and happiness to those of the most advanced welfare states. It will also propose to solve the problems of labor shortages and requests for asylum by adopting a rationally planned and administered immigration system.

A post-polarization program will advocate methods of resolving the underlying social, cultural, and psychological problems that undermine people’s trust in each other and in their ability to act collectively to satisfy their basic human needs.  Post-oligarchical reforms are part of the answer; restoring trust in government depends (among other things) on ending the dependence of politicians on Big Money donors and “revolving door” jobs.  But progressives need to recognize that the painful personal and social issues currently addressed by churches and other private institutions also require creative solutions if “white power” and other false solidarities are to be transcended.  What local and national programs and activities are needed to help communities deal with crippling problems such as mass drug dependency?  Violence against women? Mental illness?  Family instability?  A program aimed at generating real  solidarity will not mistake anti-social symptoms (such as reliance on guns and fear of strangers) for the disease.  It will find ways to organize and enact caring for each other.

These programmatic notions are merely brief suggestions, of course. But they are intended to illustrate the sort of thinking that may help those appalled by the inhumanity of the current U.S. regime (and other regimes like it) to move beyond partisan moralism toward the analysis and cure of systemic ills.

Time passes quickly. To remain obsessed by a leader’s personal failings plays his game and leaves oppressive systems in place.  Let’s focus – now! — on creating something better.

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Richard E. Rubenstein is a member of the TRANSCEND Media Service Editorial Committee, of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, and a professor of conflict resolution and public affairs at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter Center for Peace and Conflict Resolution. A graduate of Harvard College, Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), and Harvard Law School, Rubenstein is the author of nine books on analyzing and resolving violent social conflicts. His most recent book is Resolving Structural Conflicts: How Violent Systems Can Be Transformed (Routledge, 2017).

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 11 May 2026.

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