“Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Nietzsche used madness as a metaphor for the irrationality of collective movements, herd behavior, or mass delusion. Today’s woke progressivism around culture, gender, and race is the paradigm (see Explaining the Rise in Mental Illness in the West). Their derangements command far too much power. These derangements find their expression in Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS).
TDS describes strong emotional reactions to two-time US President Donald Trump. Characteristic of this disorder is irrational thoughts and extreme behavior, specifically overreaction to Trump’s actions, statements, or policies, while dismissing facts and eschewing logical reasoning. The condition is marked not only by a pathological obsession with Trump. Those with TDS are likely to trust mainstream public health messaging, for example, during the COVID-19 pandemic (lockdowns, masking, vaccine mandates), support trans rights, advocate for immigrant protections, or endorse ideas associated with critical race theory. (See The Future of a Delusion: Mass Formation Psychosis and the Fetish of Corporate Statism.)
This essay argues that TDS can be best understood as a clash of background assumptions that shape worldviews. People do not process political events or leaders in a vacuum; their perceptions are filtered through deeply held beliefs and values about culture, gender, government, media, morality, race, and society. Ignorant of these underlying frameworks, observers of a particular worldview react emotionally, often hysterically, to Trump’s presence, pronouncements, and policies, because they do not have access to the deeper understanding necessary to form a rational argument. Instead of logical argumentation, reflex leads to mocking Trump’s intelligence, manner of speaking, and physique (the latter betraying their rhetoric of body positivity). By making explicit these often-unspoken assumptions, this essay explains why reactions to Trump have been so polarized and why mutual understanding between opposing sides has been so difficult to achieve.
It’s crucial to do this because the dominant sensemaking institutions—academia, the corporate media, the culture industry, and the Democratic Party—depend on popular ignorance to advance the transnational project. Behind the strategies globalists use to disorganize the population—historical revisionism, multiculturalism, racial and ethnic antagonism, and radical gender ideology—is the project to dismantle national sovereignty for the sake of transnational corporate and financial powers. By incorporating a mass of the population into the progressive worldview, elites can produce mass hysteria when it is functional to their ends. TDS is the paradigm of deep propaganda work.
In the modern world, there exist two competing narratives about how people ought to organize their economic, political, and social lives. The first of these is the system born out of the Peace of Westphalia and later embodied in the American System—a system of sovereign nation-states, each jealous of its independence, cautious of foreign entanglements, but free to cooperate through alliances when necessary (see Will They Break the Peace of Westphalia or Will We Save National Sovereignty for the Sake of the People?).
This was the vision of Alexander Hamilton, carried forward by Henry Clay, and later defended by Abraham Lincoln (see With Reciprocal Tariffs, Trump Triggers the Globalists; Tariffs, Trade, and the Future of the American Worker; Why the Globalists Don’t Want Tariffs. Why the American Worker Needs them; History as Ideology: The Myth that the Democrats Became the Party of Lincoln). It is grounded in classical liberal principles of free enterprise, individualism, and republican governance. Economically, it finds expression in national industrial development, protective tariffs, and policies designed to secure the independence of citizens from foreign domination. In this vision, the sovereignty of the people is inseparable from the sovereignty of the nation.
Opposed to this stands the second vision: the transnational order, rooted in the technocratic speculations of French philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon (the derangements of French philosophy inform much of the progressive worldview) and nourished by European intellectual currents. Here sovereignty is not preserved but sacrificed—subsumed into larger, unelected, bureaucratic, and corporate arrangements that dictate to nations and their peoples.
This is the ideology of progressivism, an ideology that clothes itself in humanitarian rhetoric but ultimately strips free peoples of their independence in favor of managerial elites. Its institutional forms are the European Union, the IMF, the WTO, and countless other transnational organizations that presume to legislate without the consent of the governed. (See Taking Back Our Country from the Globalists; Protectionism in the Face of Transnationalism: The Necessity of Tariffs in the Era of Capital Mobility; Marx the Accelerationist: Free Trade and the Radical Case for Protectionism.)
Its cultural forms are multiculturalism, first articulated by Horace Kallen as cultural pluralism in the early twentieth century, which gradually erodes the shared civic identity upon which true self-government depends, and the inversion of the historic racial hierarchy (which a truly liberal person seeks to dismantle altogether). Its economics are free trade without limit, mass immigration without assimilation, and the wholesale transfer of industry to foreign shores.
What is too often missed in the heat of contemporary debate is that the progressive adherents to this second narrative are largely unconscious of the architecture of their worldview. They live inside it as fish in water, operating from unexamined assumptions about “global interdependence,” “diversity,” and “inevitability.” Thus, when they encounter a figure like Trump, their opposition is almost entirely superficial: they dislike his manner, his bluntness, his appearance, his defiance of polite technocratic norms. Rarely do they engage his policies at the level of ideas, for to do so would expose the fact that Trump, like Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln before him, stands within the older and truer American tradition—the tradition of national independence, protective tariffs, and a government that serves its citizens rather than distant managers.
The irony is that the progressive worldview, in its zeal to appear cosmopolitan and humanitarian, aligns with the very Democratic Party that once stood for slave democracy, free trade, and later Jim Crow segregation. Meanwhile, the Republican Party, in its origin, was born as a protest against the economic and political degradation of that Democratic vision. It sought to restore the American System, to defend national industry, and to protect the working man from being undercut by cheap labor and cheap imports. To ignore this continuity is to misread both the present and the past.
As noted above, Nietzsche famously remarked that insanity in the individual is rare, but in groups, parties, and ideologies, it is the rule. Progressivism, with its hollow cosmopolitanism and technocratic faith, is precisely such a madness—a system that promises liberation while delivering dependence, that preaches diversity while eroding unity, that invokes democracy while undermining sovereignty. Against the madness stands the sober realism of the American System, which insists that free people can only remain free if they control their own borders, their own industries, and their own political institutions. This is not a relic of the nineteenth century but the perennial truth of rational self-government. (See Populism and Nationalism; Progressivism Hasn’t Been Betrayed—It’s Been Installed; Richard Grossman on Corporate Law and Lore.)
freedom and reason 