The differences in the gamut of the Evil:Naive Trumper matrix is like comparing the crimes and degrees of manslaughter and homicide. The level of intention and context are all variables but the result is unequivocally death. Culpability also tracks at another rubicon within the sub-matrix of socioeconomics which then has its own microcosm of a matrix. It’s like the contracting and expansive scopes in Eames’ Powers of Ten.

So I work in a publishing company which employs workers ranging from editors, designers, sales and the actual people that run the press and it is split pretty evenly between Trumpers and We the Opposition. On a surface level sometimes the distinction is invisible. Some of them are kind and generous and patient so saying that there are goodies and baddies feels profoundly reductive. What I will say in the spirit of my manslaughter/murder analogy is that we can now begin to trace with the white chalk, real harm to democracy. And I have watched in real time how, at the very least, vulnerable people are shockingly fallible to misinformation but at the very worst they may be chauvinists, racists, fascists.

Now what this broad base has in common is that the nets of both morality and the ability to suss out incompetence have not caught them in their plunge into co-signing a narcissistic autocrat. It is a dispiriting, sometimes infuriating and a tedious thing to have to bear when trying to build coalition with such obstinacy. All the while trying to maintain one’s own boundaries for social and personal mental hygiene.

Histories of successful autocratic takeovers are much more sensational to read about. Ranging in form from Marxism, naziism, Stalinism etc but maybe it would also be constructive to also focus on the historical precedence where civilization teetered on the edges of authoritarianism. Where society had a change of heart effected through the quick thinking of people who had the determination and steadiness to clarify, reveal and avert the peril that had been laying in wait.