Or perhaps I should say, it is the philosophy of those who fancy themselves as members of the commercial or ownership cohort: the "makers". These folks see themselves as the natural and legitimate inheritors of wealth and privilege. They are the ones who are intelligent, patriotic, hard-working, honest, frugal, and pious--by virtue of their innate qualities and their genetic heritage. It follows then society must be out to get them, and further, that anyone who opposes them must be stupid, seditious, lazy, larcenous, spendthrift and heretical, that is, the "takers". And further, that they must have been born that way.

Well, real capitalists can at least point to genuine personal and social achievements to justify their claims, but for those who cannot make it in the very society they themselves prefer and define as natural and inevitable, then there MUST be a cabal of evildoers who toil maliciously and continuously to keep them down and take what is rightfully theirs. For the righteously disappointed, conspiracy is the only possible valid explanation for their personal shortcomings, or for the indifference of a random and chaotic universe.

Do I exaggerate? Of course, nothing in the social sciences is that cut-and-dried, and there are always exceptions to every rule and other factors and forces at play. But if you need a rule of thumb to help explain political and social divisions, a starting point, then there it is.

The followers of Trump are those who want to be Daddy Warbucks, but can't, because they are too stupid or too unlucky, or perhaps because they have been out-competed (or even victimized!) by the very people they admire and wish to emulate, and they are too ashamed to admit it to themselves. As for those who still support Trump even though they don't trust him or his program...well, they are the worst of all. Unlike the ignorant and uneducated, they should know better, but they see his lies as their best hope of furthering their own interests. They not only can be blamed for following Trump, they must also accept the blame for creating him.

They are like those Liberals and Leftists who supported Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Castro long after the evidence was in that these dictators were brutal tyrants running gangster states. Yes, this human error is not limited to one ideology or another. It is just that today it seems to be most noticeable, most troublesome, and most toxic on the Right.