A bunch of years ago, I was talking on an online forum about the Scott Pilgrim movie. Someone I was talking to said, very rough paraphrase, "Once, I had some q

A bunch of years ago, I was talking on an online forum about the Scott Pilgrim movie. Someone I was talking to said, very rough paraphrase, "Once, I had some questions about whether I would like the Scott Pilgrim comic. I asked on a comics forum, and the fans of the comic there made it very clear that they thought I was uncool and stupid. So fuck them, I'm not watching this movie." This was a person who broadly speaking in the target audience for this movie (geeky, likes action comedy movies), and who was trying to punish people who almost certainly didn't know he existed in the least effective possible way by doing something that really deprived only him of any benefit. When I pointed this out to him, he spent ten forum posts working his way around to some kind of clear ex post facto explanation for why he "wouldn't" like the movie. So the point of the above anecdote is this: If you make someone feel genuinely hurt/offended/like you don't like them, they will do all kinds of things in reaction to that. What I see in Altman's interlocutors is a lot of people who were like, "The liberals alienated me." And they may have voted in someone who on some level is factually worse for them than the alternative, but they'll justify it to themselves. (I don't think that this is a unique characteristic of Trump voters. I think basically everyone is prone to getting really offended and engaging in the politics or economics of spite.)