It’s precisely those distinctions that the writers of “Rules for Resistance” warn against, no matter how strong the compulsion to condescend or justifiable the eagerness to blame. Dismissing Trump voters as racists is an “idiotic simplification of extremely complex human beings,” writes Satyen K. Bordoloi, a Mumbai filmmaker. “We in India have been doing the same thing for two and a half years, and the results have been devastating. Our society has fractured much more because of these blanket accusations. Those who voted for [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi have gone into their defensive shells after such accusations and became more protective of their leader as their very sense of self became attached to him.”

In Venezuela, the opposition to the late Hugo Chávez made similar mistakes. “We wouldn’t stop pontificating about how stupid Chavismo was, not only to international friends but also to Chavez’s electoral base,” journalist Andrés Miguel Rondón explains. “ ‘Really, this guy? Are you nuts? You must be nuts,’ we’d say.” As a result, “whole generations were split in two [and] a sense of shared culture was wiped out.”