Barefoot over Burning Coals

Abstract

This chapter describes the organization and methodology of the book. It also introduces its central theme. Ardent Trump supporters are “securitarians,” meaning they want protection from lawbreakers, security in the face of immigrants, and defense against the power of foreign countries whereas those who view outsiders not as a source of threat but rather as people who require and deserve assistance are referred to as “unitarians.” The chapter points out that the group analyzed is not the 63 million people who voted for Trump in 2016 but rather a smaller group composed only of his most intense supporters. It explains that the central evidence in the book comes from a 2019 survey of a large representative sample of American adults and that evolutionary logic makes it possible to understand the centrality of the divide between securitarians and unitarians and the reason this divide makes politics so polarized and explosive.