Donald Trump

A few years ago a former student of mine, one for whom I had particular respect, stopped me on the street and handed me a copy of The Road to Serfdom by the British-Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek.For reasons I cannot reconstruct, I had already read that book and forgotten it, except for the impression it left of being very much a product of its place and time, the London School of Economics, 1945. Since then I have learned that, fairly or not, it is read as a supporting document for the slippery-slope catastrophism that now casts the American government, insofar as it enacts policies favored by Democrats, as a sinister and quite absolute threat to individual freedom. My student told me that a reading group had formed and I was invited. He had the glow of the convert.This fine youth was starting out on what most would consider an enviable life, free as precious few of his fellow mortals are or have ever been. Yet he was excited by a new insight, that there was a plot afoot to plunge us into serfdom, fascism, Nazism. This alarm has surged, and now we have men in combat gear standing around at public events, absolutely defying anyone to take away their freedom. If they had not hit upon that one most provocative freedom, the right to menace with firearms, probably no one would ever have given a thought to their rights except to assume that they had the normal set of them. And where is the drama in that? They are standing boldly against an insidious foe, or so they and their friends imagine.These “enemies” against whom they are armed are Americans who disagree with them.I am trying to describe a Trumpism that anticipated and continues to enable Trump, that makes a kind of sense of his wild rhetoric and the reaction to it among his loyalists. A historically privileged group – whom it is, sadly, fair to call Republicans – indulge in a fear amounting almost to panic, which has become endemic, stimulated continuously by the presence of those Americans who differ from them, for example about whether the ready availability of guns is related to the criminal use of them.There is nothing new about fantasies of peril or heroism. Boredom might be a factor among the fairly prosperous, especially as they enter middle age. Resentment is a stimulant. But there is something strange, even weird, in the climate we are seeing now that evades explanation in conventional terms.Americans have argued for generations about the deleterious effects, if any, of an active central government. Once the peril was that one morning we would all wake up communists. It was a furious and intractable debate that led to character attacks and so on, but no one mentioned civil war. There is a virulence in our present divisions that hardens and sharpens them radically. It comes with the insistent association by Republicans of Democrats – the plurality or majority of the American people, a huge, unorganized swath of the population – with perversion involving children.It should be possible to dismiss an accusation like this as proof of a diseased imagination in the accuser. But the slur is important in the behaviors that increasingly displace actual politics. Who would compromise with, let alone be persuaded by, people given to this lowest of vices? Who would believe that such people had any commitment to justice or could really act in good faith? The Democratic party as a whole tolerates and enables this abuse, they say. In this imagined context Trump’s sleaziness is shining virtue. No need to be specific when dealing in slurs. No need to prove anything. The Nazis taught us all how to stigmatize entire groups. Surely Hayek mentions this somewhere.Republicans are, of course, another huge swath of the population who identify as partisans on grounds of perceived interest or affinity, just like the Democrats. So it should not be possible to generalize about them as I am about to do. Trump enters the discussion here. Over the coming days we will learn more about the character and strength of his support among his followers. There is the very real possibility that it will be of a size and kind to cause problems, if not the “death and destruction” he foresaw as a consequence of his arraignment.There is more to this than mere loyalty to one jaded billionaire, odd as that is. There is the matter of serfdom. If the word describes anything in contemporary American life, it is surely the self-subordination of respectable people with ordinary lives to a movement that requires belief in bizarre and incendiary ideas, as well as flagrant offenses against decency, for example the heaping of opprobrium on immigrants. Trump joined this choir as he descended his escalator, announcing in effect liberation from old obligations to generosity or fairness.He has enlisted followers who might very well engage in acts that lead to death and destruction, assuming that some deaths will be their own, and the destruction will befall their own country. This makes sense only if the reward is self-submission, the craving for an identity that supersedes the autonomy of democratic citizenship. No need to weigh the merit of the claim that immigrants are rapists. No need to consider the impact of assault weapons on public life. These issues do not invite thought or debate. They occasion demonstrations of loyalty. Yes, children die, and we all pray. I tremble to think what a God’s-eye view of this ritual would be.History proves that solid-seeming populations do succumb to fascism. The word “serfdom” in Hayek’s title suggests that people would be passively subjugated, succumbing to a dirigiste economic order. But his real subject is fascism, whose worst cruelties always depend on the active participation of a significant part of these populations, even though they sacrifice what they might have thought they valued in order to be bound up in the unity the word “fascism” promises. Fascism is not a politics, it is a pathology compounded of nostalgia and resentment.European fascism has had clear markers, three being white supremacy and Christian nationalism, and, of course, charismatic leadership. In using the word “pathology” I put aside the idea of politics as usual. Other patterns are easily discernible within our American strain of this virus.It is classically fascist to influence opinion by the threat of violence. We have actual violence that lacks rational motive, but which is strikingly consistent over all in that it targets – not a metaphor – the tenderest places in our society, elementary schools, churches, outdoor festivals. It targets custom, community, contentment and hope to very great effect, dispossessing us of much of the pleasure of our national life. Weighing one thing against another, presumably, we are to accept this. At the same time the example we offer to the world of constitutional democracy is disgraced.Fascism is an autoimmune disease. Under the banner of patriotism it hates its nation and people and oversteps all civilized limits in its zeal to bring about fundamental change, whatever the damage. Something of the kind is discernible in the talk of secession, national divorce, civil war.So far, the indictment of Donald Trump has passed quietly. He may emerge for his loyalists as martyr/hero, more exalted, even as his speeches become more fuddled and monotonous, even as he keeps tapping them for money. Not much is required of the Glorious Leader once he achieves that status. Trump the opportunist has understood tendencies in American culture that most of us prefer to ignore or deny. If he has taught us one thing, it is that we have to learn to pay a different kind of attention.
Marilynne Robinson is an American novelist and essayist. She has received several awards including the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 2005 and the 2012 National Humanities Medal More