US conservatives love to warn of creeping fascism. Do they understand what it is? | Marilynne Robinson

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.

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.

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.

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.