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

Trump, a shrewd opportunist, has understood tendencies in American culture that most of us would prefer to ignore or deny

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.

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