Marilynne Robinson (the writer) and Barack Obama (the President) are the type of people I’m happy if surprised America still turns out. They seem of this time but of another as well, with a sense of history that feels as if it’s being rapidly churned out of the collective memory. 

In a conversation that took place recently in Iowa, and is now being published in two parts in the New York Review of Books (read part one), the pair have a wide-ranging talk, touching on many topics, including how fear–and the exploitation of it–is a large part of the contemporary political discourse. Obama, despite having his Administration and supporters mentioned in the same breath as slavery and Nazism by Ben Carson alone, is confident the madness will pass. An excerpt:

President Obama:

Why did you decide to write this book of essays? And why was fear an important topic, and how does it connect to some of the other work that you’ve been doing?

Marilynne Robinson:

Well, the essays are actually lectures. I give lectures at a fair rate, and then when I’ve given enough of them to make a book, I make a book.

President Obama:

So you just kind of mash them all together?

Marilynne Robinson:

I do. That’s what I do. But it rationalizes my lecturing, too. But fear was very much—is on my mind, because I think that the basis of democracy is the willingness to assume well about other people.

You have to assume that basically people want to do the right thing. I think that you can look around society and see that basically people do the right thing. But when people begin to make these conspiracy theories and so on, that make it seem as if what is apparently good is in fact sinister, they never accept the argument that is made for a position that they don’t agree with—you know?

President Obama:

Yes.

Marilynne Robinson:

Because [of] the idea of the “sinister other.” And I mean, that’s bad under all circumstances. But when it’s brought home, when it becomes part of our own political conversation about ourselves, I think that that really is about as dangerous a development as there could be in terms of whether we continue to be a democracy.

President Obama:

Well, now there’s been that strain in our democracy and in American politics for a long time. And it pops up every so often. I think the argument right now would be that because people are feeling the stresses of globalization and rapid change, and we went through one of the worst financial crises since the Great Depression, and the political system seems gridlocked, that people may be particularly receptive to that brand of politics.•