I'm Christopher Leiden, and this is open source in Saratoga, New York, with the soulful American believer, Marilynne Robinson,

prize novelist and teacher of novelists. You're known over the decades, Marilyn, as the storyteller we trust

to observe the troubled heart of our country, our own troubled hearts. You've been a voice of

encouragement. Somebody said, a voice that has been overheard by more readers than any other

living American writer. This summer, you crossed a line. You've re-labeled the American condition

in Trump time. Our politics and our culture, you write, are under occupation by a

faction of our fellow citizens. And it's quite unlike your normal ordinary right-to-left or left-to-right

political shift. It is not what people mean by polarization. It's something quite different,

more like a hostile takeover,

with the feeling of regime change almost, maybe even a cultural revolution, cross the line

into that zone. And that word, occupation, strong word. In the traditional way of talking

about the country is polarized, implies that if we just

compromised, if we could find intermediate places where we could make acceptable adjustments

to each other's preferences and so on. But that is not how things are now. The position of the

people in charge of the red side of things is so alien to

American tradition that it's really a change of character in the country as if someone had come

from the outside, from the philosophical outside, and simply erased a great deal that has accumulated

as the character of the country and the genius of the country over time.

You look at the policies now, and would I agree it was reasonable to reduce food support

for children by half?

Would that be an acceptable compromise position?

Would that be on your list? I don't think so.

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