I am a big fan of Ursula K Le Guin’s writing. Everything from the Earthsea series, through the straight science fiction to Always Coming Home, which I regard as the best fictional deep mapping going.

Back in 1974, Le Guin wrote a short piece called Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons? I’ve just re-read it and realise that it goes some way towards to explaining why, sadly, Donald Trump is merely a grossly exaggerated symptom – however unpleasant – of something deeply embedded in the culture of the USA. Not the centre of the universe, as he apparently believes. If Le Guin is right (and I believe she is), it all has to do with the American male’s fear of dragons or, to be less metaphorical, with the fact that ‘a great many American men have been taught … to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful’. Given the fundamental role of imagination in our ability to empathise with other beings – human and more-than-human – that’s a pretty concerning claim.

Le Guin doubts that ‘the imagination can be suppressed’ and that attempts to do so result in it being ‘deformed’, in its transformation into ‘mere ego-centred daydreaming’ or, at worst, into a form of ‘wishful thinking, which is a very dangerous occupation when it his taken seriously’. Particularly by the types of individual now hell-bent on “making America great again” and whose fear of imagination is actually fear of anything that might deepen their understanding of their world, and their fellow beings, their own feelings and destiny, rather than confirm the narrow-mindedness and prejudice that allow those with pathological fantasies to stoke tendencies to hatred and vindictiveness to advance their own authoritarian ends.

I think that understanding this has a certain value, if only because it points beyond the media fascination with one or two American “big fish” – who feed on being the focus of media attention – towards the roots of the global problems we must now face. Namely, that Europeans have long been absorbing the values that feed those root conditions. We may not be able to do anything about Donald Trump, but we can certainly be more watchful with regard to the ‘fear of dragons’ and its consequences in our own lived culture. That’s my reason for recommending reading Le Guin’s piece, which you’ll find in Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin, Gollancz, London, 2018.