“Every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having an hallucination.”
Think that’s from a recent news story? Nope. It’s from Philip Roth’s 2004 speculative fiction novel The Plot Against America, which HBO later adapted for television.
I took up the book, which had been on my to-read list for a long time, not knowing how well it foreshadowed the US’s current situation. If I’d known, I might not have opened it. The actual news is depressing enough.
Did you know that Donald Trump got his “America First” slogan from the isolationist America First Committee of the 1940s? One of the leaders of that movement was aviation hero Charles A. Lindbergh. In Roth’s alternative history, Lindbergh defeats Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election by pledging to keep the United States out of World War II.
It’s eerie that Roth imagined so much that has parallels today. The president is a celebrity with no political experience. He is also a bigot. Lindbergh characterizes Jews as dangerous outsiders; Trump denigrates immigrants. Lindbergh promotes the relocation of American Jews to remote areas as a righteous act for their own good; Trump says he is making America great again. Lindbergh cozies up to Nazis; Trump cozies up to dictators. The rhetoric of both gives racists permission for hate speech.
Roth’s focus, however, is more on the American electorate than on Lindbergh. Prominent citizens become accomplices out of fear or a desire to be close to power. Average people are taken in by celebrity, simplistic promises, and lies. Even as antisemitism becomes more flagrant, they are in denial or too confused or paralyzed to do anything.
The range of attitudes is seen in the Jewish family who are the main characters. The narrator is the younger son who is trying to make sense of a strange world. The father — the quote at the start is from him — bemoans what is happening but doesn’t believe it will get so bad that his family will have to flee the country. His impressionable older son becomes involved in the Office of American Absorption, a program ostensibly to assimilate Jews but really to disempower them, with the help of an aunt who works for OAA. She thinks American Jews have nothing to fear. She marries a prominent rabbi who shills for Lindbergh.
Only the ending of The Plot Against America will ring false for contemporary readers. (Spoiler alert) Lindbergh disappears, FDR is returned to the presidency, and the United States joins its allies in fighting Nazi Germany. If only the country could be rescued that easily today.
Since reading The Plot Against America, I’ve found out about other novels that foreshadowed our own time, including Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here. In that 1935 novel, a charismatic populist wins the presidency and, using us-versus-them rhetoric, fear, and a paramilitary force, becomes a dictator.
A dozen years ago I would have thought “no way” about the possibility of Trump’s ascent. These novelists believed autocracy could happen here and warned the country. We haven’t fallen to the depths they depict, but I no longer think it’s impossible.
I remember this book and thinking how terribly creative Roth was in writing this book. Little did we know what would happen to our country.
ReplyDelete