The Plot Against America

Fiction's Prophecy #8

The Plot: An American celebrity with isolationist tendencies and no experience in politics is improbably nominated as the Republican candidate for president. This prequel to the story of Donald J. Trump is an alternative fiction by Philip Roth, published in 2004 in the shadow of an America shaken into a semblance of unity by the recent tragedy of 9/11. Set in the early 1940s, Roth’s novel is a portrait of a working-class Jewish community in New Jersey that draws from his own autobiography to imagine a universal political fable: an exhausted democracy’s descent into fascism.

The narrator of The Plot Against America is a fictional version of the author’s young self. “Our homeland was America,” he tells us at the beginning of the novel. “Then the Republicans nominated (Charles) Lindbergh, and everything changed.” Lindbergh goes on to win the election. And throughout the novel, the nation’s politics become curiously intertwined with Philip’s otherwise unassuming family—his cousin goes off to fight in the Canadian army, his older brother starts to reveal sympathies with the Nazi-aligned government, and his aunt Evelyn becomes a frequent guest at the Lindbergh White House. But both Philip’s parents, though in different ways, continue to adhere firmly their New Deal ideals. In reflecting on what power looks like, young Philip reflects on the difference between his mother’s instinct, which is to pack up the family and flee to Canada, and his father’s obstinate determination to remain and resist.

Here, Roth might have been speaking of the main actors in yesterday’s Oval Office confrontation: “There were two types of strong men—those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.” The fictional Philip’s father is a dyed-in-the-wool FDR Democrat, back in a time when the Democrats were unequivocally the working man’s party. The elder Roth and his neighbors take comfort in the broadcasts of the journalist Walter Winchell (who later in the novel is assassinated after he himself decides to run for president); these men curse collectively at radio news about Lindbergh’s agenda and the war abroad; they explode in impotent anger at the family dinner table.

Roth himself, asked shortly after its publication about any covert reference in the novel to the politics of the times, joked: “My book gets it all wrong. Fortunately.” He went on: “It’s an optimistic book . . . because it imagines something that didn’t happen.” Years later in fall 2016, when asked about his reaction to Trump’s election, Roth continues to deny any intended prophecy:

My novel wasn’t written as a warning. I was just trying to imagine what it would have been like for a Jewish family like mine, in a Jewish community like Newark, had something even faintly like Nazi anti-Semitism befallen us in 1940, at the end of the most pointedly anti-Semitic decade in world history. I wanted to imagine how we would have fared, which meant I had first to invent an ominous American government that threatened us.

Looking back on the reviews of Roth’s novel contemporaneous with its publication, the stunning literary prose of Paul Berman stands out. In 2004, the year of George Bush’s famous “Mission Accomplished” stunt aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, Berman finds no hint of political commentary. “Not once in any of this.” he writes, “does Roth glance at events of the present day, not even with a sly wink.” Yet perceiving the novel’s potency, Berman goes on to make his own kind of prediction:

Still, after you have had a chance to inhabit his (Roth’s) landscape for a while and overhear the arguments about war and fascism and the Jews, The Plot Against America begins to rock almost violently in your lap -- as if a second novel, something from our own time, had been locked inside and was banging furiously on the walls, trying to get out.

Yesterday, twenty years later, that “second story” at last broke free of its literary house, and into a charged landscape upon which a flood of unconstitutional orders here at home and a bloodstained battlefield abroad gave evidence of our already reeling world. Ineloquent words spoken by a would-be king collapsed the fragile scaffold designed by FDR, a structure built and stewarded over eight decades by every administration, even those led by presidents that I voted against, steadfastly affirmed even by the ones who left loose a bolt or two.

Also in 2016, Roth concluded that the threat of Trump, the terror that he provoked then in the immediate aftermath of his first election, “is that he makes any and everything possible, including, of course, the nuclear catastrophe.”*

The author of The Plot Against America died eighteen months later, in May 2018. He was correct that Trump made “any and everything” possible, including his reelection in 2024. But what comes next?

________________________________

Unlike Trump, the proto-fascist president of Roth’s novel is a man of few words. Here is Lindbergh’s full acceptance speech at the imagined Republican convention of 1940:

My intention in running for the presidency is to preserve American democracy by preventing America from taking part in another world war. Your choice is simple. It’s not between Charles A. Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It is between Lindbergh and war.

Yet their message is essentially the same. Lindbergh left unspoken that the way to avoid war is to capitulate to Axis powers. Yesterday, Trump left the same unsaid, even while reciting Russian talking points to an ally whose country was invaded by Russia three years ago. ‘I don’t have a side,’ lied Trump. ‘I only want Peace.’**

There is sadness in the United States today, a profound “Rothian” kind of sadness given voice by the novel’s narrator in his later years: “(N)or had I understood until then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others.” As Roth would likely agree, the current plot against America, dressed up and tricked out as a plot to save it, has succeeded. Instigated by Putin’s Russia rather than by Hitler’s Germany, our own decidedly non-fiction plot is aided and abetted by uncomprehensible wealth, indecipherable ambition, and an Orwellian erasure of the kind of common language that is essential to any kind of democratic debate. There is no Walter Winchell in today’s world; we are tuned to different channels. Some broadcast the simple truth; others tell only traitorous lies.

Twenty-one years before our time and sixty years after his own, Roth’s fictional version of the real Walter Winchell addresses us directly in the year two thousand twenty-five with an uncanny premonition:

And how long will the American people stand for this treachery perpetrated by their elected president? How long will Americans remain asleep while their cherished Constitution is torn to shreds?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

All quotations are from this edition of the novel: Philip Roth, The Plot Against America, New York: Vintage International, 2005.

A hyperlink to Paul Berman’s review is highlighted in the text.

*See Judith Thurman’s excellent piece “Philip Roth’s Emails on Trump” in The New Yorker, January 22, 2017.

**Paraphrased from a published transcript.

___________________________________________________

Postscript:

I grew up in a household where the vibrato voices of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn emanated from the record player by day; at night Walter Cronkite reported on “the way it was,” and staticky broadcasts from Radio Free Europe kept us apprised of life behind the iron curtain. On Saturdays, the Manchester Guardian Weekly arrived by airmail, printed on fragile tissue paper to save on postage. As my dad gently turned the pages, he would explain as best he could what was happening abroad.

Like Philip Roth, I was raised on the milk of New Deal liberalism, the FDR version of capitalism in which hard-earned wealth was counter-balanced with a graduated income tax that provided for the welfare of those less fortunate. By and large, government was a good thing. The Supreme Court mostly delivered on the side of justice, and representatives fairly elected to the two houses of Congress debated the finer points of policy in good faith.

My father was deployed to Germany as an Army captain in 1945, to help with post-war reconstruction. He died exactly one year before Trump descended the golden escalator, one year before we make our own precipitous descent—into an ecosystem of lies, cynicism, vengeance, and betrayal. Like many of my generation, I’m grateful that my parents are not alive to witness an American president, duly elected no less, definitively abdicate our nation’s commitment to the often imperfect but morally sound doctrine of democracy.