Will I love The Plot Against America?

Recent authoritarian trends and attempts to re-establish white supremacy are not new in America.

In this novel, Philip Roth envisions an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh has defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election. He then proceeds to collude with Adolph Hitler and seeks to establish anti-Semitism throughout the country.

The novel is based on the actual attitudes which Lindbergh had toward Jews and other minorities. Of course, this is not truly an insurrection. Still, it is a portrayal of how extreme right-wing attitudes can seek to rob people of our hard-won democracy.

I was raised with a… show more.

Unlike the other books on my list, this one, of course, is a work of fiction. It imagines an alternative history, in which Charles Lindbergh, the Nazi-sympathizing celebrity pilot, wins the US presidency in 1940. Roth conveys the mounting horrors through the experiences of his narrator, a Jewish boy in New Jersey. The book is a meditation on the fragile borders between democracy and authoritarianism in the United States, it suggests that fascism could have happened (and could still happen) in our not so-exceptional democracy. 

I had this book recommended to me by a student. It’s counter-factual historical fiction, but all too believable. Roth conveys a sense of creeping dread that feels uncomfortably familiar in the 2020s. Charles Lindbergh’s role in the story is central, as his America Firsters take over the Republican Party, and then the country.

I read this when it came out, when I was writing my own book, about the rising anger I was seeing in working-class America. It was so chilling that I had to put it down and could not finish it until years later. Roth reimagines history, Charles Lindbergh was elected president in 1940, signs a non-aggression pact with Hitler. It was based on Lindberg’s actual beliefs. Roth clearly anticipated what was coming in America, and the fact that a large number of Americans would like to follow an autocratic leader. 

Philip Roth’s counterfactual historical fiction set in the 1930s and 1940s surely resembles in style the period from 2016-20. It’s much better written, of course, than the stuff presented for consumption by so-called real life in this recent four-year stretch of crude, mad, and lethal public expression of the darkness in some people’s souls.