Is Philip Roth’s current novel — “The Plot Against America” — a cautionary tale?
In Roth’s novel, Charles Lindbergh (an isolationist and Nazi sympathizer) defeats FDR for the presidency in 1940, keeps America out of World War II, and — unrestricted by a passive population — begins to sign laws targeting Jews, leading to a U.S. fascism that did not in real life occur.
The first sentence of the book — frequently the key to the meaning of a serious novel — says that “fear” pervades the book. Assuming there is a contemporary moral to Roth’s book, of what should it make us afraid?
Two very different answers were recently given — one by J.M. Coetzee in an extended essay in the November 16, 2004 issue of The New York Review of Books, and the other by Ruth Wisse in a masterful review in the current issue of Commentary.
Coetzee explored the current significance of Roth’s historical fiction as follows:
The Plot Against America cannot be true since many of the events it describes are universally known never to have occurred. . . . [T]here was no President Charles Lindbergh in the White House in the years 1941–1942, carrying out secret orders from Berlin.
Just as obviously, however, Roth has not concocted this lengthy fantasy of an America in thrall to the Nazis simply as a literary exercise.
So what is the relation of his story to the real world? What is his book "about"? . . .
The similarities between the Lindbergh presidency and the presidency of George W. Bush are hard to brush over. Is Roth’s novel of America under fascist rule then "about" America under Bush? . . .
Coetzee’s answer seems to be “not literally, but figuratively — yes.” He argues that “one of the things” the book is about is “paranoia” — a fear of creeping fascism that arrives in a fashion that seems innocuous at first, a fear mistakenly dismissed as mere paranoia:
It needs a paranoid reader to turn [The Plot Against America] into a roman à clef for the present. However, one of the things that The Plot Against America is about is, precisely, paranoia. In Roth’s story . . . [the] plot against America’s Jews [is] ultimately a plot against the American republic . . . Those who talk about a plot are [at first] dismissed as crazy.
Coetzee asserts that Roth’s fictional Lindbergh presidency is “a concretization, a realization for poetic ends, of a certain potential in American political life” — a “voting public captivated by surface rather than substance” that “might in 1940 as easily have gone for the aviator hero with the simple message” as it did for FDR.
America has just re-elected a one-time “aviator” — someone castigated by a virulent Left as borderline fascist (Google “Bush fascist” and see what you get, or look here), an election blamed on a voting public allegedly “captivated by surface rather than substance,” that went for the candidate with the “simple message” (instead of the “nuanced” one).
Is that really what Roth’s book is about? Ruth Wisse comes to a very different conclusion:
Roth has written that he chose the Lindbergh character . . . as a “leading political figure in a novel where I wanted America’s Jews to feel the pressure of a genuine anti-Semitic threat.” . . .
Does Roth intend, as some have speculated, to alert us to today’s recrudescence of global anti-Semitism, and what it might portend for American Jews?
If so, that would suggest an analogy between the war against the Jews in Europe in the 1930’s and 1940’s and the Arab-Muslim incitement against Jews and the Jewish state that has come to infect whole sectors of advanced Western society. . .
Today, as then, the enemies of the Jews are the enemies of America and of democracy. Today, as then, those who defend the Jews have been charged with dragging America into a useless and unnecessary war. .
[I]f one does not want to oblige today’s American Jews to do anything about “a genuine anti-Semitic threat,” why, then, write a novel explicitly aimed at exposing them to “the danger”? Why ratchet up the peril, raise the temperature of fear?
Wisse thinks the question answers itself:
Many American Jews, including, it would seem, some of the most enthusiastic reviewers of this book, define their own Jewish consciousness and values not by means of religious worship, observance of commandments, community affiliation, or work on behalf of Israel, but through commemorations of the Holocaust. . .
But while the original impulse behind such commemoration was linked to the vow of Never Again!, implying a need to take effective political action on behalf of the Jewish people, Holocaust memorialization has increasingly slipped into little more than self-indulgent paranoia.
She thinks the paranoia should be directed at a danger far more threatening than the alleged “similarities between the Lindbergh presidency and the presidency of George W. Bush:”
[A]side from the real possibility of Islamic terrorism directed against Jewish targets in America, there is the no less real potential today for a kind of homegrown anti-Semitic coalition, combining elements of the isolationist Buchananite Right (Lindbergh’s direct heirs) with the much more energetic and influential forces of the anti-Israel and anti-American Left.
We have had a foretaste of where this malign conjunction could lead in the recent campaign to smear AIPAC and a (non-Jewish) Pentagon analyst for allegedly passing draft classified documents to Israel. . .
[T]he real fear aroused by Roth’s novel is not that America is under “threat of becoming fascist” but that many of its leading cultural figures, and a part of American Jewry, are not prepared to sustain a war against the anti-Semites and the America-haters of our own time.
Wisse’s review is worth reading in its entirety — as is one by Stephen Schwartz, in the November 29, 2004 issue of The Weekly Standard, who writes that Roth’s book is “the first novel to transfer convincingly the atmosphere of fascist Europe to these pages”:
In [Lindbergh’s] infamous Des Moines speech (really delivered on September 11, 1941, but set back a year by Roth for fictional purposes), Lindbergh labeled "the British, the Jewish, and the Roosevelt administration" as the "most important groups that have been pressing this country toward war."
The Jews, Lindbergh charged, presented their "greatest danger to this country in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." . . .
[Roth’s] book should shame all those who in the past two years have referred to "the neoconservative cabal in the Pentagon" as a respectable euphemism for Jews allegedly dedicated to warmongering. . .
With the country again saved from isolationism by the president’s reelection, Roth, whatever his own views of the second administration of George W. Bush, deserves thanks for reminding us, through "alternate history," of our real history.
Roth appends the full text of Lindbergh’s September 11 (September 11!) speech in a Postscript to his novel.