It Is Happening Here: The Plot Against America and the Political Moment

Abstract

The Plot Against America was written amid the climate of fear and repression initiated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and published in 2004, during the bitter presidential contest between John Kerry and George W. Bush. It is alternative history, based on the premise that Charles A. Lindbergh, a celebrated aviator sympathetic to Nazi Germany, defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency in 1940. Philip Roth insisted that his book was fiction and not a parable of contemporary repression, even as he leveled scathing attacks against the Bush presidency. Though set six decades earlier, during another war and another crisis of national identity, Roth's best-selling novel was widely read, obliquely, as if the plot against America it portrayed were really Bush's consolidation and abuse of power at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Roth's Lindbergh, not unlike Bush, is a Republican interloper who glides into office offering little sense of where he stands. Though Lindbergh was an isolationist and Bush an interventionist, numerous critics across the political spectrum read The Plot Against America as a veiled account of current grim events.

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