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George Orwell's "1984," Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here," and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" were just three dystopian novels that experienced a post-2016 presidential election rediscovery. Others seemed to be discovered for the first time, including Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America."
Roth's book is an alternative-history novel (later made into an HBO miniseries) based on the premise that then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the 1940 election to an isolationist, Nazi-accommodating Charles Lindbergh. In real life the famed aviator campaigned to keep the country out of World War II under the banner of "America First" — the same phrase chosen to trumpet the foreign policy of former President Donald Trump.
In actuality, as prescient as some pronounced Roth in 2016 for writing about rising extremism in America, when the novel was published in 2004 it was considered an allegory of the George W. Bush presidency and the Iraq war — a perception that Roth himself downplayed in a New York Times essay.
"Roth's main argument in the novel is how fragile our individual and national fortunes are, how the whims of history can radically alter or destroy our lives," Mathew J. Shipe, director of advanced writing in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis, said in an e-mail interview. Shipe, who is also president of the Philip Roth Society, added that the book originally resonated "because it suggested how 'provisional' (Roth's language from the New York Times essay) our security actually is."
That certainly seemed to be the case on Jan. 6, 2021, when a MAGA mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, and in more recent weeks with the backlash against the FBI's Mar-a-Lago search.
The book is a "basis for [Roth] to explore just how America could spiral so quickly into such a terrifying place," said Miriam Jaffe, an associate teaching professor at Rutgers University. Jaffee (the Philip Roth Society's program director) added that the novel's power is that it "creates real dread in the reader, like us sort of living in perpetual fear."