The Tribulations of American Democracy in Philip Roth’s "The Plot Against America"

Abstract

Since its establishment American democracy has always been challenged to a greater or lesser extent. If neoliberalism and the reign of finance constitute democracy’s major contemporary challenge, in his 2004 alternate history novel, The Plot Against America, Philip Roth ostentatiously chooses to set his narrative in the 1940s and explore democracy in the ‘what-if’ mode, which gives him extra breadth allowing for extravagant flights of fancy. In the tradition of Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here, Roth’s novel juxtaposes an innocent America with an evil one. The latter renders the former heroic, and this brief interlude of a relatively mild form of fascism that takes hold of America ends with the triumph of democracy. Roth seems to imply that American exceptionalism, a safeguard and Deus ex machina in the narrative, appears to be at work sheltering the US from any totalitarian excess. This paper examines the narrative’s political agenda which turns out to be the assertion of American democracy that can only triumph over a brief suspension of civil rights during a politically dark era for the Western world. Roth’s imaginative inquiry into the past can be read as an attempt to reconcile himself with those who had felt offended by his work. The political novel, conspiracy theories, concepts such as ‘democratic patriotism’ and the work of Seymour Lipset provide the theoretical framework of this article.