The Plot Against America is an unsettling mini-series based on a novel written by the great American writer, Philip Roth. Roth imagines the history of the United States of America taking an alternative turn in 1939. Charles Lindbergh, America’s aviator hero who had retired to Europe after his infant son’s horrific kidnapping and murder in 1932, returns to his country in 1939 and defeats the incumbent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to become president on an isolationist platform, promising to keep his country out of a ‘European’ war.
The story’s subject is not the Second World War but America’s abrupt descent into anti-Semitism. Lindbergh was a white-supremacist who thought Hitler was doing god’s work by keeping Europe safe from the Soviet Union’s ‘Asiatic’ communism. In Roth’s re-imagining of history, Lindbergh negotiates a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, arguing that the clamour to go to the aid of Britain was sponsored by Jews via their alleged control over the media.
America’s anti-Semitic turn is seen through the eyes of a young Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. The Levins live in a Jewish neighbourhood where Yiddish is still a fading lingua franca for an older generation of Jews and a Jewish homeland in Palestine is still a cause, but Herman, Bess and their sons, Sandy and Philip, are seamlessly American in their obsession with baseball and the movies. The wrenching power of the series is the way in which the Levins go from being patriotic, socially mobile home owners with a car to terrified pariahs haunted by the spectres of internment camps and lynchings.
Why should a fictional account of anti-Semitism sponsored by an invented American regime be so disturbing when we have the real history of the Nazis and their concerted bid to exterminate the Jews to learn from or to use as a cautionary tale? Nazism’s association with Kristallnacht, the Holocaust and clips of Hitler’s public rantings has made it seem exotic and grotesque, something that happened to a wobbly republic in the aftermath of the Great Depression, not something that could plausibly happen here. Even non-believers invoke evil to explain the death camps. The unsettling achievement of The Plot Against America is to show that institutionalized bigotry is a banal business, that even an entrenched democracy like the United States is vulnerable, given the right historical conjuncture, to the rhetorical power of a scapegoating nationalism.
David Simon, who adapted Roth’s novel, emphasizes the importance of the presidential election in legitimizing and normalizing Lindbergh’s white nationalism. Roth’s choice of Lindbergh as the dark protagonist of his counterfactual history is a stroke of genius because unlike Hitler, the aviator was a bona fide hero, even a tragic hero, given the murder of his child. Lindbergh’s hero status, his friendship with that other anti-Semitic American icon, Henry Ford, allow Roth and Simon to ink in a plausible fascism, one that doesn’t need a cartoon megalomaniac to helm it because it can ride the thermals of star quality and latent popular prejudice.
When the series was launched, Simon went to some lengths to underline how much his interpretation of Roth’s novel was shaped by Trump’s election. Given Trump’s dog-whistling racism and his contempt for democratic norms it isn’t hard to see why Simon laboured the parallel, but Lindbergh’s gravitas and star quality are a better fit for Aung San Suu Kyi’s coiffed and groomed brand of bigotry than the shambling slovenliness of Trump. Just as Lindbergh’s fictional election makes white supremacy the flavour of American democracy so too did the victory of Aung San Suu Kyi’s party confer on anti-Muslim Buddhist majoritarianism — already a force in Myanmar — the legitimacy that only elections can bestow.
Amongst its Indian audiences (or readers) The Plot Against America is likely to produce an uncertain sense of déjà vu, the sort you might experience if the place you felt you had been to before didn’t actually exist. This surreal sense of recognition might make the Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2014 election victory seem like an echo of Lindbergh’s in 1939. The pogroms, the lynchings, the designated minorities... it all seems like home. The difference is that you can’t turn it off or put it down the way you can the show or the novel on which it’s based.
There are other differences. The Plot Against America is a miniseries; it ends with an election forced by Lindbergh’s disappearance; in Roth’s book, this election is won by Roosevelt who commits the United States to fighting for the Allies, thus restoring the natural order of things. Narendra Modi’s show, however, is already in its second season and given its ratings it looks set to run and run which is not much fun if you’re trapped in it in a non-speaking role.
But there might be a way out of Modi 2020 and the clue to that lies in another counterfactual version of America’s history. This is The Man in the High Castle, a show based on a novel by the great science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick. The central conceit of this story is that the Axis powers won the World War Two and the United States has been divided up between Japan and Germany. The American Reich is a dystopian nightmare, impartially dedicated to killing all minorities from African Americans, to Jews, to those disabled in any way. There is no escape from the long arm of the Reich, though people periodically try to get away.
But then hope appears, or rather forbidden, contraband films materialize, reels and reels of them that show black and white footage from another world where the Allies have won the war. The notion of the multiverse is common to science fiction, the idea that a series of similar universes coexist, each slightly different from the other. It stands to reason then, that there is a version of this India, perhaps a close cousin of it, where prime minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, is currently easing the country out of an exemplary Covid-19 lockdown with virtually no fatalities, where the letters CAA expand into Coimbatore Automobile Association and where Amit Shah is the chief scorer of the Surat Cricket Association. Into that heaven of small mercies and large absences, let me (since there’s unlikely to be room for all my people) awake.
