Fascism Fixation
“What is the precise moment in the life of a country when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight, and at first, eyes adjust…”
Evan Osnos in the New Yorker, Dec. 19, 2016
In Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” and the recent HBO adaptation of the novel, Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 and tilts the country toward the values of Hitler’s Germany. Watching the series in this Trump/pandemic era is a surreal experience. The series creator David Simon (“The Wire”) makes the necessary connection in accompanying podcasts with Peter Sagal (“Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me!”) in serious mode. Worth listening.
It is unavoidable — and entirely reasonable — to see echoes of that fictionalized saga in today’s all too vivid reality. “Lindy” a popular hero for his exploits as an aviator is the unexpected victor in a race against Franklin D. Roosevelt running for his third term. He wins on a pledge to keep the U.S. out of the European war already underway. In the course of the next two years, Lindbergh creates a political dynamic of nativist anti-Semitism and cordial relations with Hitler and his henchmen.
The urge to compare Donald Trump’s ascendency and the mythic story of Lindbergh is all too tempting: a “star” uses his unexpected powers to change the character of American life in a “twilight” that produces an American version of fascism in political life.
The HBO series aired as the consequences of Coronavirus were being widely felt across the world. I watched the finale on the night Trump tweeted that he was cutting off all immigration to the U.S., a flat assertion that he later modified. It was, nonetheless, the culmination of Trump’s drive to prevent those people across the world looking for safety, security or opportunity from finding it in his America.
In Lindbergh’s America, the pressure is on Jews to recognize one way or another that they are the lesser “other” and not the people they thought they were. Roth’s Levin family live in a lower middle- class community in Newark. They are Herman, an insurance salesman, his wife Bess, her sister Evelyn who falls in with a Rabbi, his two sons, Sandy and Philip, and Alvin, Herman’s nephew, who joins the war effort in the Canadian army, loses a leg and returns embittered. The Rabbi, Lionel Benglesdorf, is committed to aligning Jews with Lindbergh and he ultimately proves himself to be a pathetic Lindbergh acolyte whose activities add to the Levin family’s troubles.
The novel is an excellent read. The dramatic portrayal was even better for me because of the accuracy of its cinematic design and detail in displaying how that moment in history unfolds. The placid becomes the horrendous.
Recognize — and accept — that in the course of a month this spring the United States went from what was said to be the best economy in 50 years with record employment and stock prices (and blah, blah, blah) to a health crisis of historic proportions and a depression already being compared to the 1930s. The numbers of sick and dead and the means of treating those affected are a mess of confusion and mismanagement. And the president makes the problem much, much worse.
How truly strong was the economy that it could so easily be demolished? It is said that 40 percent of Americans cannot handle unplanned expenses of $400. One in six Americans is now unemployed and the lines at food pantries mean hours-long waits. And Trump whose displays of “empathy” are distinctly faux, praises “good people” — autocrats and thugs including those who are by any contemporary measure, fascists.
Stepping back, however, from this grim portrait is the other picture: impressive national gratitude to first responders in health, safety and service. Society is being tested as never before in modern times, but it seems to be meeting the challenge, which is not what happened in the Lindbergh narrative. The militia who recently protested in the Michigan state house is the same fringe that once produced Terry Nichols, a collaborator of Timothy McVeigh’s in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Bigotry and bias are a fact in American life and there is a never ending struggle to keep them in check.
Just as FDR revived the country’s spirit in the 1930s, Barack Obama took the U.S. out of the Great Recession to a time of relative — but in its way misleading — peace and prosperity. He was as much of a unifying presence as appears to be possible in our era, especially notable because he was a black man whose middle name, Hussein, was the same as the surname of the dictator we had gone to war to oust not five years before his election.
The events of American life in the 21st century have been tumultuous, divisive and dangerous by any standards, which is why we watch “The Plot Against America” and other dystopic visions of the nation with such fascination and recognition.
I was reminded of the flip side of that in our culture a few weeks ago when Colleen Lawrie at PublicAffairs received a proposal for a history of the series “West Wing,” a seven-year network television drama that recounted the fictional presidency of Jed Bartlet. The material, by two members of the cast, elicited among those of us who read it, the reasons for why we go to the series so often to see, again, what the White House could be: by no means flawless but honorable. Colleen asked several of her authors with a career in public service how they felt about the show. Janet Napolitano, former governor of Arizona and Secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration wrote:
“I find myself constantly returning to West Wing episodes to be reminded of the value of public service. Although fiction, West Wing captures the White House I knew: peopled by smart, talented people who are constantly dealing with tough issues and balancing questions for which there are no easy answers: fast paced and led by a principled and erudite commander-in-chief….”
PublicAffairs was outbid for the rights to publish the book. I think we were still glad to read the proposal and re-watch a bit of the series in addition, for me, to “The Plot Against America” while avoiding as much of Donald Trump’s egregious Coronavirus briefings as possible.
