An “Ambiguously Menacing Predicament”: Reading The Plot Against America in the Age of Donald Trump

Abstract

This article offers a critical reassessment of the ways in which Philip Roth’ s The Plot Against America (2004) has been read in the era of Donald Trump. It questions how efforts to apply a politics of liberal anti-fascism to the text imply Roth’s unquestioned support for the moral and intellectual frameworks of contemporary liberal opposition to Trump. This article explores how Roth’s formal concerns with issues of ambiguity, irony, and contradiction resist the corralling of his fiction to suit any particular ideological aspiration or unquestioned moral perspective, no matter how perceivably liberal and anti-authoritarian in its creedal outlook. Indeed, as this article makes clear, Roth’s concern with the resistance of literary expression to polemical sloganeering is made evident by the ways in which The Plot Against America subjects the cohesive liberal values of its main characters to what Lionel Trilling outlined as the disaggregating impact of novelistic discourse. As this article discusses, Roth’s examination of the limits of liberal subjectivity in The Plot Against America offers an altogether new way of thinking about how the novel may be read in the context of our own troubled times.