'It can't happen here': the horrifying power of The Plot Against America
In 2004, when Philip Roth published his speculative fiction novel The Plot Against America, the perfect title had already been taken. Sinclair Lewis laid claim to It Can’t Happen Here back in 1935 with a novel that imagined a populist demagogue whipping the United States into a fascist dystopia, complete with internment camps for dissidents and paramilitary goon squads. That unholy phrase – “it can’t happen here,” incredulity and naivety and hubris all wrapped up in one futile reassurance – gets uttered in Ed Burns and David Simon’s new TV adaptation of Roth’s novel, a high-gloss prestige miniseries airing Sunday nights on HBO. It sounds out like a death knell for all those who speak it.
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The show picks up in June 1940, diverging from the historical record with the political ascendency and presidential election of aviator/war hero Charles Lindbergh that fall. His strict anti-interventionist stance toward the spread of Nazism through Europe and the thinly veiled xenophobia implied therein germinate over the following years in a chilling illustration of how fascism flourishes. The shifting national currents articulate themselves in the rapidly changing lives of the Levin family, Jews living in a Newark enclave. Father Herman (Morgan Spector, exuding an era-appropriate Old Hollywood leading-man energy in face and poise) is the one to invoke the famous last words mentioned above, the last gasp from freedom before it’s extinguished.
But in typically Burns-Simonian fashion, “it can’t happen here” doesn’t arrive at a climactic, or even decisive moment. It’s said on the streets, at the dinner table, in bars. The Burns-Simon approach pieces together understated, quotidian scenes to create large-scale portraits of sea change. In this respect, The Plot Against America confronts its viewers with the most peculiar and crucial quality of a dictator’s rise, which is that it’s all so banal until it suddenly, horrifyingly, isn’t.
At every step of Lindberghism’s nefarious creep into the country’s culture, the antisemitic rhetoric gets filtered and sanitized through rationalization and doubletalk. The man himself works the talking point that he’s not about condoning genocide against the Jews, but that he innocently wants to keep America out of war. His followers do the rest of the work for him; they insist that he only accepted a commendation medal from the Nazis as a foreign dignitary, that he’s friends with plenty of Jews, that he’s got a good heart, that the things he says can’t be taken at face value. The Trump parallels come early and often, and while the writing occasionally prints its subtext in font a couple of sizes too large, it’s all in order to make the point that much more forcefully.
The series’ key character may be John Turturro’s southern rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, an early supporter of Lindbergh’s who rises to one of the highest stations in his party’s administration. He’s responsible for laundering the antisemitic image of Lindbergh’s campaign through his own identity and perspective, assuring his fellow Jews that the man’s got nothing personal against the tribe, and that his political stances are just that. If the show follows its source material, he’ll end up on the chopping block once the bigotry he thought he could channel and control starts to run amok. Bengelsdorf typifies a lethal combination of confidence to the point of gullibility and an excessive fondness of power, which breed complicity in wrongdoing. (We learn the telling detail that he has a well-bred Confederate pedigree.) Though he never says the words himself, he also contributes to the “it can’t happen here” mentality, if only because he believes he’ll be able to stop it.
He plays as a searing comment on the likes of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a worldwide shanda cozying up to President Trump in the presumptive belief that he’ll be exempt from the hatred now being seeded. He represents a sizable Jewish component in Trump’s base, hardline conservatives convinced that he’ll have their back. That faction receives an avatar in The Plot Against America via Winona Ryder’s Evelyn, sister to Levin family mother Bess (Zoe Kazan). Evelyn gravitates to Bengelsdorf as his eventual wife and professional partner, after he hires her as a high-ranking officer to carry out a government initiative sending young Jews to spend the summer in middle America. She buys the line that it’s all in the interest of passing along the good American values of the heartland to city folk, willing herself blind to its sinister underlying intention. “City values” has long been euphemistic code for Jewish culture, and she refuses to hear that dogwhistle because she’s on her way up. She has solidarity with her economic class and not her religion, the dissonance that makes the oxymoronic concept of high-power Jewish sympathizers to a Nazi cause possible.
With about 70 years of hindsight, Roth’s source novel honed Sinclair’s text by noting that when push came to shove, certain marginalized groups would stand to lose the most under fascism. His work and the superb small-screen drama it has inspired note that the Jews have a unique vulnerability to public hate-mongering due to their distinct collective identity. Lindbergh constantly draws a distinction between Americans and Jews, as if a link to their fellow worshippers in Europe makes them second-class citizens. It’s a warning relevant to today’s Jews, as the conversational third rail of Israel and Palestine complicates the relationship between America’s Jewish population and its own government. (While openly disdainful of many actual Jews, Trump has been ardent in his pro-Israel messaging.)
Sowing disunity proves the most effective tool in the authoritarian toolbox. As much as The Plot Against America serves to assess an era or a nation, it’s about the crack-up of a family at the core, the real-life toll exacted by these big political ideas. It’s a harrowing reminder that “the Jews” exist as little more than a remote idea to many, more readily persecuted when stripped of their personhood. Simons and Burns do the work of affirming their humanity by showing just how average they can be – buying cold cuts, talking baseball, collecting stamps. For them, it’s all so normal. They feel so normal. They’re – we’re – Americans. How could it possibly happen here?
The Plot Against America airs on Sundays on HBO and will head to Sky Atlantic in the UK later this year
