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Nathanael West

The Plot Against America and the Terror of the Unforeseen: Part Three

What follows completes my series on Roth’s Plot Against America. See parts one and two.   Fascism and the Rural Imaginary, Or, “John Rockefeller Would Give a Cool Million to Have a Stomach Like Yours”American history appears ambivalently in the The Plot Against America. It both saves the day and provides the basic outline for the fascists’ designs. With a foreign power influencing domestic events, Lindbergh and his coterie of anti-Semites draw upon a history of white nationalism to formulate policy. They summon up homespun variations on Nazi themes. Whether the Orwellian terror of the “Just Folks” assimilation initiative, or “Homestead Read more