When Non-Fiction Mirrors Fiction: The Road to Unfreedom and The Plot Against America

The New York Times review of Timothy Snyder’s new book, The Road to Unfreedom, is instructive.  The book describes the impact of Russian fascism on the West.  Indeed, although the review does not mention it, the spread of fascism Europe in the 1920s and ‘30s has troubling parallels to what has been happening in recent years.

What the review also does not address are the following questions:  Why is the American Right Wing, which was so opposed to the Soviet Union, seem amenable to former KGB officer Vladimir Putin’s Russia?  And why is the American Right Wing so undisturbed about evidence of Trump personal corruption and his collusion with Putin’s Russia?

It seems to me that both questions have the same answer:  What upset the Right Wing during the Cold War was not so much the Soviet Union’s suppression of dissent generally or its anti-democratic one-party dictatorship, but rather the fact that Soviet Union was officially atheist and ideologically opposed to Capitalism.  The American Right Wing has always been perfectly happy to impose conformity,  to use vile tactics to undermine political opposition, and to ignore basic human rights.  So now that Russia poses as a fundamentalist Christian State (particularly in its hostility to LGBTQ people and its determination to suppress Muslims who live within its borders) and has become a corrupt Capitalist state, the Right Wing embraces Putin.  This should not surprise anyone, because Putin embodies nothing they hated about the Soviet Union, and everything they themselves hold dear.  So since the Right Wing does not really have a problem with Putin, it should be no surprise that it has no problem with Trump.

The Right Wing is so besotted with its cultural “conservatism,” its un-Christ-like Christian triumphalism, and its elements of White Supremacism that it is perfectly willing to turn a blind eye to Putin’s anti-democratic and anti-American approach in both his domestic and foreign policy.  So anyone seeing Putin’s Russia as acting inimicable to American interest should not be surprised to see the Right Wing becoming something akin to the Fifth Column posited in Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, a book I read more than a decade ago.  The Plot Against America is an imagining of how the anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh could have become President in 1940 and put us on the road to fascism. See here and here and here and here.

Roth, in his fictional story of what could have happened, ends the story with events that fortuitously turned things around.  But a novelist’s rendering will not save American democracy now.  We have to do that ourselves.