The Plot Against America

by Philip Roth

America will be carried to war by a president who falsely promises peace.

It turned out, the experts concluded, that twentieth-century Americans, weary of confronting a new crisis in every decade, were starving for normalcy,

There was a new president and a new Congress but each was bound to follow the law as set down in the Constitution.

You had to be there to see what it looked like. They live in a dream, and we live in a nightmare.”

Bullies love to summarize. The redundant upbraiding summary—nothing to equal it outside the old-fashioned flogging.

for exercising what she called her “constitutional right to laugh at ridiculous statements in a public hall,”

He’d tell us that in a democracy, keeping abreast of current events was a citizen’s most important duty and that you could never start too early to be informed about the news of the day.

plutocrat

“I went,” he told her, “because every day I ask myself the same question: How can this be happening in America? How can people like these be in charge of our country? If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I’d think I was having a hallucination.”

I couldn’t miss what was diabolical about it as well. Never in my life had I so harshly judged any adult—not my parents, not even Alvin or Uncle Monty—nor had I understood till then how the shameless vanity of utter fools can so strongly determine the fate of others.

promulgating.

demagogue

profligate

There were two types of strong men: those like Uncle Monty and Abe Steinheim, remorseless about their making money, and those like my father, ruthlessly obedient to their idea of fair play.

“It is no longer a matter,” says Churchill, “of the great American democracy taking military action to save us. The time has come for American citizens to take civil action to save themselves.

mythomaniac”),

prescient