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This article aims to explore the two fundamental yet mutually contrasting elements of politics in Philip Roth’s The Plot against America: the necessity to rejuvenate American democracy and the desire to reinstate masculine individuality. By adopting historiographic narrativity, Roth shows how ‘Americanness’ has degraded into an empty category in the early twentieth-century. The problem is, however, that Roth’s political critique quite dismantles toward the end of the novel. The masculine patriarchal individual, which the author provides as an imaginary solution, tries to protect his family from the ruins of America, but in doing so, the text’s focus shifts from the nation’s communal identity to personal survival. This paper argues that The Plot against America suffers from this deviation, in which the author’s overall attempt to radically re-imagine the nation’s collectivity is severely crippled by his desire to revive a form of masculine heroism based on physical violence.
