Philip Roth, the celebrated, award-winning novelist, has told the artistic community not to over-react to Trump by treating him like an actual dictator – while they are still actually free.
Roth – whose novel The Plot Against America imagines a larger-than-life populist capturing the presidency in the 1940s – intervened in an interview with The New Yorker published Monday.
It came against a backdrop of hot takes essentially claiming that his book “predicted” Trump’s ascent to the White House, and warning of dire consequences to follow.
But Roth batted away comparisons between the two. When asked how writers should react to the new administration, he noted that things could be much worse – and that it is “unwise” to cry wolf:
Unlike writers in Eastern Europe in the nineteen-seventies, American writers haven’t had their driver’s licenses confiscated and their children forbidden to matriculate in academic schools. Writers here don’t live enslaved in a totalitarian police state, and it would be unwise to act as if we did, unless—or until—there is a genuine assault on our rights and the country is drowning in Trump’s river of lies. In the meantime, I imagine writers will continue robustly to exploit the enormous American freedom that exists to write what they please, to speak out about the political situation, or to organize as they see fit.
Roth is no fan of the new President – in the New Yorker exchange he describes Trump as “humanly impoverished”, before reeling off a list of failings:
[Trump is] ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English…
But his point remains: events in Washington, however much you dislike them, don’t suddenly make the U.S. some kind of twisted, unbearable dystopia.
