There’s a moment in the middle of Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America where the family has just learned that the father, Herman, is going to be transferred by his long-time employer, an insurance company, from Newark to somewhere in Kentucky. It’s very clear that the transfer is punitive, punishment for the father having crossed his sister-in-law, who is very connected with the fascist Lindbergh administration.

The transfer order also looks a lot like simple ethnic cleansing, except that it’s framed as an “opportunity” that has been opened up by the Department of Interior, along the lines of the Homestead Act, where you get to be a pioneer in empty territory. But it’s all Jews who are being transferred. Though the narrator doesn’t mention it, the transfer has shades of Indian Removal and Japanese internment (one of the weakest parts of the novel is how little its narration of American fascism invokes anything concerning the actual racist history of the US, but that’s a whole other issue).

What’s so brilliant about this one passage (and I think the novel is overall pretty weak, though more on that in a second) is how skillfully Roth interweaves the language of corporate transfers, economic opportunity, Homestead and pioneers, with the reality of political repression and punishment and ethnic cleansing.

What’s doubly brilliant is how when the family argues over this move, the father defends it as an act of the company and the mother attacks it as an act of the government. “Bess, please,” says the father, “this is what it is like to work for a big company. Big companies transfer people all the time. And when they do, you have to pick up and go.” She replies, “I’m talking about the government. The government cannot do this. They cannot force people to pick up and go—that is not in any constitution that I ever heard of.”

The reality, of course, is that this is a move by both the government and the company, who are acting together, somewhat but not entirely, like the merchant sovereign that Adam Smith warned of in The Wealth of Nations. But insofar as the family understands it as an act of the company, the transfer is seen as legitimate. It’s only if it’s an act of government that it becomes illegitimate.

I can’t help but feel that Roth, unintentionally, is narrating the real back story to the right-wing politics of our time. For decades, entire communities in America have been wiped out by corporate decisions. Employees have been moved around (if they’re lucky) like pieces on a chessboard. More often, the company picks up and move and people and communities are left to die; they’re disposable. This has been the story of capitalism since the beginning: Just read Edmund Morgan’s chapter “Boom!” in American Slavery, American Freedom, on the tobacco boom in 1620s Virginia, how it created garbage towns made of people who were equally disposable. And it’s been the story of deindustrialization since at least the 1960s, when Black writers and political figures began to point out what was happening to Black neighborhoods in urban centers across the Midwest and Northeast as companies picked up and moved south or west or out of the country.

When you get so inured to this kind of reality in the economic world, it becomes awfully hard to resist in the political world.

As I said, I don’t think this is one of Roth’s strongest novels. It has a lot of interesting material, but it’s lacking in many ways. But in many ways, its weaknesses are inadvertently revealing of the politics of our moment. So it’s a good time to be reading the novel.

And why am I doing so?

Because I am going to be talking about it fairly soon on a wonderful podcast called “Roth and Company,” which is hosted by Sam Graham-Felsen, historian of the Philip Roth Personal Library. The podcast focuses on one novel per episode with a discussion among various writers. It has featured Adelle Waldman (on The Ghost Writer), Ariel Levy (on Sabbath’s Theater), Taffy Brodesser-Akner (on American Pastoral), and, now, this coming week, the New Yorker writer Andrew Marantz and I discussing The Plot Against America with Graham-Felsen. When the episode goes up, I’ll make sure to post it. In the meantime, you can catch up with earlier episodes (see link above).

On a related note of speaking appearances, I’ll be talking with Bruno Leipold about his excellent new book “Citizen Marx.” Tuesday, February 25, at 6 pm. It’s at the New School, 6 East 16th Street, in the Wolff Conference Room (Room 1103). It’s open to everyone.