It has been many years since I read Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America.” As I recall, it was set in the late 1930s and early 1940s and suggested that the presidential candidacy of Charles A. Lindbergh, the American hero who had flown across the Atlantic on his own in the Spirit of St. Louis in 1927 was, in reality, a front for the Nazi Party. 

Lindbergh was an appeaser. He was a white nativist. He did not want America to be involved in the rest of the world. He believed in “America first,” but I have never seen a photo of him giving the Nazi salute, as have Steve Bannon and Elon Musk. All that is missing are choirs chanting “Deutschland Uber Alles.”

The Roth book, however, reminds us of the underlying bigotry in America that rears its ugly head, often in cycles. In that era, it was directed primarily against Jews; Catholics were not well thought of either. The activities of the Ku Klux Klan, in the first decades of the 20th Century, were aimed at anyone who was not a white Protestant.

Now we have Elon Musk, the unofficial deputy president of the United States, cozying up to the ADR in Germany, the closest we have to a successor to the Nazi Party and suggesting that they not be ashamed of their past and that in Germany “there is too much focus on past guilt” for what Hitler did. 

Does Musk know that Hitler was instrumental in exterminating not only 6,000,000 Jews, but also taking the Eugenics Movement to an extreme point by also eliminating other selected groups, including gay and lesbian people and the mentally ill?

In Roth’s book, as a I recall, there was a rabbi who felt he could speak to Lindbergh, but then the rabbi was gathered up, as were other people as part of Lindbergh’s purge of anyone who did not fit into his idea of what an American should look like. Today’s messaging in the public square echoes that rhetoric.

History now tells us that Lindbergh’s obsession with the “Aryan” race was such that he had a second family in Germany, unbeknownst to his wife and his family on this side of the Atlantic. Again, a parallel to Elon Musk ,who breeds without the benefit of marriage. What a horrible example for young people in America!

Where does it stop? Where does someone in power stand up and say “This is wrong. He must go. This man cannot have his hands any place near the steering wheel of our national government!”  

Lawrence S. DiCara, a former Boston city councillor, is a Boston attorney who is originally from Dorchester.