After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

by Ben Rhodes

Travel was the most comforting and illuminating escape I could make from the political chaos back home. I took every opportunity I could to go overseas, and I found myself seeking out the kind of people I never really had the opportunity to fully know when I was in government: dissidents, activists, oppositionists—anyone, really, who looked at power from the perspective of an outsider. What an opportunity—to learn the stories of individuals who lived the political trends that I had watched from the exalted distance of the White House. Unburdened by being American themselves, they experienced no difficulty of politeness or discomfort that prevented them from seeing the Trump years for what they were: an American experiment with fascism, albeit of a particularly incompetent and corrupt kind. But there was also a similarly obvious reality: The forces that produced a Trump presidency long predated it and would still be there after it was over. Indeed, a new model of nationalist authoritarian politics is a defining reality of our world today.

In March 2017, I went to Myanmar to help the government there prepare for peace negotiations with a patchwork of provincial ethnic groups who had been waging civil war for decades. Diplomacy, it turned out, was privatized like everything else. I would be an independent contractor for a British-based nongovernmental organization (NGO) led by Jonathan Powell, who had served as

chief of staff for Tony Blair. Powell had led the negotiations to secure the Good Friday Accords that secured peace in Northern Ireland in the late nineties. Ever since, he’d become something of a globe-trotting private peacemaker from Africa to Latin America to Southeast Asia, a figure out of a Graham Greene novel meeting rebels in jungles and deserts, seeking to recapture the accomplishment of his career’s high-water mark. Perhaps because I was newly admitted into the ranks of former officials, it seemed no surprise to Powell or his staff that I wanted to get to Burma a little early to unwind. We were trying to help end wars, but we were also dealing with our own private ones.

Like Sandor’s, my Jewish roots are in the Eastern European countries where pogroms drove people deep into the Jewish quarters of the grand cities. A good chunk of my family came to America early, decades before German nationalism lit the fires that fueled the Holocaust, while some stayed behind, destined to be surrounded by walls. Growing up in New York City, I did not feel my Jewishness as a religious identity; history was something we had escaped from. Our rabbis were writers—Roth, Bellow, Singer—who told stories from the residue of nation-states, the assertion of the individual. Our temples were the apartment buildings, courtyards, and fire escapes of Manhattan, where every life contained multitudes. As unbridled capitalism washed across New York at the same time that it remade Budapest, I had felt Sandor’s sense of loss as I watched characterless glass towers erase those old apartment buildings and with them the stories they held.

As I’d pass from crowded Venice Beach into Marina Del Rey, the crowds thinned until I’d reach a largely deserted pier at the end of a promenade. Turning right, I’d run out over the ocean. There, all of Los Angeles is in the hills behind you or curving around the coastline to the north. The smell of fish blends with the sound of seagulls circling. A fisherman or two linger. In the late afternoons, as the sun begins its plunge into the ocean, you’re running into a dazzling array of colors. Atop a rock wall just beyond the pier, a large American flag flutters in the breeze—the edge of the country, the last stop before the endless ocean. From that spot, the world behind me seemed impossibly far away, a distant jangle of news reports and information wars.

I asked my British friend about the impact of the 2008 financial crisis in bringing about this dynamic, the sense of desolation it fueled, people’s belief that the whole system was rigged to screw them. Instead of talking about markets or elections, he talked about gas chambers—the shock that accompanied the discovery of the extent of fascist crimes at the end of World War II. “That was so appalling,” he observed, “that it created an elongated reason cycle, aided by the creation of the American order.” A cycle in which the nations of the world bound themselves to a system of international treaties, norms, and institutions that shaped everything from the development of nuclear weapons to the rules that governed trade between nations to the expectation that human rights should be protected within them—or at least within what was known as the “free world.” Perhaps, he was suggesting, it wasn’t some evolution of human reason that had brought about the relative peace and progress of the postwar decades, it was the shock of fear that came from staring into the abyss of where nationalism and tribalism lead.

Whereas Hungary represents how capitalism without meaning or restraint opened the door for a return to an older nationalism, Russia represents the disruptive force that nationalism can be in the world when hitched to a belligerent approach to national security, the worldview that domestic and international laws are always to be subjugated to the raw will to power. The corruption that seeped into Hungarian political life is but a drop in the ocean of graft upon which Russia runs. The authoritarian playbook pursued by Viktor Orban was modeled on steps that Putin had taken over the previous decade. The nostalgia for the past and ceaseless Us versus Them politics was similarly a reflection of Putin’s political project, one in which greatness is defined by what you can destroy, not what you can build. And what Putin set out to destroy, above all, was the idea that was so prevalent after the Berlin Wall came down: that a new world order of democratic values and agreed-upon rules and norms was here to stay.

Putin made a version of the same argument about other countries. He cast every other government—every other political model—as hopelessly corrupt as well. If that’s the game, Russians might as well have a strong, competent leader who shares their grievances and sense of national greatness. “It’s just a business,” Navalny said, characterizing Putin’s argument. “All over the world, it’s the same rules. That’s exactly what Putin is saying.” The democracies, like America, were just as bad as anyone else. “It’s absolutely the same, they’re just hiding it better. Everyone is corrupt. Everyone is cynical. There are no rules. There is no democracy. Every election is bought.”

I went in search of a restroom, somewhere I could splash some cold water on my face and consider how to read the meeting out to the press. Finding one, I tried to open the door. In that awkward moment when you don’t know whether a door is stuck or locked, I pushed against it a few times, jiggling the knob, before taking a step back, resolved to the fact that someone was in there. Just then, the door opened and out walked the queen of England. She was unaccompanied, given that the area was supposed to be reserved for leaders only. She stood ramrod straight, looked me up and down with a glance that would have once sent someone to the gallows, and walked away.

The danger of the other path is catastrophe. The history that Putin had reentered is the older kind, which inevitably leads nations down rivers to the heart of darkness, borne on the currents that gave rise to fascism and Communism, Hitler and Stalin, two men who had caused the death of tens of millions of Russians. When history appeared to come to an end at the conclusion of the Cold War, the specter of another world war was lifted, and with it some of the sense of drama that Putin had tapped into. And while wars fought online were not often tied to actual violence, a dizzying array of narratives online recirculated those old twentieth-century forces in new packaging—in particular, a creeping and sometimes casual fascism that suited Putin and had reshaped the American right wing.

The more ominous danger, Adam said, came from China. “Putin’s Russia is the threat of a wounded animal. China is the threat of a growing, strengthening, burgeoning power.” It was a power that had the capacity to do more than tear things down—the stopgap nationalism of a Putin or Orban. Russia could destroy; China could build. So perhaps, after Putin tore down pieces of the post–Cold War Western world, it was China that would replace the old order, with consequences for our politics, culture, and identity for a century to come—in large part because of technology. If Russia represented the vengeance extracted from fights rooted in the past, China represented the future coming into view. “The Chinese have been more risk averse to date,” Adam said. “But they have massive troves of data that can be used to build a surveillance world that Orwell doesn’t do justice to.”

I was an American in a world that America had made in its own image, a world that now felt oddly foreign in its familiarity. I was an individual who felt unmoored amid the forces shaping the world, my own identity as incidental as a flicker of light in the panorama that reflected off the water. I was a political exile of sorts, cast among the figures of the past who objected to the general direction of events, clinging to pride in the fact that I’d soon meet with a Tibetan Buddhist who was almost sure to die in a foreign land. I turned to walk the few paces back to the hotel, taking momentary solace in the “likes” that began to register on the screen of my phone, like an addict being given tiny doses of an opioid by some giant unseen beast.

For most of the last few hundred years, the center of geopolitical gravity was in Europe: home to the Enlightenment, the emergence of nation-states, the rise of empires, the catastrophe of world wars, the Cold War competition between the American and Russian superpowers. China was on the periphery of this world: a great civilization turned into a divided and partially colonized country, a Japanese-conquered member of the World War II allies, an impoverished Communist regime that helped determine the outcome of the Cold War by shifting its weight slightly away from the Soviet Union and toward the United States. In the span of just thirty years, the center of gravity has shifted. Today, Viktor Orban’s Hungary represents the emerging brand of nationalist authoritarianism that has infected the West in the wake of globalization’s failures. Vladimir Putin’s Russia represents the disruption of the post–World War II global order of international laws, norms, and institutions through a return to an old and aggressive definition of national security and sovereignty. Xi Jinping’s China represents the emerging model of capitalism blended with techno-totalitarianism that could be our future, as it is taking hold on nearly every continent. Far from the periphery, Beijing could become the new center of global events.

My British friend in Singapore—the one who described the “elongated reason cycle”—recalled to me the moment when he believes the seams finally popped. It was a few weeks after the Beijing Olympics, when Alan Greenspan testified before Congress as the American financial system was melting down. Here was the man who presided over the massive economic growth in the two decades after the end of the Cold War, the maestro who was the invisible hand behind the Federal Reserve for much of that time, the steady, competent force who could be depended upon in financial capitals around the world even when American politics resembled a playground of dysfunction. Even the Chinese implicitly accepted the premise that they had to defer to Americans of Greenspan’s stature on the basic operation of the global financial system. During his testimony, Greenspan was asked, in essence, How did this happen? “I have found a flaw,” Greenspan responded, referring to his basic worldview. “I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.” “Bam,” my friend said, describing the moment. “Shivers-down-the-spine moment. That was the intellectual gunshot that was heard very loudly in Asia.” He called it “a hinge of history.”

This is the apathy that those with unchecked power seek to engender in others: the idea that it’s not even worth caring about something because it’s not going to change. That’s the strategy the Chinese Communist Party has pursued for decades—for instance, on something like the erasure of the Tibetan people’s distinct language, culture, history, and leadership. It would hurt the feelings of the Chinese people and Xi Jinping if you met with the Dalai Lama. “It’s not worth it,” they might as well say. “It’s not going to change, and we have more important things to talk about.” But in Maya Wang’s telling, informed by countless interviews with Uighurs (“I didn’t interview one person who wasn’t crying or close to tears”), Xinjiang is really about the future of China. “It’s about the whole model of Xinjiang—the ability of authorities to put basically [an area the size of] a third of Western Europe under some kind of lockdown, from prisons to reeducation camps to being detained at home, depending on their level of reliability.”

Wilson understood what I was saying. “I think that’s the fear of what we might see in the coming decades.” He stopped and corrected himself. “Or coming years. The increasing use of technology to control what you can say before you say it.” This was the crux of the issue to me. Could a mixture of prosperity and nationalism, authoritarianism and technology, control how human beings think? Could people be highly educated and connected to the wider world, and yet so conditioned by their education, aspiration for wealth, and fear of those with power that they wouldn’t want those things that Hong Kong still offered, albeit in shrinking portions: the right to speak your mind and choose your leaders, the space to worship Jesus or any other deity, the freedom to read whatever you want? Could the concept of truth be permanently altered to suit the Communist Party’s objectives? Could the deer really become a horse?

Obama and I had a running debate during his presidency. Who makes history? Individuals or movements? Gandhi or the Indian masses? King or those who marched with him? U.S. presidents or the bottom-up pressures that force them to respond? We found ourselves taking different sides of this debate at different times. Obama’s view was that movements can provide the spark that initiates change and apply new forms of pressure on those in power; but he insisted that the moral vision and kinetic energy of movements ultimately has to be channeled into the accumulation of power and the reform of institutions—the business of political parties, laws, and programs. Movements that failed to do so risked chaos or the setbacks that come from the reprisals of those in power. My heart was shaded a bit more to movements as the drivers of change, though I was consistently proved wrong by the failures of the Arab Spring, Ukraine’s descent into war, the quiet end to the Umbrella Movement. Perhaps, though, even these failed efforts were seeding even bigger movements to come. Hong Kong was a leaderless movement testing this proposition, but the success of that movement would depend on intangible factors that, I have come to realize, go beyond the outlines of our debate: the course of events yet to come, the actions of other world powers, wars yet to be fought, the fallout from a pandemic or changing climate, the strength or fragility of markets, the stories told by popular culture, the emergence of...

On that trip with Obama in 2017, after we left Shanghai for New Delhi, the Dalai Lama was older and more frail than when I’d seen him last a few years earlier. He and Obama had a pleasant conversation. At the end, Obama—who rarely shows how the troubles at home have backed up on him—let his guard down. How does one retain hope, he asked, in a world so beset by ugliness, tribalism, and strongmen? I could tell he was genuinely searching. The Dalai Lama just smiled his beatific smile, grasped the sides of Obama’s head with his two hands, and said, You must remember that we are all one, and all capable of love. It felt, at the time, like an anodyne dodge from one of the few people on earth who is supposed to have all the answers. But then again, if you do believe that, if you do believe in a sense of common humanity, if you do believe there is irreducible dignity in the identity of every person, then you cannot succumb to a fatalism that human beings are destined to cast aside their own essential nature for a manufactured package of self-serving nationalism and state-controlled prosperity, numbed and monitored by technology. Nor can you restrict your concerns to your own narrow definition of identity. You have to begin from an uncompromising and unshakable belief: This is not who we are.

My world growing up was an enclave of Manhattan. I remember that I used to go with my father to park our car in a garage across the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge in Queens. For years, the parking attendant was a kindly older Black man named Booker whose world seemed to be within the confines of that garage—he was always there. He and my father struck up a New York friendship of brief sports conversations and family inquiries, deepened by the impression that Booker shared Southern roots. When Booker died, my father gave his family money for the tombstone. I remember feeling good about this gesture. I don’t remember seriously considering how I could square my own sense of America with the factors that separated my family’s life from Booker’s, a man who worked every day of his life but couldn’t afford his own tombstone. There but for the grace of God went I.

I had no doubt that she had a long list of legitimate grievances about the variety of disappointments that accompanied American life over the last several decades, just as she felt a sense of pride and likely believed her American identity to be a blessing. In our own ways, we all felt that. But we no longer had a common set of facts that could be agreed upon other than fleeting interactions that are increasingly rare in our individual lives or national experience. I walked through the chill of empty Harpers Ferry streets, where unseen ghosts reminded me that the story of what is happening in America has always been contested, always connected to larger questions about who gets to be fully American, who profits from those determinations, and how the rest of us understand those realities and live within them.