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

by Ben Rhodes

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...