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

by Ben Rhodes

The final takeover does not happen with one spectacular Reichstag conflagration, but is instead an excruciating, years-long process of many scattered, seemingly insignificant little fires that smolder without flames. —Ece Temelkuran

To be born American in the late twentieth century was to take the fact of a particular kind of American exceptionalism as granted—a state of nature arrived at after all else had failed.

The globalized spread of profit-seeking capitalism accelerated inequality, assaulted people’s sense of traditional identity, and seeded a corruption that allowed those with power to consolidate control. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, this nation’s sense of purpose was channeled into a forever war that hemorrhaged resources, propagated a politics of Us versus Them, and offered a template and justification for autocratic leaders who represented an older form of nationalism.

To be American in 2020 was to live in a country diminished in the world, unwilling to control the spread of disease or face up to our racism, and looking over the precipice of abandoning the very democracy that was supposed to be the solid core of our national identity.

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.

How the spread of social media had unleashed a flood of disinformation that undermined democracy while offering autocrats ever more powerful tools of social and political control.

In Hungary, where the anticommunist liberal turned reactionary nationalist Viktor Orban took advantage of the 2008 financial crisis to create a model of authoritarian politics that is strikingly similar to the playbook that the Republican Party has run in America.

In Russia, where Vladimir Putin capitalized upon the humiliations of the end of the Cold War to build a cabal anchored in corruption and nationalism and then set out to turn the United States into a mirror image with American social media as his most potent offensive weapon.

And in China, where Xi Jinping is building the model for a new world order on the pillars of state-controlled capitalism, national sovereignty, and totalitarian technology. Remove any democratic values, and you get the shift...

We can never start a new life. We can only continue the old one. —Imre Kertesz

Viktor Orban, had transformed Hungary from an open democracy to a largely authoritarian system in the span of a decade. It took him only a few minutes. Win elections through right-wing populism that taps into people’s outrage over the corruption and inequities wrought by unbridled globalization. Enrich corrupt oligarchs who in turn fund your politics.

Create a vast partisan propaganda machine. Redraw parliamentary districts to entrench your party in power. Pack the courts with right-wing judges and erode the independence of the rule of law. Keep big business on your side with low taxes and favorable treatment. Demonize your political opponents through social media disinformation. Attack civil society as a tool of George Soros.

Cast yourself as the sole legitimate defender of national security. Wrap the whole project in a Christian nationalist message that taps into the longing for a great past. Offer a sense of belonging for the disaffected masses. Relen...

Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Meanwhile, Orban has become what he once railed against: obedient to Russia, the corrupt beneficiary of the dark money that courses through the veins of global markets, leader of what increasingly resembles a dictatorship by a single party. The story of how that happened is the story of how the period after that high-water mark of freedom failed to reconcile the wounds of the past or offer people a sense of purpose for the future. It’s a story that shaped the lives of Hungarians like Viktor Orban and Sandor Lederer in very different ways.

Orban’s idea of Hungarian identity—a Christian nation rooted in ethnicity, a traditional society with an assortment of triumphs and grievances. There was, above all, a sense of what Hungary was not—what it was against. To identify who the Us were, Orban focused more on the Them.

For Orban, this was a flexible target. The one constant was that They could be cast as foreign, a threat to national sovereignty and Christian identity. He nationalized certain sectors of multinational corporations, even as he would also slash taxes and worker protections. He lambasted the European Union and its cadre of faceless bureaucrats in Brussels, even as he took the EU’s money.

In the years since, I’ve learned how widespread the use of private intelligence is by the world’s autocrats, oligarchs, and corporations. Often making use of retired American and Israeli spies and Special Forces troops, dozens of outfits like Black Cube can intimidate inconvenient adversaries, obtain sensitive information, blackmail people, or shape an online or media narrative to suit the interests of their client. Consider it a service industry for the powerful who can afford to pay those bills and have the will to do so.

Just as governments and political parties like Fidesz and the Republicans use media to shape people’s idea of what’s true and what isn’t, this private espionage service economy can shape the idea of what’s true and what isn’t about individual targets like me or anyone else. The message is clear and the same: It’s not worth the cost of opposing the powerful, particularly those willing to respect few or no limits in exercising their power.

Budapest’s transformation after the fall of the Berlin Wall: As a child, you see the visuals. Visuals in terms of statues that you see on the streets. In a country where politics has an underlayment of “red or brown,” these decisions about history indicated which side was responsible for Hungary’s defeats and which side had won. It wasn’t just statues. Orban was remaking Hungary’s national curriculum, elevating some writers and eliminating others, including the Nobel laureate Imre Kertész—a Jew who had chronicled Hungary’s Holocaust experience.

American Republican operatives who helped conceive the attacks on Soros. Orban regularly uses his friendship with Netanyahu to beat back charges of anti-Semitism, while Netanyahu shrugs off criticism over his friendship with Orban, who is a reliable voice in the counsels of Europe defending Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. In this way, the ethnonationalism of the Jewish state finds common cause with the Hungarian flavor of ethnonationalism, which has deep roots in anti-Semitism.

Orban and Netanyahu had used the same American political consultants, just as they had similar approaches to critical NGOs.

I came to realize what was so oppressive to me about Black Cube.

It was the realization that I was a casualty of a war over identity—who defines it and who doesn’t, what is true and what isn’t, what happened and what didn’t, who you are and who you aren’t.

Nationalism affects mainly those who need ties, need bonds to communities, and don’t have them.”

Leaders like Orban don’t pretend to solve the problem of a corrupt and unequal economy any more than the Republican Party does in the United States. What he does is insist that in a world that is corrupt and unequal, Hungary should at least be ruled by the “true” Hungarians—white Christians who define themselves not through coexistence but through hostility to what they are not. That, in essence, is what the Republican Party has become in the twenty-first century: the arbiters of who is a true American. It should come as no surprise that this turn has been accompanied by hostility to international law, to immigration, to a Black president.

the elongated reason cycle of the postwar years, and the progress it enabled—from the civil rights movement in the United States to the relative peace among nations—is not the norm in world history. You have to summon the centuries of feudal order, war, empire, slavery, revolution, counterrevolution, and ultimately Holocaust.

This is what is so dangerous about Orban and his fellow travelers, including in the United States—the fact that they represent the historical norm, not the aberration, and that historical norm leads inevitably to violence and subjugation.

Putin has appealed to a particular strain of nationalism—Christianity, hostility to Muslims, subversion of the international order, the longing for an idealized past. “In the past, we Hungarians have suffered a lot under Russia,” Orban told one interviewer. “Nevertheless, it needs to be recognized that Putin has made his country great again.”

Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant racing ahead to develop and sell 5G Internet technology, has its largest production base outside China in Hungary. “They are producing the 5G network equipment here,” Szabolcs said, “and they distribute it not just in Europe, but also in North Africa. And they can have a ‘Made in the EU’ stamp.”

power was such a zero-sum game for Orban. “I think he’s reached a point of no return in a sense that he’s involved in so many corrupt dealings with the Chinese and Russians that there’s no way back for him. He cannot turn his back because he’s going to be stabbed by them. And also with his schoolmate being the richest businessman in Hungary, and his son-in-law and daughter having hundreds of millions of dollars. If there’s a change of government and Hungary turns into a proper democracy, his family could go to jail. So there’s no alternative, there’s no turning back. He’s a prisoner of this path he took.”

Putin’s Russia has served as both a model and a source of corruption for people like Orban. Russia, like Hungary, holds up its own mirror to the American-led order—through the capitalist explosion of the 1990s, the hypersecuritized 2000s, and the social media boom of the 2010s.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence. —Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Kiev-Rus was a federation of ethnic Slavs founded by a Viking prince in the late ninth century. The kingdom spanned the territory from the Ukrainian capital of Kiev to the Russian capital of Moscow and embraced the orthodox Christianity that predominates in Russia to this day. In the thirteenth century, it was overrun by Mongol invaders and divided into separate nations. The fates of Russia and Ukraine have been intermingled ever since through periods of union, war, and separation—an ethnic, religious, and psychic bond that continues to shape the idea of Europe, the identity of Slavs, and the politics of both countries. There was never any question that Putin’s counterrevolution would come to this place that, in his view, belonged to Russia; otherwise, European democracy risked coming to Moscow through Kiev.

Passivity is fatal to us. Our goal is to make the enemy passive. —Mao Zedong

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it. —James Baldwin

The Cold War that needs to be won is now at home, a battle between people who live in the reality of the world as it is and people who are choosing to live in a false reality made up of base white supremacist grievances and irrational conspiracy theories—and seeking to impose it on the rest of us.

COVID exposed all of our most profound failings. Rarely in recent history has the collapse of a superpower been so quick, so complete, and so self-evidently connected to that phrase—who we are. We are a country that killed hundreds of thousands of people through our own unique blend of incompetence and irrationality; a place where we condemned our children to a much lengthier period of trauma from their distorted and disorienting reality.

white supremacy is one particularly virulent manifestation of all the other ways around the world that the few claim supremacy over the many, where individual dignity is subjugated to the pursuit of power and money.

Early in the pandemic, Viktor Orban granted himself emergency powers, including the capacity to imprison whomever he wanted. I emailed Sandor Lederer to see how he was doing. “To be frank,” he wrote, “I’m more worried for the U.S. than for Hungary at the moment, horrifying news keeps coming every day. Please do share if you have any optimistic scenario for America.”

For all of America’s mistakes over the last thirty years, I was struck by the unease, expressions of concern, and constant requests for predictions about the election’s result that I got from people around the world. By any measure, we had fallen from our position of hegemony, a superpower humbled by its own failings. And yet the question of what America was still mattered to people. They were watching—intently. What a strange and sprawling America they saw.

American democracy doesn’t offer us immunity from human fallibility, but it does offer second chances.