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

by Ben Rhodes

K-Monitor saw some results in its anticorruption work—local politicians were shamed, and national corruption scandals were a feature of campaigns, but nobody was vigorously prosecuted because everyone had similar clouds hanging over them. This proved corrosive to Hungarian politics and society, as ordinary Hungarians became more cynical about the whole enterprise of democracy, which was, after all, less than two decades old.

The steps taken to climb out of the financial crisis in turn exacerbated some of the same failures endemic to the American model of globalization. Trillions of dollars were transferred to some of the same banks that caused the crisis so that they could be a source of lending and investment. This helped prevent a depression, but it also left in place the basic wiring of the financial system and the inequality that made so many people angry in the first place. The few people who were rich enough to have their wealth invested in markets got richer; for everyone else, the cost of necessities from rent to transportation to education went up.

she was the product of an entirely post–Cold War Hungarian experience, forging a political identity in opposition to the post-financial-crisis populism that swept across the West, made up of young people who aren’t seduced by the past, who are fed up with the present, who are worried about the future, and who don’t want to toss out the democracy that America and Europe once stood for just because the project of globalization has been coming apart at the seams.

I passed a couple of uneventful days in Kaliningrad. One night, my friend and I went to a bar touted by our guidebook as the kind of place that drew a colorful assortment of gangsters, arms dealers, and artists. Unfortunately, that’s exactly who seemed to be there, and we finished our beers while reading danger in every glance thrown our way. As Americans cocooned by our Cold War victory and prosperity, we weren’t ready to confront the rough edges of the residue of the empire we had defeated. But still there was a feeling of invincibility that came with the passport tucked into the cloth wallet affixed to my belt, stamped UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. This was the last trip I took outside the United States before 9/11, which changed everything about international travel, legitimized Putin’s instinct for brutality, and set in motion the chain of events that would somehow propel me—just seven years later—into the White House.

With so much corruption circling around Ukraine, a place that has attracted all manner of Russian and American grifters and influence peddlers over the years, Obama seemed to just be a guy doing his job. “Obama, when he started attacking Putin after Crimea and Ukraine, was an example for me,” he said. “Look, this is just an honest guy who was elected despite the fact that he was not rich, he was not connected, he was based in morality.” Navalny clearly saw himself as someone who could become the president of his country while remaining honest. And this, in his view, meant not succumbing to the American position on Crimea. “If I’m president,” he said, “I want to have something fair. A real, fair referendum under independent observers.”

In this case, it was a handful of writers sponsored by PEN, the organization that supports journalists and authors facing oppression around the world. I remember the familiar feeling of meeting with a group of people whom I could not possibly seem to help. Throughout the meeting, I was distracted by the fact that one of the women looked uncannily like my mother, which led my mind to wander and wonder just how far east my family’s journey had begun before the pogroms drove them across Poland and then to America. I asked the writers if they had any concerns about being affiliated with an American organization like PEN, or about meeting with people like me. No, they answered. It was their choice. What they wanted was not so much help as the simple opportunity to share their experience and perspective, which is, after all, a starting point for writing itself.

The American moguls who served as thought leaders on China and gatekeepers to the Chinese market—men like Henry Kissinger, Hank Paulson, Steve Schwartzman, and Mike Bloomberg—really had only one idea to offer: Do what the Chinese want, and you can make money there. U.S. businesses acquiesced to the self-censorship that comes with operating in China. U.S. venture capital helped build a Chinese tech sector that was perfecting methods of surveillance. U.S. popular culture gradually expunged the democratic themes that would make a movie, show, or game less welcome in the Chinese market.

Could, as Bao suggests, a more ancient Chinese identity still be a living force among the people despite Mao’s systematic destruction of traditional Chinese society over several decades? One irony of China’s ascendance is that achieving Mao’s vision of a rising China depended upon the Party’s abandoning a number of Mao’s convictions—Communism, worldwide revolution, self-sufficiency. But not the most important one: The Chinese Communist Party must rule and is the sole arbiter of Chinese identity.

They could also easily argue that their authoritarian model was a better choice than the American one—not just for other governments, but for their people as well. As one prominent African entrepreneur put it to me, summing up how billions of people likely feel around the world: “I mean, one can argue with China and say, well, China is not democratic. But when you look at the results—hundreds of millions of people brought out of poverty in a very short period of time—one must say, well, okay, how do we learn from the way that has happened?”

I felt an affinity for Hong Kong from my first visit in 2002. With steep mountains ringing a majestic harbor lined with skyscrapers, it had a geography that changed the way I looked at the possibility of a physical space—a futuristic city implanted on an improbable landscape. As a British colonial outpost, Chinese city, and global center of finance, it gave off—street by street—a sense of being a bridge or portal between worlds: East and West, Communism and capitalism, open and closed societies. Here, one could imagine, there had been all manner of intrigue over the decades—opium traders; dissidents escaped from mainland China and the spies looking for them; foreign correspondents and organized crime; Chinese tycoons and Westerners who’d never lived in the West.

The growing luster of the Chinese Communist Party’s model depends upon the proposition that people prefer order and prosperity to the dysfunction and chaos exemplified by American democracy. Give the people economic growth, a nationalist story of ascent to believe in, and the cultural products of a liberal society—American-made superhero movies and opinionless athletes—and they will be happy. So Hong Kong was an uncomfortable twist in the plotline of Chinese ascendancy. There was only one place in the world where people lived under a blend of China’s system and the characteristics of an open society. If the Communist Party’s model was superior, presumably the people of Hong Kong would want to opt in to it. But throughout 2019, people had been making clear through protests that involved an enormous share of the Hong Kong population that they did not want that.

To the American media, there was additional drama revolving around whether Xi Jinping would take questions from the press alongside Obama. In this way, issues related to human rights are reduced to a kind of formulaic play: The U.S. government raises issues privately with little expectation that they will be resolved to our liking; the U.S. media champion issues related to press freedom that are also about whether they get to ask Xi Jinping a question. We Americans get to perform on behalf of human rights, but when we leave, nothing changes.

“The nationalism in the U.S. and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this isn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think—Should we really follow a Western model? Look what’s happened. That’s when you start to hear more about a Chinese model. So the nationalism movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model.”

By pushing propaganda on kids—forcing them to learn about the Party’s history and requiring them to sing the national anthem—the government only fueled a burgeoning sense of Hong Kong identity in the city’s young people. The authorities were, Charles said, “trying to brainwash the next generation but ended up promoting a sense of Hong Kong independence.” Not necessarily a desire for political independence, but more that desire Wilson talked about: to be left alone. Like so many young people, those in Hong Kong were figuring out who they were by figuring out first who they did not want to be.

he was also making a larger point: that identity-based movements are going to be unable to bring about the scale of change necessary in a world moving rapidly in the wrong direction. “Identity politics is the driving force of the twenty-first century,” he said, and not happily. “Identity politics is not based on universal values, because universal values should apply to all human beings.

“The thing is,” he said, “I basically agree with Bernie’s critique of the system”—that American society had been wired for the benefit of a tiny minority of wealthy and largely white people, and that this was the result of policies from Reagan on, and of the flood of money into politics. “But there’s something missing when Bernie talks about it,” he added. “A spiritual component, a national identity that’s not nationalist.” He briefly ticked through the ways in which the other candidates had tried to fuse an adequate critique of what had gone wrong with an affirmative expression of national identity. Some, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, were closer on the critique. Others, like Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, were better at offering a vision of national unity without speaking as directly to the dislocation people felt. This was through no fault of their own; it wasn’t an easy thing to do. “What Bobby Kennedy was doing,” he said, searching for a historical analogy and landing on this brief 1968 campaign, “had that spiritual component.”

I’d grab a phrase from the American air and drop it into the text of some Obama speech—We are the ones we’ve been waiting for—and it would interact with the culture as if through osmosis. The villains in the story were all obviously discredited to our youthful minds—the warmongers, torturers, racists, climate deniers, special interests, and amoral wealthy who always tried to stand in the way of progress. The compromises to political reality—the occasional hawkish language on terrorism, for instance, or the critiques of capitalism that had to be carefully worded to avoid charges of socialism—felt incidental to the larger project. Facebook was a game-changing force for good that allowed enterprising young liberals to organize their own political communities. Hungary, Russia, and China were a million miles away, but on some level they would not be immune to the contagion of hope. There was a sense, as Obama seized the nomination and began his final sprint to the presidency, that we’d moved so fast and with such confidence that we’d caught the forces of entrenched power by surprise, like Jackie Robinson stealing home against the Yankees in the 1955 World Series.

I’d lived the two ends of American politics within the span of a few years: the Republican corporate-funded machine of the Giuliani juggernaut, weaponizing fear and grievances and promises of more cops being more aggressive on the streets, and the ethnic equation of the Democratic machine, tallying up a winning number of constituents based on ground-level appeals and bite-sized government programs that didn’t alter the structure of things. On some level, I knew this.

Sitting there, I considered the gulf that existed between me and this woman, the different worlds we inhabited. We’d both lived with the same presidents, experienced the same cultural moments, and likely made the same watercooler small talk about Super Bowls and celebrity breakups. We shared the trappings of a national identity that could stitch together disparate states, people of different backgrounds and religions. The national anthem. The Pledge of Allegiance. Memorial and Veterans Days to pay homage to the military. Familiarity with the Civil War that had started right there in Harpers Ferry. Pride in winning World Wars and the Cold War. Familiarity with the phrases inscribed on parchment: We the People. And yet her understanding of the course of recent events was entirely different from mine. It wasn’t simply the question of immigration policy. Basic facts—objective reality itself—were different, whether the subject was what happened on a chaotic night in Benghazi, Libya, or the motivations of people like me.

I offered Cody the image of Jackie Robinson, an imperfect man who’d endured pitches thrown at his head and abuse hurled his way from the grandstand, stealing home in the 1955 World Series. What an American thing to do! What combination of brazenness, composure, and luck. How subversive, this thing that was allowed by the rules but not by the logic of the game. How many currents of American history informed that act? How many anonymous baseball games played under the American sun—segregated fields, Negro League ball, players forgotten to history—added up to the set of skills and cunning that Jackie had acquired by the time he got to third base that day and sized up the pitcher’s delivery against the distance home, marking American time. Obama, I thought, was much more akin to Jackie Robinson than to John Lewis—the barrier breaker who played by the established rules and looked for the occasional opening within the rules to dash home.