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

by Ben Rhodes

Here’s why Trump is a tragedy for us. All my literature is based on the idea that free elections are a system where a better guy becomes higher and a worse guy becomes lower. And now, what is the example? At the high point of this democracy there is someone corrupted.”

If I thought America represented diversity, Trump represented white supremacy. If I thought America was about hope for the future, Trump offered a crude longing for an ill-defined past.

In my own less risky way, I had become like the Russians I’d met over the years—a citizen struggling to hold on to my own identity as my country comes to stand for something else.

Neither Putin nor Orban nor Trump created this reality; it was simply available to them. “They didn’t invent it,” she said, “but they are riding this wave, which travels a short distance. They are unable to build things, so they destroy things.”

With the cloud of nuclear apocalypse lifted, our own political culture descended into triviality and racialized grievance, opening the door to both Donald Trump and the online Russian cavalry that came to his assistance.

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.

what O.J.’s acquittal was to a lot of Black folks—you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.

“politics has to lead people to that moment, to that feeling. And there’s nothing about American politics today that does that.”

We were raised to see baseball stadiums as cathedrals, rock concerts as rites of passage, blockbuster movies as communal sacraments, and the American literary canon as key to understanding ourselves.

Far more Americans would be killed in the decade from 2010 to 2020 by white Christian Americans with guns motivated by that information flow than would be killed by Muslims.

He was rich and famous for being rich and famous.

When Trump and his people moved into the same offices where I’d worked for eight years of my life, I wasn’t just replaced by people who disagreed with me—I was replaced by people who sought to

erase the very objective reality that I lived in and to use the massive machinery of the U.S. government to amplify a chorus of conspiracy theories that would once have existed only in the isolation of handwritten letters or forwarded emails.

For the first time in my life, I had the acute awareness of living in a time when America was no longer viewed as a leader of the world, free or otherwise.

To have any capacity to help fix what has gone wrong in the world, we have to begin fixing what has gone wrong with ourselves.

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.

The American element of this global movement against the forces that are crushing individuals around the world is rooted in opposition to American racism.

You have to look squarely at the darkest aspects of what America is in order to fully, truly love what America is supposed to be.

If i could only use one sentence to summarize this book, this is the one i would use.

People always lie most frenetically, to themselves and others, when they know they’ve done something wrong.

It was because America had become an unexceptional country in many ways—the flawed construction of its own excesses, ruled by the corrupt autocrat with the son-in-law down the hall. Because America was like everyone else, made up of people from everywhere, the nation America chose to be might tell people around the world something about what direction events might take everywhere.

This was the most obvious and terrifying truth that I’d come to see these last few years: that there was nothing inherent in America that made us immune to the viruses that had consumed all manner of societies in the past, and that we were capable of spreading those viruses to other countries.

No one person could do that for us. It was something that required a mass of human beings deciding that enough was enough and heading for the bridge.