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

by Ben Rhodes

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.

I asked him to walk me through how his country’s prime minister, 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. Relentlessly attack the Other: immigrants, Muslims, liberal elites. It struck me that Sandor could have been describing America instead of Hungary.

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.

In their own way, they had anointed themselves the arbiters of identity,

“Orban was basically focusing on—we are the good Hungarians, and all the others aren’t even Hungarians.” She didn’t like that Fidesz claimed the Hungarian flag, so she wore a flag pin in protest.

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.

and where will the stark truth of russia's atrocities lead us?

This was the American-led international order that prevented World War III and helped bring down the Berlin Wall. After the Cold War, it lost its organizing principle, just as the memory of blitzkrieg and gas chambers was fading. What was left behind was a momentum of hypercapitalist globalization that expanded until it was felled by its own excesses in 2008. “The model was just an implicit premise—kind of a lazy premise that everyone had—this idea that it was almost a manifest destiny belief that freedom and markets and consumerism are going to take over the world, full stop.” Instead, we got the return of the old history—the grievance-fueled nationalism that has usually been a precursor to war or revolution, whichever arrives first.

There is this economic drive behind it. The phrase summed up a lot about the world America has built since the end of the Cold War as the urgency of the postwar decades and the shadow of nuclear holocaust faded. The first American presidential campaign after the Berlin Wall came down was driven by a slogan—“It’s the economy, stupid”—whose very effectiveness became a trap. GDP growth. Deficits. Gas prices. The markets. The politics of wealth creation. The wealth that funds politics. The wealthy and the politicians appearing on panel discussions at international conferences to discuss vague concepts of global security, global supply chains, and global sustainability in a world where consumption has made life on earth unsustainable.

What’s important is that people don’t feel lost. 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.

If, like me, you were born in the twilight of the twentieth century, you have to remind yourself that 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.

“Ethnicity and hatred toward other groups—I think the combination of the two is a very dangerous mix,” Sandor told me. “Of course you cannot compare our days with the 1930s in the way that people live. But the talk and the rhetoric and the thinking behind it is a direct connection, and that is why I find these politicians extremely dangerous.” It’s easy to discount this thinking as alarmist. But there has never been a time in human history when this form of nationalism hasn’t led to violence, to war, to mass destruction.

Szabolcs also noted that one of Orban’s closest associates also met with the head of the FSB, Russia’s intelligence service, around the same time. The purpose of that meeting was to begin discussions of a mutually beneficial economic relationship—not between the two nations, but between the two political parties, Fidesz and United Russia. “So Orban established his contacts both with Putin on a formal level, and the underworld—the economic underworld,” Szabolcs said.

Sure enough, business picked up substantially between Hungary and Russia in the decade after Orban’s election, most notably in the construction of a multibillion-dollar nuclear power plant. Putin got his payment and Orban set up a corruption scheme. Szabolcs walked me through how it could go. It’s not particularly complicated. An Orban crony gets, say, the contracts to pour the concrete for part of the plant. That crony does all manner of favors for the people in government. Then the crony overcharges the government for his services. Everyone profits—Putin, Fidesz, and Orban’s cronies. This isn’t so different from how it works in America, of course, when wealthy interests profit from government favoritism and in turn fund political campaigns—it’s just a little less subtle.

In his courtship of Russia, Orban has come full circle from his early political days when he railed against Soviet domination, in the same way that the Republican Party came full circle from its anti-Russia identity. Like Orban and the Republican Party, 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.”

Orban was also the first European leader to sign up for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a massive infrastructure development effort to project Chinese influence and investment around the world. The Hungarian Belt and Road project is a railroad that will connect Budapest to the Serbian capital of Belgrade. The project, Szabolcs noted, involves a consortium of three companies; two are Chinese, and one is owned by Orban’s childhood friend, the billionaire Mészáros. “So it’s quite clear what the scheme is.”

this was precisely why 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.”

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

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.

For much of the twenty-first century, Russia has led the counterrevolution to American domination—not by seeking to upend the global order that America constructed, but rather by disrupting it from within, turning it (and ultimately America itself) into the ugliest version of itself. I think of how Russians must have seen us Americans as I was growing up: capitalist stooges, driven entirely by a lust for profit; a militarized empire, unconcerned with the lives of the distant people harmed by our foreign policies; racist hypocrites, preaching human rights abroad and practicing systemic oppression at home. That’s the America that Putin wants the world to see, and that’s the America that Putin wants us to be.

Once the House of Soviets reached twenty-one stories, the engineers realized that it wasn’t going to be safe to complete without risking collapse. Construction was halted in the 1980s, and the giant structure stood empty until I laid eyes on it, an unfinished ruin. It did not take a literary mind to see the unpleasant concrete structure as a metaphor for the Soviet Union itself: an ideal that triumphed in war but proved incapable of meeting the basic needs of human beings or keeping pace with a changing world.

“Nemtsov was a tireless advocate for his country, seeking for his fellow Russian citizens the rights to which all people are entitled.” Unsaid because it was implicit was the reality that that is what got him killed.

There was something different about the American story, but it wasn’t the arc of military and geopolitical triumph from Wilson to Reagan; it was the struggle to better ourselves, to right the historical wrongs of people like Wilson, who’d embraced segregation, or Reagan, who represented the conservative counterrevolution to the civil rights movement.

Years later, just before I left Washington, I had coffee with a journalist who had spent a lot of time looking at Russia’s use of disinformation. I described how it had taken years for me to understand the psychological toll that came from a daily bombardment of messages on social media that dehumanized and threatened me. How it was impossible to know what was someone’s real voice and what was automated, what was American and what was Russian. “That’s part of the point, right?” he said. “To demoralize the opponent.” As obvious as that was, it had never occurred to me in quite that way before—that my mental state was one tiny front in a war that Putin had been waging since Beslan, that he had projected back onto America what he found ugly about us and in turn shaped us into something that bore a closer resemblance to his view of the world, a place in which truth and individual human beings are incidental to the raw will to power.

As the corruption of Russia’s economy was impossible to ignore, one of Putin’s goals was to discourage people from thinking that participation in politics was worth the effort. To accomplish that goal, he didn’t need to convince people that he wasn’t corrupt, he simply needed to convince people that everyone was corrupt,

To be a democrat was to be aligned with the corruption of those days and the political agenda of the Americans.

Navalny summed up their somewhat contradictory political message. “Two points of their agenda: First, the West is bad, they don’t have any morality; second, it’s actually the same, the system is the same, everyone is the same.”

revolutions. Navalny is charming and gregarious over FaceTime, even as his grievances are not far beneath the surface. I recognized in him something that I’d felt myself, something that built during my years in politics and the years since: visceral, dumbfounded anger at the circumstances around me—the lies, hypocrisy, and absurdity of it all; incredulity that basic beliefs like the need for a government that isn’t corrupted by moneyed interests should be so widely and fiercely contested; the sense of powerlessness in the face of conspiracy theories in which you’re cast as someone you’re not; the feeling that a global enterprise has been built to sustain the power and wealth of a very particular group of people.

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.

We were in the last weeks of the Obama campaign when the Georgia invasion took place. For a few days, John McCain sought to make Russia’s aggression a central issue, but there was little appetite among the American public for his hawkish approach, especially with the Iraq War grinding through its sixth year.

if we hadnt gone to war in iraq, would things be different today for ukraine and baltic countries?

There are plenty of Russian liberals I know who see Navalny as a kind of Putin Lite, a nationalist with a personality-driven approach to politics. As a liberal wary of nationalism, I caught myself at times trying too hard to project what I liked about Navalny onto him while eliding the rougher edges that he made no effort to conceal. The comfortable assertion of a nationalism that, with an issue like Crimea, drifted into blood-and-soil territory. The leadership of an organization that appeared to be fueled by something of a cult of personality embedded in anticorruption. But I’ve also lived enough lifetimes in politics to know that those things made him a more effective politician and viable leader of Russia, and to know that thinking Americans have any capacity to pick our ideal Russian leader (or American one, for that matter) is a foolish impulse destined to lead to dashed expectations.

Compared to the battles of Russia’s past, the actual fighting in Eastern Ukraine was a small endeavor affecting mainly the people there and the few thousand Russians sent furtively across Ukraine’s borders. But there was something brutal and infectious about the propaganda that went along with it. I noticed it at the time. In memes that anticipated American conspiracy theories like QAnon, Russia’s enemies were cast as pedophiles, sexual deviants, and diabolical criminals. This ability to manipulate and mobilize the national psyche while keeping the stakes relatively low represented a breakthrough for Putin, making easy use of America’s unregulated and sensationalizing social media networks. “People are happy to be violent in the social networks,” Maria said. “In that space, there has been rhetorical violence in Russia for the last ten years, through the discourse of hate on social networks.”

I thought of my own daily experience of social media, the emotions that could be stirred by a single tweet, the reduction of discourse to a set of characters that could trigger someone in response, the endless online battle that can have no winner but that seems to carry with it the highest possible stakes. This is our most prevalent experience of how politics meets culture today: the ceaseless immersion in social media and how they shape our perception of ourselves, our countries, and the world at large. Ironically, a space with no borders in which we try to assert what our nations mean. Neither Putin nor Orban nor Trump created this reality; it was simply available to them.

This great nation that gave the world Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, that once saved Europe from fascism and sent the first satellite into space, now exports a toxic stew of conspiracy theories and disinformation that will make as little sense to people in the future as it does to anyone living in reality today.

“Can you imagine,” Adam asked, as if still trying to wrap his mind around Putin’s success, “in his wildest dreams, that the president of the United States would parrot his talking points? It was the intelligence coup of the century.”

“Putin wants to weaken Western societies,” Adam said. “He knows the fault lines well. He knows how to manipulate them on social media. It’s cheap and deniable.” The violence, as Maria had said, without the actual violence. The worry, Adam said, is that Russia is exporting these methodologies, causing them to mushroom across the United States and around the world—the counterrevolution gone viral.

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.

When the dinner was over, as I watched Obama introduce each of his staffers to Xi, it occurred to me that I was looking at the most powerful man in the world who was not—for the first time in a long time—an American president. And Xi had none of the sense of defensiveness and grievance that characterized interactions with Putin. This was a guy who was totally comfortable sitting at the top of the pyramid, methodically asserting his power over more than a billion people, refining a totalitarian system, waiting out, strong-arming, or steamrolling the next obstacle in front of him.

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. The United States made this possible. Since the end of the Cold War, we have developed a symbiotic relationship with the Chinese. Our businesses eagerly decamped to China to make cheap goods that they could then sell back to Americans hungry for ever-improving standards of living; it’s almost impossible to imagine an American household that doesn’t have something in it that was made in China, even as much of the wealth created through this process was accumulated by the very few Americans who sat at the top of our own economic pyramid, the people who ran companies, traded stocks, held portfolios, and repeatedly had their taxes cut.

At every turn, the profit motive and economic interdependence between our countries ensured that concerns over democratic values would be subordinate to other interests. The U.S. government always had higher priorities. 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.

It’s therefore no surprise that China has become more like America in apolitical spheres—the way they’ve plugged into the grid of the global economy, the pollution they spew into the atmosphere, the pop culture they consume, the technology-driven nature of life in the twenty-first century. Think of American capitalism and culture devoid of liberal values and democratic politics, and you’ll get something approximating the Chinese Communist Party. But in recent years, the balance has also shifted. It is now America that is becoming more like China—a place of growing economic inequality, grievance-based nationalism, vast data collection, and creeping authoritarianism.

American politics became characterized by a paranoid and sometimes bipartisan demagoguery about a “rising China” that feels one step behind the times: China isn’t rising, it has risen.

He had the conflicted air of a man who doesn’t trust people easily but has a lot to say.

The twenty-first century is about identity. Identity is something that you cannot put into a framework. But that’s where the emotion is.” And that identity, of course, is defined by both who you are and who you are against. “The driving force,” Bao Pu told me, “is the rise of a Chinese identity versus the West, versus Japan. So this is the major issue—the modern Chinese identity is the key to understanding every present-day China issue on the world stage.” Bao Pu went through his own list: China’s humiliations at the hands of Western powers in the nineteenth century; China’s subjugation by Japan during World War II; the American abandonment of the Chinese Republic to Mao’s advancing armies in the war’s aftermath. To Bao, these veins of humiliation, betrayal, and fear of chaos run deep through the Chinese body politic, and the Party has proved capable of tapping them. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the Party dialed up anti-Western and anti-Japanese themes in official media, stirring up lingering resentments over Western colonization and Japanese atrocities. They scrubbed the school curriculum of the Western materials that Bao Pu recalled from the 1980s. They buried the historical memory of Mao’s catastrophic mistakes and rehabilitated Confucius, the preeminent ancient Chinese philosopher whose thought had been sidelined under Mao, as a justification for a society focused on collective effort over individual rights. “Confucius was rejected in the twentieth century,” Bao tol...

“Western culture traditionally tended to distinguish between good and evil in absolute terms, defining a clear line. The Chinese never think that way. Instead, Confucius tradition focuses on personal virtue.” This focus would compel leaders to admit error and evolve—the opposite of how the Chinese Communist Party operates. “As a ruler, you are supposed to perfect your virtue. When you fail, you hold yourself accountable. The ideal leader in the Confucius tradition would not try to put total control over a society.”

Xi launched a massive anticorruption campaign, which simultaneously acknowledged the public’s frustration with rampant corruption and served as a useful tool for Xi to sideline potential opponents. Factory owners could use the initiative to justify endless hours for their workers, who were called upon to produce the goods that would make China a great nation (and factory owners rich). And Xi promoted a cult of personality that emphasized his own charisma instead of just putting himself forward as the leader of the Party—students were forced to study his writings, Party members recited his sayings, and television cast him as the star in China’s story of ascent.

Just as the Party placed a bet after Tiananmen that they could embrace capitalism but not democracy, they’re now placing a bet that responding to people’s wants and desires in some areas can erase their wants and desires for other things—like politics.

Xi Jinping once said, “Freedom is what order is meant for, and order is the guarantee of freedom.” Read that several times and make sense of it. Or think about George Orwell’s slogan for the Party in 1984: Freedom is slavery.

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.

The economy that I’ve lived in most of my life is shaped by this dynamic. American manufacturing jobs were displaced to China. Cheaper goods facilitated bargain shopping that started at places like Target and Walmart and migrated to Amazon. Electronics emerged from supply chains designed as intricately as your smartphone—ideas from Silicon Valley and chips made in America to be assembled in China and sold back to Americans. Things worked out very well for the people at the top, and everyone else owed the illusion of rising standards of living to a basic bargain—the cost of education and health care and housing kept going up, but at least you could buy cheap household goods, drive a big car, and entertain yourself on a phone that offered the promise—or distraction—of infinite immersion. Meanwhile, the rich people who could own stocks and trade in markets got wealthier and translated that wealth into political, social, and cultural influence.