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

by Ben Rhodes

But I sensed a continued internal conflict within Bao Pu. He preferred democracy but was uncomfortable oversimplifying what has happened in an enormous and ancient country like China. He recognized the achievement of the Party but thought they had stumbled into their current position by being in control at the right time. He opposed identity politics but was plainly proud of his Chinese identity. He rejected the grievance-filled nationalism of the Party, but he clearly harbored some of the same grievances. And despite his belief that Tiananmen was an accident of history, doomed to fail, Bao Pu had spent much of his life trying to fight against this whitewashing.

“In these semiauthoritarian or authoritarian regimes, they’re very good at shutting down people from saying anything that might be quote-unquote ‘political.’ And in that context, ‘political’ usually means something that’s critical of the government.

The Communist Party’s version of truth also seeped into Hong Kong society. Lorraine described the more extreme manifestation of the new reality. “It’s like pointing at a deer and saying it’s a horse.”

Charles said the protests that had been raging against inequality in Chile, literally on the other side of the planet, were closely followed and cheered on from Hong Kong. Later in 2020, when I spoke to protesters from Belarus standing up to a dictator, the Belarusians told me how surprised they were to get a flood of online messages of support from people they’d never met in Hong Kong. Even as the Hong Kong protest movement was about this particular localized identity, the movement was self-consciously globalizing, a vessel for opposing the generalized sense among the world’s young people that the world they grew up in was being ravaged by authoritarianism, inequality, the abuse of technology, and the looming danger of climate change.

John stepped out of the conversation about Hong Kong and asked me what I’d learned in reporting this book about how different authoritarian regimes acted. He was looking for some germ of insight that could be of use. I did my best to give him a brief summary. I described to him how they all made similar efforts to swallow institutions and lubricate their efforts with corruption. How they try to make politics so futile or toxic that people just succumb to apathy, like John’s taxi driver. How Putin makes examples of people—killing or poisoning the occasional opposition figure as a message to others. How the Chinese Communist Party exhibited all of these characteristics but also used their economic and technological leverage to try to control not just Hong Kong but the behavior of countries like the United States and individuals as well. How all these leaders wrapped everything up in a nationalist bow to justify their control while their authoritarian repression became steadily more brazen.

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

the world was basically a reflection of America’s post–Cold War identity, our prioritization of money, post-9/11 militarism, and technology.

My father occasionally reminded me of this reality, citing the old truism that compared racism between North and South: in the South, they don’t care how close Blacks get as long as they don’t get too high in society; in the North, they don’t care how high Blacks get as long as they don’t get too close.

In the spring of 2019, I taught a class in presidential speechwriting and U.S. foreign policy at UCLA. One of the speeches we studied was George W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress a few days after 9/11, in which he seized control of American politics and—for a time—global events. In it, he defined the heroes and villains of our new epoch. On one side: first responders, Rudy Giuliani, the members of Congress who sang “God Bless America,” faithful Tony Blair, the soon-to-be-created Department of Homeland Security, the law enforcement personnel and intelligence professionals who would be handed the authorities of the PATRIOT Act, the military preparing to once again fight and win wars, a great nation stirred to action. On the other side: al-Qaeda, a name most Americans were hearing for the first time. “Why do they hate us?” he declared. “They hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government.”

untrue. they hated our bold, naked greed in the form of untethered capitalism

But even that justification obscured the deeper reality that America had built a complex infrastructure in the 1980s to transfer weapons to the mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. That network of supply chains ran through the tribal regions of Pakistan, making use of Pakistani intelligence and Saudi money that facilitated everything from training camps to madrassas for austere religious education. Ronald Reagan welcomed the mujahideen to the White House as freedom fighters, men of God, comparing them to George Washington.

The securitization of society. The demonization of the Other. Far-reaching laws of social control branded as counterterrorism. These would prove potent tools. Vladimir Putin had already been waging a brutal war in Chechnya before 9/11. But when he used security and antiterrorism laws to transform Russia into an authoritarian cabal where he controlled all aspects of Russian politics, he could nestle these measures under the wing of the American hegemon and its shared commitment to fighting a global War on Terror, while bristling at America’s moral standing to criticize him. Xi Jinping also embraced the American War on Terror as a template and a justification. The Chinese Communist Party built an infrastructure of mass surveillance that took the PATRIOT Act to the next logical step of making maximum use of all that reach into the lives of their citizens. In 2014, after Uighur attacks took dozens of lives in Xinjiang Province, China’s media began to refer to “China’s 9/11.” Xi set in motion the crackdown that would lead to a million Uighurs being thrown in concentration camps by calling for a “struggle against terrorism, infiltration, and separatism.”

The Egyptian government has a peace treaty with Israel. It is backed by the oil-rich Saudis. It casts itself as an ally in the War on Terror. In return, the United States provides those billions of dollars in arms that are actually payments to job-creating American defense contractors who then turn over the weapons to the Egyptian government. To America, all of those interests have been more significant than the interests of those sixty thousand prisoners, or the absurdity of that same Egyptian government’s trying to radicalize their own opponents to create terrorists in order to justify those billions of dollars in assistance. Such is the logic of our forever war.

I looked back at Zuckerberg, who appeared relieved the exchange was over, awaiting the debrief with his staff, the well-compensated people who had every incentive to prevent him from questioning his own assumptions—the wildly out-of-date language about connecting people and an open Internet. This reflexively defensive guy was a thirty-four-year-old worth $44 billion, the world’s fastest-growing billionaire and CEO of a company that was remaking the global economy, media, and politics for the worse, and he was accountable only on the basis of the wealth his company accumulated. There’s something wrong with a society that produces that.

To simply hate America would mean succumbing to the apathy that bigots and autocrats always seek to evoke, to quit on what’s best about other people, to confirm that America is the worst version of itself when in fact it is a multitude of very different human beings—and therefore contains the good and the evil, the selfishness and selflessness, of which human beings are capable.

What that alternative reality offers is an elevated sense of belonging, one that floats above even truth itself: America is for you and not the Others; and that sense brings consequences for everything from the exercise of political power to the conduct of your daily life. No matter what happens to you, even if you lose your job, or get COVID because you refused to wear a mask, you have this intangible sense of belonging. The obvious mediocrity and mendacity of Trump and the Republicans make turning back even harder, because doing so requires you to acknowledge that you were taken for a ride by such people: People always lie most frenetically, to themselves and others, when they know they’ve done something wrong.