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

by Ben Rhodes

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.

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.

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.

With more advances in technology, the Party is trying to reach a new reality. She summed up the goal this way: “We are able to predict dissent before it occurs and crack down on it, and completely reengineer people’s identity and thoughts.” 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. This is done by harnessing technologies that are similar to those that help Amazon predict what I might want to buy while nudging me in certain directions. Maya described this as “creating the kind of new society where the Party serves the people so well that people no longer feel the need for democracy or debate, because we would know you are unhappy about it or we will manipulate it so you won’t be unhappy about it.”

Over the last few years, the numbers out of Xinjiang came into focus, but because the media faces strict restrictions in this remote part of their country, the picture does not. There would be no images of crying children, separated families, or dead-eyed prisoners. Perhaps some aerial imagery that shows the development of a camp gives us a glimpse of this systematic effort to grind the identity out of a minority group through the relentless application of control. But this would not be something that we would be forced to reckon with through our own eyes.

It was reported that Trump himself told Xi that the construction of camps for the Uighurs was a great idea.

I found myself imagining what it might feel like to be a Uighur, and what their experience might suggest about the future for other Chinese people, and perhaps for ourselves. There are cameras everywhere; some ostentatiously placed, some invisible. They don’t just monitor events; they record your face so as to perfect the facial recognition technologies that make it easier to monitor the population. There are checkpoints everywhere. They don’t just stop and question you; they also record images of your face, car, and license plate. You don’t know what, exactly, will get you sent to a camp. You can arouse suspicion by being idle or switching jobs. You can be interned for showing religious devotion—attending prayers at the mosque, downloading sermons, covering your hair or growing facial hair, adopting a more pious lifestyle (quitting drinking, for instance). You can be questioned for something that your family members do, including those who live abroad. You have to assume your communications are monitored. You don’t know if your phone has been turned into a listening device, your home is surveilled, or your circle of friends is penetrated by informants eager to finger someone as politically questionable, destined for the camps. You can attract attention for knowing too much about what is going on in a place where the authorities only want you to know what they tell you. The curriculum in schools has been changed to sever your children’s bonds to what has been a communal id...

So while they are extending their influence, the Chinese Communist Party is also exporting authoritarianism—through corruption, geopolitical leverage, and, increasingly, the export of the same technologies that they use to suppress dissent in places like Xinjiang. This creates a particular dilemma for democratic governments: If you seek to isolate authoritarian governments in order to impose some cost for their repression, you only push them further into China’s arms. Myanmar, for instance, knows that it will face no sanctions or criticism from China over its treatment of an ethnic Muslim minority group.

these two compatible ideas came up again and again: that Chinese authoritarianism might be more effective than American democracy, and that Trump’s abandonment of the international order meant that there was no alternative to increasing Chinese influence.

Ultimately, this shift in the center of the world’s gravity doesn’t just shape particular transactions and policies; it begins to shift how we behave, in a version of how a totalitarian government exerts control over the behavior of its citizens. For rich countries, big corporations, and prominent individuals who want access to Chinese markets or investments, there is increasingly an explicit cost in return. Do not meet with people like the Dalai Lama. Do not oppose China’s position on matters like the South China Sea. Do not investigate or even inquire about what is happening in Xinjiang. Do not comment on anything that is taking place within China’s borders.

And while it’s easy to find major American films that are critical of the American government, try to find a blockbuster movie that takes on the Chinese Communist Party. Instead, American blockbusters are now laced at times with subplots of Chinese ingenuity helping to fend off alien invasions or to rescue Sandra Bullock from space. More subtly, they’re devoid of the admittedly simplistic Cold War storylines that I grew up with, when the good guys were fighting for democracy and the bad guys were totalitarian oppressors. It’s easier, instead, to have the bad guys be people who don’t control a chunk of the global market: Muslim terrorists, for instance, a representation that can justify both America’s War on Terror and China’s repression in Xinjiang. In this way, American companies, banks, entertainment conglomerates, sports leagues, and even the U.S. government are operating under the same social credit system that applies to Chinese citizens. The incentives and disincentives are clear. Using the leverage of money within the system of American-designed global capitalism, the Chinese Communist Party is increasingly shaping our choices, and incrementally exerting control over what we say and think.

I asked him why the Party had to whitewash Tiananmen from history. “Because they can,” he answered, echoing my own sense of why Putin had poisoned Navalny. “It’s just because they can. The Tiananmen student protest exemplified nonviolent struggle. But because nonviolence was met with tanks and machine guns, right and wrong was really clear. The Communist Party had no excuse for this massacre, even within their own rhetoric. The history of the Communist Party is littered with inconvenient truths. Cultural Revolution they can’t explain. The Great Famine they can’t explain. They had to erase them all from history.”

For his part, Bao Pu told me he is shifting from nonfiction to fiction. The battle to shape perceptions of recent history and objective reality has become increasingly impossible to fight. “There are other ways to shape hearts and minds besides using nonfiction,” he told me. “I think the people in the twenty-first century receive information from either education or entertainment. Perhaps entertainment would be a better tool.”

Reminds me of literature lessons right after USSR ended - there were more or less subtle anti-USSR messages throughout the classics we were studying! So much so that you could bet on it when you didn't know the answer that the teacher was looking for! Scary.

When you wrap your mind around the scale of the challenge to individual liberty posed by the Chinese Communist Party, it’s easy to succumb to a sense of inevitability about the dystopia that lies ahead. But then I remind myself that people were equally certain, back in 1989, that the future would evolve in a particular direction: that America was ascendant and its model of democracy and open markets would inevitably prevail. Who could have foreseen, back then, what events like the Iraq War and the financial crisis and the election of Donald Trump would bring about? In assessing the present, what you cannot account for is the intrusion of hubris and history—the inevitable overreach of a totalitarian government, and the irreducible longing of human beings to live without a boot on their throat. The event that might spark some form of mass mobilization, which in retrospect always seems inevitable.

“People rightly feel defensive about their country. However much nationalism does play a role in politics, people who talk to each other about issues in China, their gears shift.” What happens may not take the form of dissent, but it suggests that the Party’s rigid framework does not define the people.

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.

As Chinese rule entered its second decade, Beijing’s efforts to assert control over Hong Kong began to accelerate in ways that were imperceptible day to day, but transformative over time. “The way that the Chinese government does these things,” Wilson explained, “is really through a whole-of-society approach.” Businesses that relied on the Chinese market were told their employees should not express political views. Mainland Chinese tycoons with ties to the government began to buy up nearly all the major newspapers and television stations and toe a reliably pro–Communist Party line. Independent media were denied a license to operate. Certain kinds of speech began to disappear—not because any one dictate went out, but simply because they began to be regarded as outside the realm of accepted discourse. Life became less free. Even as these changes were taking place, the relative prosperity and the feeling of openness remained. No Berlin Wall went up; no troops were in the streets. “What’s so interesting,” Wilson said, “is that life is basically similar, right?”

In November 2014, at the height of the Umbrella Movement, I traveled to Beijing with President Obama. The focus of the trip was securing an ambitious Chinese pledge to combat climate change: If the United States and China could make a joint announcement about their commitments to slow global warming, the rest of the world could be brought along to achieve what would end up as the Paris Agreement. Hong Kong was in the backdrop, the latest human rights irritant in our relationship with the Chinese government and therefore something Obama would raise in his meeting with Xi. 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.

There have been trade-offs like this for decades; at every turn, there is some competing priority that makes complete sense in the moment, just as it can seem pointless to press the Chinese Communist Party to move in a direction that they will surely resist. But the problem for people like me is being part of a broader enterprise that has allowed itself, over time, to see human rights as a secondary or even unattainable objective. That’s what the U.S. government—as well as American society writ large—has done with China since Tiananmen.

Around the same time, the Hong Kong booksellers were detained and taken to China. “These guys were not prominent activists,” Wilson told me. “I don’t even know if they can be called dissidents because they’re just publishing things, they’re not writing.” What unsettled people, he said, was how random the detentions were. One bookseller was taken from Hong Kong, another from Thailand, suggesting a lack of safety anywhere, foreshadowing the extradition law. “The most shocking thing is that it was not shocking,” he told me. The most shocking thing is that it was not shocking. It was a sentence that had become like a reflex to me during the Trump presidency.

Reminds me of a cruel experiment I have read about, where a dog's cage is made to give him electric shocks. If it is predictable, the dog continues to fight and complain. If it is random, the dog gets depressed and just lets it happen. Can people, who are (seemingly) randomly persecuted, fight back; or will they just take the abuse? Human/animal nature is the latter. It is difficult to overcome both in abusive relationships and when the abuse comes from somewhere else. Scary!

Self-censorship had become a prominent feature of life in Hong Kong. If you want to get ahead in politics, don’t criticize the Chinese government. If you want to get ahead in business, don’t criticize the Chinese government. Even without a social credit system in place, the effect is already present. Wilson pointed out a different, more social form of self-censorship. “Authoritarian regimes are very good at equating ‘political’ with ‘bad,’ ” he said. “So if anyone’s a political person, that means they are some kind of devious or bad person. So you always get the message from the pro-Beijing camp: Keep politics off campus. But what they actually mean is ‘Don’t have students who oppose the government.’

The movement learned from the failure of the Umbrella Movement. Because people can’t take off work for months at a time, this time the protests would be episodic—a flash mob on a lunch break, a surge of people on a weekend, in shifting locations. Because an identified leadership could be arrested, this time there was no leadership—instead, a kind of direct democracy prevailed; in some cases protesters went into mass groups on encrypted online message boards and voted on a time and place for protest. This is how the movement tried to avoid being crushed by Beijing, like a virus evolving to survive. No disunity. No single venue. No leader. Secure communication. Over the summer of 2019, the authorities started blocking peaceful mass protests. In this second phase of the protests, the police set up roadblocks and clashed with protesters who turned out. Many people who’d participated in the mass marches started staying home, and the streets were left to what became known as “frontline protesters”—people who chose to climb the mountain through confrontation. As the protests stubbornly continued every day, with crowds that swelled on the weekends, the approach toughened. “They started shutting it down as soon as people appeared in the streets,” Wilson told me, “firing tear gas and so on.”

I asked Wilson what the people of Hong Kong wanted. He gave a simple answer: “To be left alone.” It was a less ambitious definition of freedom: to be left alone. One country, two systems. “You’re pretty much left to do what you want, say what you want, educate your people in the way you want. You can criticize China in the same way as you can criticize the queen or the prime minister if you’re in Scotland.” Summing it up, he said, “Your separate system and separate identity are respected.” This feeling, he noted, was overwhelming among the youth.

When I asked Wilson what America should do about this development, he had a familiar list. Set a better democratic example. Impose sanctions on Chinese officials engaged in repression. Offer asylum to those threatened with arrest in Hong Kong. Work with allies to raise awareness and impose pressure on Beijing. Perhaps most important, Wilson argued that people in the United States should care more about these issues, and the actions of the U.S. government should reflect these concerns.

“They’re going to lose, unless they convince the rest of the world that they’re fighting for something bigger. Unless they embrace universal values. We’re going to fight authoritarianism. We’re going to fight for the rule of law. We’re going to fight for democracy. We’re not for Hong Kong identity, we’re for democracy for all China. Unless they make that leap.”

It was, in a way, selfish of people like me and Bao Pu to put the onus for changing the world upon the people of Hong Kong. They wanted to preserve their identity. Sure, that was tied up with concepts like democracy, liberalism, and the rule of law. But it was also tied to that other universal concept Wilson had talked about: the desire to be left alone. And over the coming decades, people were not going to be left alone unless they forged a solidarity with others who felt the same way, like different tributaries feeding into a larger whole, a building wave.

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. Given that reality, John asked, what could be done to restore what he called “normalcy”—where these leaders showed restraint; where, implicitly, China didn’t feel compelled to swallow up Hong Kong even if it didn’t like Hong Kong’s freedoms. All I could do was speak for what America could do, and I walked him, and maybe myself, through some of the realizations I’d come to in writing this book. How over the last thirty years, American-led globalization, our post-9/11 fixation on national security, and our scaling up of technologies that we didn’t fully understand had helped create the authoritarian dynamic that I’d just described. How America had been weakened by the Iraq War and the financial crisis and then gone through our own crisis of ident...

He began by offering an amendment to my focus on the 2008 financial crisis. “I think you need to recognize the transitory nature of the post–Cold War moment,” he said. “There have been two artificial periods in our history when we were the dominant power in the world. The U.S. post–World War II, and post–Cold War.” After World War II, he pointed out, we were both exhausted by the experience of war and afraid of the prospect of another one—thus beginning the “elongated reason cycle,” that methodical effort to establish an international order of institutions, laws, and norms aimed at preventing another world war. There was no similar dynamic after the Cold War. “It was going to come to an end at some point,” he said. “Even before the crisis, Chinese economic power was ascendant and Russia had figured out that it could be a mafia-authoritarian state; 2008 was an accelerant to that process.”

“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.

Several Uighurs were held in the prison at Guantanamo Bay. None of them were found to pose a serious danger to the United States. Instead, they were among many people detained after 9/11 in Afghanistan largely for the crime of being there. After Obama took office, as he tried to close Gitmo, there was a plan to release a few Uighurs within the United States. It was necessary to show that we would do our part, as we were also urging many countries around the world to repatriate detainees who had been cleared for release, people who could not be convicted of any crime. It was also not safe for them to be sent home to China. The proposal was met with political and media hysteria. Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman led this charge from the Senate, declaring jointly that the Uighurs “have radical religious views which make it difficult for them to assimilate into our population.” The uproar led to legislation prohibiting the transfer of any Guantanamo detainees to the United States, even to supermax American prisons from which no human being has ever escaped. This made it impossible for Obama to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Today, the Chinese government uses essentially the same argument as Graham and Lieberman to justify genocide against the Uighurs. They have radical religious views which make it difficult for them to assimilate into our population.

Despite my growing alarm about what America had done in the world, these warning signs cautioned against succumbing to the reflexive leftism that sees America as doomed to do no good in the world. If we were absent, then it would be only the Putins and Xis aiming to direct events. What would become of the European activists, the Russian writers, the Asians living in China’s growing totalitarian shadow, Mohamed Soltan in an Egyptian prison cell, if America ceased to even try to be its better self?

Don’t be too critical of Trump, I was advised. You’ll be taken less seriously by the shapers of conventional opinion. You’ll narrow your options for future employment—in government or the private sector. You’ll attract negative attention from the Republicans who control the White House and Congress and seem willing to use their power to punish their political opponents. The fact that there was a logic to it made the advice more chilling. Even with a fascistic lunatic running the country, self-censorship was expected in how one talked about it. Be critical of Obama, I was advised. You need to demonstrate your independence, to reinvent yourself as something other than Obama’s guy. I was familiar with this formula, as it had been followed by some of my former colleagues, including all of Obama’s former secretaries of defense. But why was it helpful to criticize my former boss when the fascist lunatic running the country was blaming him for everything? I knew the litany of points that people wanted me to hit. We should have gone to war in Syria. We should have kept those ten thousand troops in Iraq after 2011. We should have been more robust in confronting Putin in proxy wars from Syria to Ukraine. I did have my list of things we’d done wrong—for instance, supporting the Saudi-led war in Yemen, surging troops to Afghanistan, or failing to more forcefully confront the Republican Party’s efforts to undermine democracy. But these, I knew, were not the criticisms that most of the ...

More fundamentally, when it came to Trump and his election, the focus on Obama obscured—to me—the radicalization of the Republican Party that has been under way since the end of the Cold War and that accelerated under Obama, a party that could find common cause with the likes of Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin by the end of our administration. Obama had not governed as a radical; indeed, the things I wish he might have done differently are mainly policies that would have been further to the left and further antagonizing to the right. This, to me, cast a harsh light on a fundamental truth, one that is as uncomfortable as it is obvious. At one book event, I was politely grilled by an audience of Germans about Obama’s responsibility for Trump. The red line and the West Virginia voter both made appearances. I reiterated that Obama came to office preaching national unity and bipartisanship. He extended olive branches far beyond the point when he had any reason to expect them to be accepted. His policies were more moderate than the progressive wing of the party wanted. He enjoyed broad support from a majority of Americans and would have beaten Trump if he could have run again. Finally, as one man kept insisting that Obama should have done more to stop the Republican Party’s drift in the direction of Trump, I snapped. My voice rising just a sliver, I said that the thing that was most triggering to many Americans, that helped fuel the Republican Party’s radicalization into Trumpia...

As I walked the class through a syllabus based upon country after country that had drifted to the nationalist, authoritarian right—Hungary, Turkey, Russia, China, India, Brazil—it was glaringly obvious how interconnected these right-wing nationalists were. They used common tactics, common narratives, and common conspiracy theories to legitimize their rule; many of them shared common sources of financing, corruption, and political consultants. Isolated, the resistance movements that gave me hope would likely fail. But if they were connected, perhaps some of them could succeed. That would require an America that came to its senses while recognizing how much had gone wrong. America had helped shape the world we lived in before descending into the cesspool of the Trump years. We now had a government that was busy radicalizing a huge swath of American society, with pockets of the country turning to violent white supremacy or a QAnon conspiracy theory positing that America is secretly run by a cabal of child sex traffickers. At precisely the time that progressive forces around the world were under siege, America absented itself from the defense of the most basic propositions that had once defined it in the eyes of the world: The idea that individuals are entitled to a basic set of freedoms that should be applied equally to all people. The idea that democratic governance will compel a society to organize itself around a common set of facts. The idea that people of different races...

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 end of the Cold War removed the demon that needed to be faced down abroad, the competing empire that compelled a certain sense of national unity and purpose. But we never did settle on a new national purpose after the Cold War, a sense of what it meant to be American in the world. Instead, after 9/11 we made the mistake of going abroad to look for new demons to confront. 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.

Once you’ve taken the step of believing that two plus two equals five, of—as Lorraine said of the Chinese Communist Party—looking at a deer and believing someone who tells you that it is a horse, there is no easy return. 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. Yet it was also heartening to see how plain the stakes were to a larger number of Americans in those weeks leading up to the election. Biden’s own flaws as a candidate only made this realization more profound. Here was a fundamentally decent man whose main message, distilled, was a repeated assertion that America was better than this; a message that he clearly believed, deeply, against all evidence to the contrary. But because there was no Obama, no charismatic savior to embody a movement, removing Trump was going to take a collective effort by ma...

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. Things that I once thought unimaginable could happen here, in America. Just voting Trump out was not going to do anything to change that reality, and might even provoke those who supported him to become more radicalized, just as each of Obama’s two elections did. The election of Joe Biden could prevent us from drowning, but it didn’t assure that our feet touched the bottom; that would require more collective effort, the work of a generation in the cyclical fight over what it means to be American.

America is no longer a hegemon. There is opportunity in that. To recover ourselves; to claim the mentality of the nation of outsiders, comprising every strand of humanity. To make capitalism about something more than money, to make national security about something other than subjugation, to make technology work better as a tool for human enlightenment, to make our embrace of multiracial identity a reality beyond rhetoric. To learn from others around the world instead of thinking that it is always we who have something to teach them. To learn from young Hungarians like Katalin Cseh who are working to construct a politics of belonging that joins a sense of local identity with a set of values that are universal. To learn from Russians like Alexey Navalny who are courageously insisting that the corruption of those in power in the world today be revealed, creating an undeniable logic that the system itself must be upended. To learn from Hong Kongers who offer a warning about where the inexorable logic of politics and capitalism in our world is leading today: to the streets in which the sanctity of an individual’s agency to determine who they are and how they think must be defended. To learn how they went about building a movement—Each of us can scale the peak in front of us, each in our own way. Alone together. We live in a time when the world is emerging into a single history, and you can feel the currents of that history moving in the wrong direction. You can see it in the t...