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

by Ben Rhodes

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.