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

by Ben Rhodes

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...