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

by Ben Rhodes

The final takeover does not happen with one spectacular Reichstag conflagration, but is instead an excruciating, years-long process of many scattered, seemingly insignificant little fires that smolder without flames.

After the fall, we must determine what it means to be American again.

seeing the Trump years for what they were: an American experiment with fascism, albeit of a particularly incompetent and corrupt kind.

No, this wasn’t some black swan event, easily explained by a couple of years’ worth of scary headlines. It ignored the lived reality of the eight years that I worked in the White House, the feeling that a cancer was metastasizing everywhere despite our efforts to treat it. It

America wasn’t at risk of being transformed into a semiauthoritarian nation by Trump; we were already well along that spectrum, and the damage could not be undone by any single election.

The Tea Party was built on the wreckage of American capitalism, American leadership, and the Republican Party—making possible everything that came next, including Trump.

From the Supreme Court on down, the United States now has a right-leaning judiciary that can be expected to look favorably on Republican priorities for decades.

The brute force of these moves represented the stakes for a Republican Party that needed to ensure that it could wield power even if a majority of the country wouldn’t vote for them.

it isn’t just they feel they’ve been left behind, they feel that the one percent did a deal to deliberately screw them.”

it was the shock of fear that came from staring into the abyss of where nationalism and tribalism lead.

European identity is that we are diverse and respect each other. I don’t want to make Germans speak French or the other way around, and I also don’t want to ditch my heritage. But we can coexist. I think this is the difference between me and Orban, because I really think that no culture is superior to the other.” This is supposed to be what the United States stands for, the idea that different people can coexist peacefully, that you can have your own local identity and still belong to a larger whole.

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.