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

by Ben Rhodes

After the Cold War, Russia (partly by American design) became more like America as it opened things up. But then, over the last decade, America (partly by Russian design) became more like Russia, as nationalism and conspiracy theorizing shaped our politics. Ironically, this Russian effort was made much easier by American-made social media and online culture.

How extraordinary that in my own relatively short life span, the Internet and globalization have become more of a threat to the democracies that set them in motion than to totalitarian regimes like China’s.

Trump is for a lot of white people what O.J.’s acquittal was to a lot of Black folks—you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.

This was the most obvious and terrifying truth that I’d come to see these last few years: that 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.