David’s Reviews > After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made > Status Update

Poignant quote, p. 329:
"The obvious mediocrity and mendacity of T**** 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."

"Fight the Smears" was for me the most powerful chapter yet in the book. During his relaying of a conversation in a WV B&B with an Obama voter turned T**** supporter, trying earnestly to uncover her understanding of an event like Benghazi, I would suddenly feel how tensed I had unconsciously become. He seems somehow still hopeful since they could be civil after the exchange, but hope is clearly waning.

The ocean liner that is the US government is hard to maneuver, the current government's members mostly can just try to make it start changing direction and hope their ideas are picked up by subsequent administrations. But when the next group wants to sabotage everything that was done, those attempted changes can end up looking like wasted effort.

In the latest section, Rhodes highlights just some of the absurdity in the "forever wars," where supposed enemies of the US might end up funded or otherwise supported by the US, perhaps because a supposed ally of the US felt their own narrative to influence people was supported by allowing their continuance. Very screwed up, but hard to counteract in a sound bite.

"Forever War" points to the PATRIOT act as an identifiable beginning of decline, where America essentially made rules against its own tenets of freedom to attempt to have people feel safe. Ben points out that a class of his asked in 2019 to name the big issues of the day did not mention terrorism at all, even though Bush II had made that fight the central goal of American society.

In "We Do Big Things" Ben describes more about his upbringing and the contrast between his parents, also about how they both ended up somewhat separated from their families over life choices. He muses that maybe that separation and lack of tribe made him and his brother strive for big achievements, so Ben ended up in the White House while his brother became prez of CBS.

Starting the section "who we are: being American." Hiw weaving of a story about his panic attack in 2006 into the narrative of how things have changed for "the American people"/"the Americans" was pretty effective at conveying the feeling of unease and anxiousness endemic to our current existence.

End of the section discussing China and Hong Kong, basically using those as proxies for things happening around the globe with authoritarian governments flexing their muscular control over democratic entities. "Power does not give up without a fight," indeed.

This section covers "The Chinese Dream." The succinct summary of the goals of leaders in recent Chinese history by a friend of the author seems worth remembering: "Mao was _Stand up_. Then Deng was _Get rich_. And now Xi is _Become strong_."

The role of technology in China's programs is unsettling - think of "Minority Report" and the recognition of your face everywhere you go, your movements always monitored.

It's almost certainly because I agree with much of this book's assessment of TFG, but it just seems filled with apt descriptions of the sickening corruption that poured from that administration into the rest of society, and in this past chapter about A War Without Violence how we as a country have become so susceptible to manipulation by actors like Russia.