After the Fall Quotes

“Win elections through right-wing populism that taps into people’s outrage over the corruption and inequities wrought by unbridled globalization. Enrich corrupt oligarchs who in turn fund your politics. Create a vast partisan propaganda machine. Redraw parliamentary districts to entrench your party in power. Pack the courts with right-wing judges and erode the independence of the rule of law. Keep big business on your side with low taxes and favorable treatment. Demonize your political opponents through social media disinformation. Attack civil society as a tool of George Soros. Cast yourself as the sole legitimate defender of national security. Wrap the whole project in a Christian nationalist message that taps into the longing for a great past. Offer a sense of belonging for the disaffected masses. Relentlessly attack the Other: immigrants, Muslims, liberal elites.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“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. —Ece Temelkuran”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“History looks very different depending upon which window you open to look at it.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“It’s as important, if not more important, to create alternative identities in terms of more local communities—communities of chosen values, which for some people might be religion and church, and for others might be the hiking club or a sports club. What’s important is that people don’t feel lost. Nationalism affects mainly those who need ties, need bonds to communities, and don’t have them.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“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.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“We demonstrated weakness, and the weak are beaten.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“Human beings, left to our own devices, are equally capable of beauty and evil,”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“In those moments, I’d look at the flag that once stirred such emotion inside me and feel absolutely nothing.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“As Márta said, they make politics dirty and dispiriting on purpose, so people will turn away. Maybe this is what whoever was behind Black Cube wanted,”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“I sensed something familiar, the insider who still feels he’s outside the system observing it.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“Sometimes conspiracy theories are the darker musings of those kept out of power in a society. Sometimes they are fueled by those in power to keep a society distracted. But the Trump years went beyond even that—conspiracy theories were a driving force behind the government itself, connecting to the most potent grievances of those who felt excluded even though their guy had won, shaping the subject matter of the national discourse, and radicalizing individuals inclined to prejudice. Once people choose to exist in an entirely separate reality, bringing them back is no easy task, especially when every turn of national events can be framed as a validation of their grievances. We will be living with the residue of that radicalization for a long time.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“In the second year of the Trump presidency, I attended a dinner of American hedge funders in Hong Kong. I was there as a guest speaker, to survey the usual assortment of global hot spots. A thematic question emerged from the group—was the “Pax Americana” over? There was a period of familiar cross-talk about whether Trump was a calamitous force unraveling the international order or merely an impolitic Republican politician advancing a conventional agenda. I kept interjecting that Trump was ushering in a new era—one of rising nationalist competition that could lead to war and unchecked climate change, to the implosion of American democracy and the accelerated rise of a China that would impose its own rules on the world. Finally, one of the men at the table interrupted with some frustration. He demanded a show of hands—how many around the table had voted for Trump, attracted by the promise of tax cuts and deregulation? After some hesitation, hand after hand went up, until I was looking at a majority of raised hands. The tally surprised me. Sure, I understood the allure of tax cuts and deregulation to a group like that. But these were also people who clearly understood the dangers that Trump posed to American democracy and international order. The experience suggested that even that ambiguous term “Pax Americana” was subordinate to the profit motive that informed seemingly every aspect of the American machinery. I’d come to know the term as a shorthand for America’s sprawling global influence, and how—on balance—the Pax Americana offered some stability amid political upheavals, some scaffolding around the private dramas of billions of individual lives. From the vantage point of these bankers, the Pax Americana protected their stake in international capital markets while allowing for enough risk—wars, coups, shifting energy markets, new technologies—so that they could place profitable bets on the direction of events. Trump was a bet. He’d make it easier for them to do their business and allow them to keep more of their winnings, but he was erratic and hired incompetent people—so much so that he might put the whole enterprise at risk. But it was a bet that enough Americans were willing to make, including those who knew better. From the perspective of financial markets, I had just finished eight years in middle management, as a security official doing his small part to keep the profit-generating ocean liner moving. The debates of seemingly enormous consequence—about the conduct of wars, the nature of national identity, and the fates of many millions of human beings—were incidental to the broader enterprise of wealth being created.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“Just as the United States helped create the prosperity that enabled the Party’s control, U.S. technology has been copied, repurposed, and enhanced to secure that control—sometimes with investment from U.S. venture capital. Across China, a program known as Police Cloud allows for the collection and integration of previously unimaginable amounts of information: who you’re in contact with, what you buy, where you travel, when you shop, whether you pay your parking tickets, and so on. A “social credit” system allows the government to affix a score to someone: How reliable are you? Could you pose a threat of some sort? You live your life with the knowledge that the sum total of your actions could be evaluated by someone, somewhere, with some purpose. This creates incentives and disincentives, given the reach of the Party into people’s lives. Disincentives are clear: Say the wrong thing, and you could end up detained. But the incentives may be even more powerful: Want a good job? Want your kids to get into a good school? You may have to consider those aspirations with everything you do.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to be nothing, have no place in it.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“I recognized a different form of rage—the disappointment of someone watching a serious enterprise like the presidency be debased, the sense of betrayal that must come from watching an entire nation do something as unfathomably stupid as electing Donald Trump.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made

“To be American in 2020 was to live in a country diminished in the world, unwilling to control the spread of disease or face up to our racism, and looking over the precipice of abandoning the very democracy that was supposed to be the solid core of our national identity.”
― Ben Rhodes, After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made