For many Americans, Donald Trump’s 2016 victory came as a shock. For Ben Rhodes (1977), adviser and speechwriter to Barack Obama, it was traumatic. He had to passively watch as prominent trolls and conspiracy theorists who’d taunted him online took over the offices where he’d worked, and reversed one policy move after another painstakingly crafted in the Obama era. It didn’t feel like a democratic change of power, it felt like a reckoning. “A tumor was spreading everywhere, despite our best efforts to do something about it,” writes Rhodes, known for the bestseller My years with Obama in his new book After the fall.
As the adrenaline that had helped him for eight years drained from his veins, he was overwhelmed with a sense that not only the US, but the world was going in the wrong direction. That feeling had plagued him in his final years in the White House, when his speeches to Obama reached just four in ten Americans.
A form of trauma processing
After the fall can be read as a geopolitical consideration, but also as a form of trauma processing. From Hungary to Hong Kong, Rhodes visits freedom and democracy activists who face the tide. Not so long ago he did his best to encourage them, nowadays he feels that he is in the same boat. A few years ago, he was astonished when respectable Republican politicians “used their power to give the fabrications of an incompetent selfish maniac a thin layer of legitimacy.” He now knows that today’s Republican party culture is surprisingly similar to Orbánism in Hungary or Putinism in Russia—the same mix of nationalism and authoritarianism, the same hostility, the same permanent suspension of fact.
Rhodes felt a kinship especially with his Russian contemporary Alexei Navalny: ‘(…) we were both on the wrong side of the political trend in the world, although the dangers he faced were many times greater.’ The latter became apparent soon after their last Zoom conversation, when Navalny collapsed on a plane over Siberia.
In After the fall Rhodes mixes conversations and travel impressions with impressions of world leaders he gained while traveling with Obama. You get a different feeling from Putin than from Xi Jinping, we learn. Putin is angry and resentful, Xi is all optimistic calm, who has a firm belief that he is perfectly right. Rhodes also saw this conviction in a famous compatriot: Mark Zuckerberg. Rhodes considers him largely responsible for “destroying the concept of objective reality and expertise on which national decisions should be based.”
A downward spiral
The common thread in After the fall is Rhodes’ analysis that democracy worldwide has entered a downward spiral at the hands of his own country’s exports. The English subtitle, Being American in the World We’ve Made, covers the load better than the all too neutral Dutch, In search of democracy in a changing world. Democracy is nowhere to be found, the author struggles with feelings of guilt and shame about the great contribution of the US to the world in which we live.
First, there was globalization. In the 1990s, the self-overestimation of neoliberal ideologues knew hardly any limits. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ivy League academics like Jeffrey Sachs and Larry Summers went to Russia to advocate the joys of unregulated capitalism. The KGB version of it was a lawless robbery capitalism that plunged the Russian population into an acute poverty trap.
The Chinese Communist Party emerged as one of the most powerful capitalist players in the heyday of neoliberalism. As a result, the global economy is now deeply entwined with a totalitarian regime. Western economic actors are terrified of taunting Chinese rulers with comments about human rights. They are even prepared to remain silent about the situation in Xinjiang province.
In the Chinese regime’s discourse, the re-education camps for Uyghurs in Xinjiang are necessary for the fight against terrorism. The ‘war on terror’ is the second American export product that Rhodes denounces. It enabled many types of repressive regimes worldwide to ‘make their own power a security issue’. Before 9/11 Putin waged war in Chechnya, after 9/11 he fought terrorism there. When you can label opponents and even entire opposition parties as terrorists, suddenly everything is allowed.
The digital revolution
Repressive regimes are also generously taking advantage of US-originated technology. The Chinese regime used Silicon Valley inventions to create the world’s first tech totalitarian state. The third point in Rhodes’s accuse of his own country: recklessly “embracing and disseminating technologies without considering what they could be used for.”
The digital revolution appears to result not in the spread of democratic ideas, but in enemy thinking that undermines democracies. The cement of digital enclaves in the Western world is the belief of members that they have discovered something evil in the Other – hostility and victimization create a sense of community more than ever before. Just as the 20th century was about ideology, so is the 21st about identity.
After the fall is a good analysis with good examples. Obama put things into perspective after reading the manuscript: “Every generation has its own version of this struggle, Ben.” Anyone who wants to can argue that Rhodes shows himself to be a typical American by making his own country responsible for so many abuses in the world: it is the reversed version of the US that makes the world better everywhere. Libraries are filled by American authors who know their country’s world is getting worse—the merit of Rhodes is that his analysis doesn’t turn into anti-Americanism. “Seeing what America has done wrong has made me love what America should be.”
Ben Rhodes: After the Fall – In Search of Democracy in a Changing World. Translated from English by Pon Ruiter and Aad Janssen. The Busy Bee; 400 pages; €30.
