After the Fall

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

This was a hard, frustrating, infuriating, fascinating, depressing book to read. But as Gerald from Elephant and Piggie so eloquently put it in The Cookie Fiasco, “Good books make me feel big things.” So maybe that’s not entirely bad. But this book was a lot to take in.

Ben Rhodes was a speechwriter for Obama, and then a key advisor, and throughout definitely a true believer and acolyte in second stage neo-liberalism. The technocratic liberalism Obama so embodied, the belief in slow progressive change that was tinged with a sense of inevitability. As such he is an excellent guide through the shock and pain and, well, betrayal, of going from Obama to Trump. Americans are a people with short memories –well, about certain things—and so it may not be easy to remember the overwhelming support that Obama had, that we had 60 Democratic Senators for a short time, and that in 2008 and 2012 some pundits were actually asking if Democrats were the ones who had a lock on the electoral college no matter what forever and ever. But even more than that, we had Obama, we had Pope Francis – he was pretty exciting at the time, don’t forget—we had Blackish, we had Hamilton. The Arab Spring showed that the internet would make everything better. Gay marriage had been legalized and the whole tide seemed to have already turned there. Everything was changing and even if not everyone was on board it seemed inevitable that yeah, the arc of history would turn towards justice! And then it all came crashing down.

But, of course, there was so much turmoil, so much of fascism and the right wing fighting back in local areas and around the world, and many hadn’t seen it. Or thought it was just the lashing out of people who no longer had any power over politics or hears and minds A lot of the problems that we are facing now are not only because we didn’t fully eradicate our sins of racism and toxic masculinity, but also because there are people directly fighting for fascism and autocracy to win, have been for a long time, and the liberal wing has ceded ground without even realizing it was in a fight. In many ways this is a book of naivety and what makes it frustrating is that as amazingly well researched and detailed and raw and honest and insightful it is it still has huge blind spots that Rhodes is unwilling or unable to grapple with or, even more depressing a thought, unaware that he has.

After the Fall covers a lot of ground, and I won’t be able to cover all of it here, but I’ll try to focus on a few main areas that stuck with me. The first is the very coordinated, very planned, rise of disinformation and support for fascism we’ve seen around the world. Rhodes recounts a rather chilling tale of learning that Black Cube had been hired by Trump to dig up dirt and harass Rhodes and others involved in the Iran treaty negotiations in order to discredit them, and also later on his discussion with an internet ‘reputation’ firm. While Rhodes ultimately did not hire the reputation firm, what they showed based on his search results was, to paraphrase, that what their firm could do for him, someone else was doing to him. These are disconcerting tales for a couple of reasons. The first is that, of course, it’s impossible to actually trust information we receive now. We all know this intellectually, but that is very different from really internalizing how much of a loss we are at in terms of having shared facts. And, of course, anything that gets people to be cynical and disillusioned helps fascism. If there are no facts, why not just believe what you want? And if everyone and everything is corrupt and terrible, then how can you compare and why not vote for the grifter and crook who will at least help your team and hurt the people you don’t like?

But the other reason it is a disconcerting tale is just because it is a reminder of how much work has gone into creating noise, discrediting truth, sowing discontent, and all in support of fascism. And much of it, of course, coming from Russia. Zeynap Tufecki has discussed in Twitter and Tear Gas how we knew this was happening for years, and there were practice runs in some smaller European nations prior to 2016, but it was not recognized for the serious threat it was and is. The naïve thought was that our democracy was too strong, our media landscape—that has been hollowed out for decades and is so dominated by Murdoch—would simply prevail. And yet we are still here, with the threat still ever present, and with still no real way of knowing how to combat it and regulate and govern the internet.

The next is China. This was truly a chilling section, actually, reading how much China has gained control over much of our economy and soft power. You may remember how a few years China moved to consolidate greater control over Hong Kong, leading to major protests. Daryl Morey, the General Manager for the Houston Rockets, tweeted out support for the protests. And China protested mightily. They pressured the NBA to make the player apologize, and eventually threatened NBA access to the Chinese market and threatened not to show the games. And guess what? Morey apologized. Just to be clear, what happened is that another country pressured a US company to make a United States citizen limit their criticism, and they all complied. With little or no outcry. This is mind boggling. The group that is screaming about cancel culture and the limits on free speech had little to nothing to say. And as Rhodes systematically lays down, this is just one example of something that happens constantly. Internet companies that talk about how regulations or censorship will destroy their company comply with incredibly overbearing and terrifying requests. And what China wants becomes baked into business models and internalized so that people self censor without even realizing it. Movie makers know that anything that is too explicit about celebrating privacy, democracy, or freedom won’t be shown in China and so they take a different angle in order to have access to the Chinese market – which means that the stories we are telling ourselves are also more geared towards autocracy than democracy and freedom. I suppose we don’t have proof of this, but I would guess it’s why superhero movies are a bit of a mess plotwise, rather than a simple show of punching out Nazis in the name of freedom, and probably why they often come down on the side of the panopticon.

This section is, as I say, pretty effective and very well put together. Rhodes digs into the long term planning of the current Chinese leadership and how they wield soft power, including in development overseas, supplanting American influence. He is also rather clear on how it happened, with seemingly small concession that made sense at the time after seemingly small concession that made sense at the time, all with an eye towards allowing American businesses access to the Chinese markets. What is infuriating here is that so much of what he talks about as the common wisdom and what ‘everyone’ accepted as reality had people fighting against it even at the time. He talks about Clinton granting China Most Favored Nation status in trading, and how it is totally understandable because we all thought that China opening up economically would automatically lead to opening democratically and us winning the war of influence. The thing is, though, even at the time there were people saying otherwise. The very left groups were saying that no, laissez-faire capitalism (which is also not what China has) does not equal democracy and civil liberties; that it was more important to fight for what we said we really wanted – democracy and civil liberties—and use economic policy as a carrot, and that no, actually, global trade with no rules on environment and labor was damaging to everyone. But those voices where shouted and laughed down. In fact, if Rhodes is to be believed he isn’t even aware that there were whole groups on the left against many of the decisions made to allow trade without civil liberties. And this is infuriating and a problem because, well, I was definitely part of that chorus and it’s frustrating to be erased. But also if there is still this ignoring of the fact that the most progressive wing – the wing that was also against Iraq from the beginning and other debacles – had a point means that those voices are still ignored, the centrists and more Serious Thinkers who bought into conventional wisdom are still elevated, and we might keep making the same mistakes.

But the other issue here is that Rhodes still has trouble identifying one of the key players in this story. Oh, he dances right up to it here talking about all the concessions made to China in the name of business and the bottom line. But he stops short of really identifying the problem of global capitalism and greed as a big part of the issue. There’s a fascinating scene at the end where Rhodes is giving the kind of talk people who used to be high up in an administration get paid to give to corporate speakers, and they’re all complaining about Trump and how he can be reigned in. Rhodes asks this group of very serious people, who would like Trump to not be so, you know, Trump, how many there voted for him. And more than half the group raise their hands. Because of taxes. Because they don’t want regulation. Because greed and the need to get more more more was greater than their concern over country or democracy or principle. It is far past time to recognize that the wealthiest, the business class, are not in this with the rest of us. They are against democracy if democracy doesn’t line their pockets, and they are not going to make decisions based on what they know is best for the country. They will risk all of us to keep their power and their billions.

I don’t know how we address that. I don’t know how we start thinking long term. I don’t know how we realize we actually are in a class war. And Rhodes doesn’t, either. He is short on solutions, but worryingly he is also short on really identifying the source of the problems. And we desperately need to figure all of that out because time is running short.