This process of reexamination leads Ben Rhodes – author of an excellent and much-discussed 2018 White House memoir The World as It Is – to question key assumptions and draw remarkably critical conclusions regarding the United States’ global role. After the Fall is indeed testament to how its author had to wean himself off the somewhat naively nationalistic stories of his youth to grasp the arc of recent decades. 1977) identifies himself as a member of an emotionally committed, idealistic, and disillusioned generation. Throughout, Rhodes comes to realize how much America s fingerprints are on a world it helped to shape: through the excesses of the post-Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism, post-9/11 nationalism and militarism, mania for technology and social media, and the racism that shaped the backlash to the Obama presidency.Īt the same time, he learns from a diverse set of characters from Obama to rebels to a rising generation of leaders how looking squarely at where America has gone wrong only makes it more essential to fight for what America is supposed to be for itself, and for the entire world.“I was an American in a world that America had made in its own image, a world that now felt oddly foreign in its familiarity”, Ben Rhodes writes in his new book After the Fall, an engaging and somewhat ambivalent attempt to understand the ascendancy of authoritarianism and nationalism across the globe. A writer, political commentator and former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting under President Barack Obama, Rhodes (b. After the Fall is a hugely ambitious and essential work of discovery. Over the next three years, he travelled to dozens of countries, meeting with politicians, activists, and dissidents confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America apart.Īlong the way, a Russian opposition leader he spends time with is poisoned, the Hong Kong protesters he comes to know see their movement snuffed out, and America itself reaches the precipice of losing democracy before giving itself a second chance.
To understand what was happening in America, Rhodes decided to look outwards. In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was helping Barack Obama begin his next chapter, the legacy they worked to build for eight years was being taken apart. After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made Rhodes Ben Rhodes € 26.99 This item is currently not available through our suppliers.
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