After the Fall by Ben Rhodes review – nostalgic
for certainties
Barack Obama’s speechwriter considers America’s fall
from grace, an unnerving attempt to discredit him and what the former president
thinks now
Julian
Borger
Fri 18 Jun
2021 02.30 EDT
Ben Rhodes
was Barack Obama’s speechwriter and became one of the former president’s
closest aides, a constant presence at his shoulder as he toured the world and
sat down with the powerful and famous. Three years ago, soon after leaving the
White House, Rhodes wrote a compelling insider account of that era called The
World As It Is. He has now written the sequel, and has opted for the
apocalyptic title After the Fall. It is the story of an aftermath, of the
acolyte still travelling the globe with the greying former president as he
garners awards, mobbed by adoring fans. A rueful Obama muses about his
transition from political force to celebrity, adored but virtually powerless.
After the
Fall is a cleverly chosen title. It is about the ending of an administration
and the aspirations of those who served in it, who look on aghast at the reign
of Donald Trump. But it also has the suggestion of original sin – in this case,
the US’s. The subtitle is Being American in the World We’ve Made, and the
central theme of the book is a contemplation of the seeds of the country’s fall
from grace in the world. Trump’s crassness is not the cause of the descent, but
a symptom.
Rhodes
traces much of the decline to the 9/11 attacks and the George W Bush
administration’s reaction to them, which sought to “reorient America’s entire
national purpose to the task of fighting terrorism”. The Iraq invasion, in
pursuit of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, “cracked open the facade
that elites in the United States knew what they were doing” and called into
question “why Americans were the stewards of world order”. Then came the
largely made-in-America financial crash of 2008, destabilising politics-as-usual
around the world. At home, a pivotal 5-4 vote by the US supreme court in 2010
opened the floodgates to unaccountable “dark money” saturating politics.
Meanwhile ever more extreme politics were facilitated by Facebook, Twitter and
the like.
“Profit-driven
social media algorithms, like unchecked political contributions, were treated
as free speech beyond the reach of government regulations,” Rhodes writes. He
travels around the world observing the plight of other frail societies, such as
Myanmar, Hungary, Russia and Hong Kong, where democracy is in retreat or has
been routed altogether. He talks to dissidents trying to push back against the
tide, and finds common strands in the American malaise and the rest of the
world’s. Little of the analysis is new or original, but it is certainly
elegantly expressed. This is the man, after all, with a degree in creative
writing, who wrote so many of Obama’s soaring speeches.
And Rhodes
does have an interesting personal tale to tell. He found out from reporting by
the Observer in May 2018 that a shady firm of Israeli ex-spooks-for-hire called
Black Cube was sniffing around him and another Obama staffer, Colin Kahl. The
firm had been hired by the Trump camp to discredit the top officials involved
in the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The abortive smear effort involved sending
creepy fake emails to Rhodes’s wife. She did not fall for it but the experience
so unnerved her that she insisted on moving their young family out of the
political crosshairs to Los Angeles. Rhodes cannot help wondering if the
family’s decision to flee politics is what his persecutors wanted all along. To
kill off political engagement and drive an activist generation towards apathy
and cynicism. He comes to the realisation that he is “a casualty of a war over
identity – who defines it and who doesn’t, what is true and what isn’t, what happened
and what didn’t, who you are and who you aren’t.”
There is a
very personal element to After the Fall in which Rhodes admits to
disorientation and a desire for purpose in the long spiralling descent from the
Oval Office. “I was a thirty-nine-year-old with as little idea what I was going
to do with the rest of my life as I’d had as a twenty-three-year-old,” he
reflects. “History was no longer something that took place in rooms where I
sat.” The introspection, coupled with an itinerary of venerable European
destinations, such as Paris, Budapest and Baden-Baden, sometimes gives the book
the feel of a melancholy Chekhovian tale: the young courtier in the retinue of
a revered, recently ousted monarch, touring old watering holes. He meets
like-minded contemporaries, including Hungarian, Russian and Hong Kong
dissidents, and they try to come to terms with the implosion of the world they
had once hoped for.
Throughout,
Rhodes struggles with a certain ennui. On a trip to Yangon, he wanders into a
pagoda and “sat staring at a Buddha, waiting to feel something”. Some of the
best passages arise when he is back together with his old boss, and we are
given an insight into what Obama thinks of it all, including the acerbic and
memorable observation that “Trump is for a lot of white people what OJ’s
acquittal was to a lot of black folks – you know it’s wrong, but it feels
good.”
We can also
sit in while Obama considers the leadership challenge facing the progressive
democratic cause in the US and further afield. Surveying the candidates in the
2020 Democratic primaries, the former president says he agrees with Bernie
Sanders in his diagnosis of America’s malaise, a system chronically rigged to
benefit the very rich. “But there’s something missing when Bernie talks about
it,” Obama adds. “A spiritual component, a national identity that’s not
nationalist.” Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg are better at invoking national
unity but don’t have Sanders’s and Elizabeth Warren’s fire in the belly, their
outrage. Searching for a historical precedent of a progressive leader who could
offer both, Obama has to go all the way back to Bobby Kennedy.
It
illustrates a certain nostalgia pervading the book, looking back at the times
before the fall, and the allure of the apparent certainties of Rhodes’s youth,
when America seemed to have all the answers. They still exert their pull on
him, even though he now knows them to be hollow.
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