Barack Obama’s response to a scandal – whether it be a mass shooting, a racist incident, or the emergence of Donald Trump – has been to insist, “It’s not who we are. are. The more the former US president felt the need to say it, the less convincing it was. Yet the sentiment has often been reused by his closest collaborators.
None, perhaps, were as close to Obama as Benjamin Rhodes, who started out as a speechwriter and ended up as the president’s deputy national security adviser. Rhodes, who co-hosts a popular podcast, Pod Save the World, always travels with Obama on post-presidential trips.
His book After the fall offers an elegiac guide to what’s wrong with America and democracy in the world since Obama’s early days. Obama joked to Rhodes that “Trump is to a lot of white people what the acquittal of OJ Simpson was to a lot of black people – you know it’s wrong, but it feels good.” What haunts Rhodes and, implicitly, her former boss, is that “maybe this is who we are.” A lot of people have wondered the same thing.
Like Rhodes, journalist and author George Packer was an American idealist. Both supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a necessary response to the September 11 terrorist attacks. Both ended up being disappointed with the America they thought they had grown up. Each of their books addresses the troubling question of what it is to be American.
Bill Clinton once said that there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed by what is right with it. The question is as much spiritual as it is empirical. The limitations of such books, in one form or another, are that they inevitably fall back on appeals to the best angels of American nature.
Even in the hands of talented writers such as Packer and Rhodes, there is this nagging sense of American solipsism. Title of the packer, Last best hope (of the Earth), from a line by Abraham Lincoln, is therefore both ironic and serious.
“These truths that we take for granted. . . will only survive if we make them through our own efforts, ”Packer writes. “Some days the project seems absurd and the effort exhausting. But I am American and there is no escape. We have never known another way of life. We have to do this one.
Each of the journeys in these books is far more invigorating than their destinations. Packer divides today’s America into four: free America, populated by big business and libertarians; Smart America, which is the professional meritocratic class; The real America, who are mostly white-outs; and Just America, who is the young new left who rejects many of the country’s self-calming nostrums. If everyone had to be given a face, Free America would be the bleached face of Ronald Reagan; Smart America would be the Clintons; The real America would be Sarah Palin and Trump; and Just America would be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
I would be generally skeptical of the neat taxonomies of a nation of 330 million people. But Packer is a masterful dissector of America’s cultural frontiers. He is particularly acerbic about defenders of the American credo of meritocracy, which he considers hollow.
It describes the book by Thomas Friedman The Lexus and the Olive Tree, who touted the triumph of US-led globalization in the 1990s, as “Das Capital for Smart America ”, in the same way as that of Ayn Rand Atlas shrugged is the bible of libertarian America. The self-satisfaction of America’s urban elites for having succeeded is matched only by their fear of losing what they have. “The fall is steep, and when the parents on the lucky ledge of this chasm look down, the vertigo stuns them,” Packer writes.
Many Smart America kids see the pitfalls of the system and reject gambling – that unquenchable desire to follow an overcrowded elite. But they didn’t necessarily end up in a better mental state.
Unlike Rhodes, who is equivocal about the deepest source of America’s problems, for Packer the root cause is inequality. For the younger inhabitants of Just America, however, Trump was entirely the product of racism, “which relieved them of the burden of understanding the motives of their compatriots in the lowlands, let alone doing something about them.”
More specifically, Packer attributes their rejection of any economic root of populism to a form of self-preservation. In a way, Just America and Smart America are aiming for the same things. “Admitting breed privilege is one way to cling to class privilege,” Packer writes.
Both writers rightly see the pandemic as having crystallized America’s pre-existing conditions – the gap between essential workers and those who could afford to work from home, the virtuous labeling of the former by the latter as ” heroes ”, and the racial and class divide inequalities in health care, education and connectivity. For Packer, the failures of the pandemic meant America was “no longer a light to the nations.”
When Rhodes grew up, his family took him on a “pilgrimage” to sites such as Independence Hall in Philadelphia or George Washington’s home in Mount Vernon. The US response to 9/11 caused Rhodes to lose confidence in his country, which work on the Obama campaign then restored.
Even operating from the Obama White House, however, he couldn’t escape the feeling that “there was cancer spreading.” [in America] despite our efforts to treat it ”. After Obama left office and Rhodes was plagued by an online character assassination racket, he moved to Southern California to escape the toxic atmosphere of Washington DC. It didn’t seem to help much. Having once looked at the American flag with pride, he often felt “absolutely nothing” when he saw the stars and stripes.
Rhodes spent much of the post-Obama years trying to figure out what’s wrong with places like Hong Kong, Hungary, and Russia – as well as America. It is addressed to figures such as Alexei Navalny, the jailed (and recently poisoned) Russian opposition leader, dissidents in China and besieged journalists in Budapest.
Much of what Rhodes writes is illuminating. His diagnosis is that much of the blame for today’s increasingly plutocratic and transactional world lies with America. His overreaction to 9/11 gave the green light to authoritarians around the world to suppress rights. At the same time, the United States exported a supercharged financial capitalism that spawned oligarchies abroad and strengthened them at home.
In Rhodes’ account of his post-2016 conversations with Obama, the two appear to share this perspective – although the former president seems oddly detached from his years as the Commander-in-Chief of the United States. “This is the world that we [America] done, ”Rhodes writes. He is right up to a point. But a lot is happening, whether the United States likes it or not. The future of the world is in many hands.
If I had a review of these two impressive but imperfect books, it would be the same. In their own way, each is reluctant to measure America against the others – the most informative barometer of any society. Both are fully capable of greater insight. In their disappointment with America, they remain attached to its exceptionalism. Rudyard Kipling once asked: “What do they know about England that only England knows?” To better understand America, it would sometimes be useful to see it from further away.
After the fall: Being American in the World We Created by Ben Rhodes, Bloomsbury £ 20, 384 pages
Last best hope: America in crisis and renewal by George Packer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux $ 27 / Cap Johnathan £ 14.99, 240 pages
Edouard Luce is the US national publisher of the FT
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