Liberalism is Not a Guaranteed Outcome

A new book by Ben Rhodes: ‘After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made’

After the Fall by Ben Rhodes

“To be born American in the late twentieth century,” Ben Rhodes writes in his 2021 book After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, “was to take the fact of a particular kind of American exceptionalism as granted — a state of nature arrived at after all else had failed.”

However, as Americans began to forget World War II and as the Cold War also ended, “the American-led international order…lost its organizing principle” and replaced it with “hypercapitalist globalization that expanded until it was felled by its own excesses in 2008.” Only a few years after the September 11, 2001 attacks, President Bush’s language had begun to sound like “a post facto justification for something that had no justification.” By the Obama administration, the moral ambiguity of the ongoing wars had apparently seeped into American politics more broadly: politics was confused, cynical, and hostile, and racism was directed against the President. The zeitgeist of “unchecked American capitalism, military power, and technological innovation” ultimately resurrected “nationalism and social control in new packaging.” And “if there is a governing ideology in the world today, it is this crude transactionalism” between wealthy people and…