A sometimes wise, often strange, book

The book excerpts that follow, written in 2020 as far as I can tell, seem perhaps even more on point about what we are trying to comprehend today than when they were written:

Whereas Hungary represents how capitalism without meaning or restraint open the door for a return to an older nationalism, Russia represents the disruptive force that nationalism can be in the world when hitched to a belligerent approach to national security, the worldview that domestic and international laws are always to be subjugated to the raw will to power. The corruption that seeped into Hungarian political life is but a drop in the ocean of graft upon which Russia runs. ... The nostalgia for the past and ceaseless Us versus Them politics was ... a reflection of Putin's political project, one in which greatness is defined by what you can destroy, not what you can build. And what Putin set out to destroy, above all, was the idea that was so prevalent when the Berlin Wall came down: that a new world order of democratic values and agreed-upon rules and norms was here to stay. 

For much of the twentieth-first century, Russia has led the counter-revolution to American domination -- not by seeking to upend the local order that America constructed, but rather by disrupting it from within, turning it (and ultimately America itself) into the ugliest version of itself. I think of how Russians must have seen us Americans as I was growing up: capitalist stooges, driven entirely by a lust for profit; a militarized empire, unconcerned with the lives of distant people harmed by our foreign policies; racist hypocrites, preaching human rights abroad and practicing systematic oppression at home. That's the America Putin wants all the world to see, and that's the America that Putin wants us to be. 

Think about it. Isn't that what you would want for someone who humiliated you? For them to be revealed, before the world, as the worst version of themselves? By doing so, Putin leveled the playing field -- the world is what it is, a hard place in which might makes right, capitalism is as fungible as Communism, and a ruthless Russia will always have to be treated with the respect it was denied after the wall came down.

• • •

Ben Rhodes, from whose After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made these thoughts derive, was a national security aide and speech writer to President Barack Obama. He's all of 44  now and served 8 years back then on the White House staff. The more senior figures in the U.S. foreign policy establishment, then and now, seem to regard him as an irritating twerp.

Nonetheless, it has leaked out that Obama used Rhodes extensively when he wanted to open up to normalizing relations with Cuba -- perhaps some youthful thinking helped break that fossilized morass open. Today Rhodes can be found as cohost of Pod Save the World.

In response to the shock of the United States electing an authoritarian moron to succeed Obama, Rhodes wandered the world, trying to understand illiberalism on the ascendant. This book is the story of the places (Hungary, Russia, Hong Kong) and people (mostly members of a young, modern, educated class like his own) who he met and commiserated with.

It's not a bad book -- as the excerpts above indicate, it is often insightful.

But to this reader, it's also just plain weird. 

Rhodes seems genuinely to know a lot about the places he describes. (With his background, one would hope so.) But he shows not the least brush with any leftish narrative of "western" history. I'm not talking hard core Marxism or Lenin on imperialism. He uses all the conventional critical words -- corruption, capitalism, nationalism, American exceptionalism. He understands that women matter, but perhaps has never had to understand how we're different. He describes being in his own country during the "racial reckoning" of 2020 and he is sharp about how white supremacy constrained Obama. But above all, his mindframe is "rules-based-order," "international law," "human rights." He doesn't seem to have a frame for society-wide, systemic oppression and subjugation.

Don't get me wrong: I love that some of the horrors and heartbreaks in our past have taught the U.S. and Europe to care about liberal values. But I can't understand the implications of what we affirm on our better days without also considering fascism, communism, imperialism, colonialism. And patriarchy. And somehow Rhodes seems untouched by these concepts; they are not his frame.

Rhodes is aware of US hypocrisy. He knows unequivocally that the "War on Terror" was both a practical and ethical disaster for the country. He knows U.S. global hegemony is over. He's perhaps like his old boss without the cosmopolitan sophistication, preferring to point his readers to visions of better possibilities rather than chew over the breakage of the past. He's likable. But this is an odd book, just a notch off-center for this reader.