In After the Fall, Rhodes makes every effort to live up to that reputation as an angry young man, petulantly scorning his many critics as phonies. In the early weeks of the pandemic, Rhodes felt an “unutterable rage”-though not so unutterable as to prevent him from describing it, incessantly, in his new book, After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made.įive years ago, in a widely-read profile of Rhodes written by David Samuels for the New York Times Magazine, Obama’s United Nations ambassador Samantha Power remarked that the character from literature Rhodes most reminded her of was Holden Caulfield. It was “rage” that inspired Rhodes to get involved in politics, and rage that “kept me going day after day when all my other sources of motivation had dissipated or run up against the limits of an uncooperative world.” Rage in response to “the daily realities of Trump’s America” has “eaten away” at Rhodes over the past four years. “Rage” is the word Rhodes uses most often to describe his feelings. If you experienced the world like this, if you had convinced yourself that every single person who questioned your perspective on a wide variety of highly contentious issues was either arguing in bad faith or willfully malign, it would take a superhuman capacity not to be consumed by the “visceral, dumfounded anger” that appears to be the overriding factor in Rhodes’s life. Federal Election Commission, along with Republican congressional redistricting efforts and schemes “requiring certain forms of identification to register” to vote, come straight from Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orban’s nationalist playbook of “Us versus Them politics.” As for the unfortunate souls who find themselves opposing Rhodes in various legislative battles or ideological debates, he describes dealing with such people as akin to debating those who insist that “two plus two equals five” or, to cite a parable offered by a Chinese dissident regarding that country’s ruling Communist Party, who point at a deer and tell you it’s a horse.
According to Barack Obama’s deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications, the presidency of Donald Trump amounted to “an American experiment with fascism.” Contemplating a life beyond the maddening vicissitudes of politics, Rhodes abandons such an irresponsible notion when he realizes that, but for him, the deluge: “Perhaps this was how fascists got away with it through history.” The Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v.
How comforting it must be to see the world as does Ben Rhodes: Everyone who disagrees with him is either a fascist, an idiot, or both.
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