After the Fall: Being American within the World We have Made

Why is democracy so threatened in America and around the globe? And what can we do about it? A former White Home aide and shut confidant to President Barack Obama—and the New York Instances bestselling writer of The World as It Is—travels the globe in a deeply private, fantastically noticed quest for solutions.


In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was serving to Barack Obama start his subsequent chapter, the legacy that they had labored to construct for eight years was being taken aside. To grasp what was taking place in America, Rhodes determined to look outward. Over the following three years, he traveled to dozens of nations, assembly with politicians, activists, and dissidents confronting the identical nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America aside. Alongside the best way, a Russian opposition chief he spoke with was poisoned, the Hong Kong protesters he got here to know noticed their motion snuffed out, and America itself reached the precipice of dropping democracy earlier than giving itself a second probability.

Half memoir and half reportage,
After the Fall is a massively bold and important work of discovery. In his travels, Rhodes comes to appreciate how a lot America’s fingerprints are on a world we helped to form, by means of our publish–Chilly Conflict embrace of unbridled capitalism and our post-9/11 nationalism and militarism; our mania for know-how and social media; and the racism that fueled the backlash to America’s first Black president. On the similar time, Rhodes learns from the tales of a various set of characters—from Barack Obama himself to Cuban rebels to a rising era of worldwide leaders—that wanting squarely at the place America has gone flawed makes clear how important it’s to combat for what America is meant to be, for our personal nation and all the world.