Here is a man-a smart man, an educated man-who, in his own telling, is flabbergasted to discover for himself and his reader things that have been obvious-and written about -for years. It takes a certain kind of privilege, as Ben occasionally acknowledges, to be surprised by the darkness of history. Yes, Navalny has had a harder time of things, Ben writes, but their righteous anger at corruption is pretty similar, no? (When Ben was writing this book, Alexey was still a free man, still unpoisoned by a weapons-grade nerve agent, though now he is recovering from a nearly successful assassination attempt and in jail for the forseeable future-unlike Ben, who lives in L.A.) There’s an assumption that America is inherently different and that Americans are just better, immune to the kinds of undemocratic things that other, less advanced peoples do, like storming their own parliament in an effort to overturn a free and fair election-only to wonder how this could possibly happen in America when it does. That, in fact, “history never ends,” that history is a bloody, awful business, and that the progress of humankind is neither inevitable nor irreversible.īen compares himself to Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. He learned, for instance, that Frances Fukuyama ’s proclamation that the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the “ end of history ” was near-sighted. The problem is his tone of wide-eyed wonder about the discovery of truths that are painfully self-evident.īen describes meeting activists for coffee, staring at hotel room ceilings deep in thought, or sitting in front of Buddhas, “trying to feel something,” and experiencing insights that I really hope he understood years ago, before he became a foreign policy advisor to the Leader of the Free World at the age of thirty-two. Its primary conclusion-that unregulated American capitalism and information technology have helped raise the global anti-democratic tide that has returned to our shores that Trump is Putin is Orban -is hardly novel. Here’s the thing about After the Fall : it is crushingly obvious. In her first dispatch she talks about the stunning naivete of Ben Rhodes: Now she’s in the newsletter space putting together her own media company, which is very cool. I’ve always liked Julia Ioffe’s stuff, going back to her TNR days.
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