After the Fall: A Virtual Evening with Ben Rhodes and Jon Meacham

good evening buena noches and thank you for tuning in on behalf of all of us at the locally based independently owned bookstore books and books in miami florida and in partnership with miami book fair it's my pleasure to welcome you to a virtual evening with ben rhodes to discuss his new book after the fall being american in the world we've made published by our friends at random house ben rhodes is a writer political commentator and national security analyst he is currently a contributor for nbc news and msnbc co-host of pod save the world a senior advisor to former president barack obama and chair of national security action which he co-founded with jake sullivan in 2018. from 2009 to 2017 ben served as a deputy national security adviser to president obama and later wrote the new york times bestseller the world as it is a memoir of the obama white house which we were lucky enough to present at the coral gables bookshop what seems like many moons ago now to moderate tonight's conversation we're joined by john meacham john is a pulitzer prize winning biographer the author of the new york times bestsellers thomas jefferson the art of power american lion andrew jackson in the white house franklin and winston destiny in power the american odyssey of george herbert walker bush and the soul of america the battle for our better angels he is a distinguished visiting professor at vanderbilt university a contributing writer for the new york times book review and a fellow of the society of american historians throughout this evening's broadcast you're invited to post questions by using the ask a question feature at the bottom of the screen and you can order your copy of after the fall from books and books below by pressing the green button we appreciate each and every order and the generous donations from viewers everywhere and now without further ado i'd like to welcome our guests to the virtual stage hello welcome welcome thank you thank you i'm going to take moderating privilege and uh thank our friends in miami uh books and books has been a long time friend of mine and so hit the green button a lot buy the whole rhodes cannon then buy some trollop you know buy some jane austen it's a long summer ahead uh so i'm honored to be here with my friend uh ben and i'm just going to jump right in uh there's nothing more uh resonant right now than the tension between democracy and autocracy uh the incumbent president uh with whom then served in the obama white house has made that a recurring theme and i'm intrigued ben by the the title uh define if you would when you think the fall happened well i i mean and thanks uh john for doing this and thanks to books and books i had a great time there what seems like about a million years ago um so i went out uh john kind of in search of this answer to the question of what had happened to democracy in the world why was it so under siege in the united states um and and in other places around the world um and and and what i ended up doing uh is i found you know the jumping off point for me was hungarian who i talked to who said uh look you know why i was talking to myself how did you guys go from being a democracy to essentially a single party autocracy in a decade um after victor orban got elected prime minister and he said well that's simple um orban got elected on a right-wing populist backlash to the financial crisis um then he redrew the parliamentary districts to entrench his party in power can pack the courts with far-right judges he changed the voting laws to make it easier for his supporters to vote uh he enriched some cronies on the outside who financed his politics and then bought up the media turned into kind of a right-wing propaganda machine used social media to kind of further flood the zone and he wrapped it all up in a nationalist message us versus them us the real hungarians them immigrants muslims liberal elites george soros and and i'm thinking you know well this sounds very familiar and and and so i uh you know having lived that experience in the united states i i felt for the last decade with the republican party i i ended up looking at different places where there's a different flavor of this kind of nationalist authoritarianism which took me to china and hong kong and russia and hungary in the united states and you know obviously i think that the the the fall that i refer to in the title uh really is the the the trump presidency but um what i end up doing is kind of tracing in each place because that's what i was told by the people i spoke to the fall essentially from the high water mark of the end of the cold war um when it seemed like these these questions were settled it seemed like it was the end of history that freedom and democracy and open markets were going to kind of wash across the world and water a million seeds and each of these other countries i looked at were on the other side of the iron curtain and in some way what i found is there's been a a pretty steady fall for democracy after kind of the explosion of the 90s um you know since the early 2000s that the financial crisis itself was a much more kind of cataclysmic event than even i fully appreciate at the time working in the white house um and then kind of the bottom falls out under trump of course um but i part of what i i discovered and i wanted to communicate in the book is that you know there's some trends structurally that have been building for some time now in terms of globalization and capitalism not delivering for people creating a sense of inequality that nationalists could exploit uh the kind of post-9 11 wars and the the us versus zen brand of politics that that unleashed in this country and other other places and this rise of social media and disinformation which has been the perfect tool for authoritarianism those trends were building and then trump here in this country i think kind of completed the process of america no longer being this kind of dominant power and no longer being able to take for granted that this question of our own democracy was settled so is this a difference of degree or kind this is a really good question so my old boss barack obama is also a character in this book and you know i he was more the optimist in some ways in that his point to me was you know i i kind of walked him through he comes in and out of the book as i'm kind of telling him my progress and what i'm learning and so that it's interesting to kind of trace his reactions to what i was hearing around the world and you know he said to me look ben you have to remember that this is a cycle um there's always a competition in this country about what it means to be american about how true we are going to be to that better story we tell about being a multi-racial multi-ethnic democracy and in a sense he was saying don't get down the same thing happens over and over i do think though that there are some things that are qualitatively different than pastimes and for me i'd really highlight two things that are interrelated one is technology and technology in the the in in the united states is experienced mostly through what is the impact of social media on our discourse and on the ability of people to agree upon a basic set of facts and live in a common reality um and what's happened in this country which is also what i found has happened in other places particularly places like russia where putin has really manipulated the information flow to people is that you have you know a huge chunk of people who are truly living in a world of different facts than the world i inhabit um and and at the extreme versions of this you see a conspiracy theory mindset uh that obviously donald trump himself represented everything from the big lie about the u.s election to q anon but to a million little conspiracy theories that that all serve to kind of diminish people's confidence in institutions and distrust government itself and i think that's new i mean i i think that the the the the risk the challenge of people being in these kind of hermetically sealed information bubbles is something we haven't fully experienced we've had as historians like you have well documented partisan media in this country we've had disinformation but not on the scale that technology affords and i think that's something we're gonna have to wrestle with and that leads to kind of a related and i think distinct challenge i really do think and i'm not happy about this that the the illiberalism of the republican party right now is something that we haven't really seen much of at least in our recent history i mean obviously we have um at different junctures in american history but you know i i sense this john when i was in the white house and i write about kind of the rise of the tea party these were different kinds of people getting elected from 2010 on they didn't want to just debate you know the size of government and tax policy and national security policy um there was a kind of ruthlessness to how they sought to accumulate power that's not unlike again what i described in hungary um and i think you know that's obviously tied in part to the fact of people living in an alternative reality it's kind of symbiotic with it and i think that does pose a unique test even if this is a version of the generational challenge it happens again and again in america about who are we what is our democracy who is it for who gets to be an american and what does that mean yeah yeah i think you're right i think the difference uh to me the the delta here is that one of the two major parties in the constitutional structure has taken leave of its senses and i don't say that as a partisan uh in any way it's just self-evidently true that uh that frankly the the democratic party at this point doesn't have a partner for peace uh to use a use of a middle eastern analogy and i do think that is a difference that was not even true four or five years ago yeah uh i was like president obama i was optimistic about this the ebb and flow of history uh you know the battle between our worst instincts and our better angels but that battle only works if there are in fact two parties two forces that in fact are devoted to the same experiment and the republican embrace of the will to power at any cost i think is is that is the the key distinction which i in my sense is that you have to go to the 1850s to find this uh where the slaveholding interest uh was as devoted to their own vision of reality with its own theology its own economics its own its own canonical texts uh to to get there um what's the lesson from abroad uh what should we be doing well i i mean there's a negative lesson and hopefully a positive lesson right um on the negative side i mean part of what i wanted to illustrate is that there's kind of one trend happening everywhere um and look i mean people you know you can see this plainly from vladimir putin to xi jinping to erdogan and turkey to bolsonaro brazil to obviously urban and hungary and unfortunately i could go on modi in india most of humanity right now is living in a circumstance where their country is moving towards this kind of nationalist authoritarianism we bucked that trend with biden's election and you know there are a lot of reasons for that i mean uh what i'd kind of shorthand here is you know bao poo is a chinese character in this book who i talked to who's was in tiananmen square his father was senior in the party he kind of after watching his friends get shot down he goes to the united states he goes to hong kong where he publishes books critical of the chinese communist party you made this point to me that in a way the 20th century was about ideology it was about isms you know fascism communism capitalism and democracy and you know after the the end of the cold war um you see this kind of return to a sense of more identity-based politics you know what does it mean the chinese communist party and this telling from him kind of rebranded itself reinvented itself not as a communist party but as a nationalist party um and that with globalization there was kind of an opening for people to offer that traditional sense of identity and belonging that's what orban did in hungary that's what putin did in russia you know tapping into people's grievances about if they feel like they were left out of the benefits of globalization i'm going to offer you now the oldest story in the book the blood and soil nationalist story the ethno-nationalist story and and you know it's interesting to to contend with that in europe right which should have learned this lesson better than anybody um in in world war one and two but you know what i also heard from somebody was a really interesting you know i think argument was essentially that you know we're moving beyond the memory of that time that the shock of world war ii and the holocaust kind of sobered up the world to create some international institutions and a set of norms and some kind of guard rails around the way in which nations interacted um led to kind of a focus on human rights uh i think after the horror of the holocaust um and in a sense it at least there's the aspiration to protect individual liberties and then you know and i relate the story of someone and my uh kind of family friend of mine who who kind of lived that story his father had been a nazi and he um he he left germany and moved to brussels and worked at the eu and and kind of dedicated his life to this project of not allowing this um this this darkness to return but he he recently passed away and and i do think that the danger is that you know the norm in humanity is to trend towards nationalism and and and as we uh see more and more places doing this again the danger i i see on the horizon is technology can afford an enormous amount of power to governments and and i do think the hong kong example that i spent so much time on this book is illustrative to us because it's basically a situation where the people there didn't want this autocracy but there's such total surveillance of a society and the capacity to see not just what people are posting on social media but what they're emailing what websites they visit you know who might be interested in and a set of values that runs contrary to china's communist party that that that danger of letting totalitarianism take hold i think is something that should sober us up i think on the positive side you know i talk to hong kong protesters i talk to people like alexei navalny in russia i talk to democratic activists and and places like hungary there is a mobilization happening of people who are much more aware of what's of these trends the conversation that is happening in this country and around the world about democracy today is far more advanced than a decade ago people see the kind of authoritarian playbook that's being run and they're figuring out different ways to push back they're doing so by trying to assert that their identities as russians or as hong kongers or hungarians is not inconsistent with democracy they're exposing in the case of navalny the kind of fundamental corruption of autocracies and i think that is the achilles heel of most autocrats is the lavish corruption that you know usually is a source of serious popular blowback um and what they're also doing and i think we have to do in the united states and we did in the case of joe biden's victory a place like hungary the entire opposition has now decided we're going to put one big umbrella over the of this uh polyglot group of political parties and they actually have a shot to beat victor orban next year despite how much he's kind of wired the system because they're unified in defense of democracies and i think that's what it's going to take it's going to take within countries and between countries a real sense of unity and solidarity for those of us who believe in democracy i think there are more of us that do than not i think the idea that people would rather opt in to the chinese kind of model of prosperity and capitalism without any democracy the lie was put to that by the fact that the people of hong kong clearly didn't want that but you know we're gonna have to be vigilant here we're in a i think a pretty perilous and important moment for the next few years so talk a little bit about demography and race um it goes to your blood and soil point um obviously the demographic shifts here are driving a huge amount of what's unfolding in the united states but i also wonder about demography in this sense um you know we started out as a country 80 20 right 20 of the country uh did not want to rebel against uh britain and we've collapsed that ever since uh so we had what 81 to 81 million to 74 million uh in the biden victory my back of the envelope calculus unburdened by data or responsibility has been that if you could get five to ten million people to essentially sober up along the lines you're talking about you restore a certain stability to the democratic experiment that won't make it perennially durable but at least would bias some number of years uh does a number like that make any sense or am i being too optimistic no it does make sense um and actually you know this is a conversation you know i also have with obama um in the context of this book which is that look there's always been unfortunately 30 to 35 percent of this country that you know would have voted for for george wallace right i mean there there's a you know there's a strength of of of somewhat a liberal uh thinking particularly when it comes to race um and and you know i think what happened you know it was interesting to kind of i look at the tea party in this book and i tried to look at it in the same way that i would look at these movements in other countries you know sometimes i think it's useful for us to step out of our own you know it's like being in a family and sometimes you have to to look at it from the outside to understand what's happening and when i look back at that i see okay there's a lot of similarities to the backlash against globalization and capitalism democracy that i found in a place like hungary or to some extent earlier in a place like russia and we've seen in other countries brexit chief among it but when the tea party started it was this blend of i think the grievances of people who felt for lack of a better word screwed by the financial crisis and were just angry at the whole system then you add to that a black person getting elected president of the united states and it infused it with a kind of racialized backlash that i think added to the intensity and you know people i mean i remember very well you know people chanting take our country back in the streets and you know the the the reason given was they were mad about deficit spending you don't see that you don't see those protests happening now as joe biden deficit spends you didn't see what trump did so it felt racialized and look john i think the reality is this country is going through a demographic convulsion first with kind of the question of who's in the room and you know like like a lot of people i can look back and say well it seemed like it worked better how come we could all kind of figure this stuff out in the cold war there are these guard rails and you know uh the parties kind of generally played by a commonly accepted set of rules but you know those were only white men really making those rules and and and i think there was an initial you know uh change to the fact that suddenly there's people of different colors and genders in the room and and that made our politics more complicated and then you throw in the mix the fact that you know if current demographic trends continue in you know certainly my lifetime this will become a minority a a majority non-white country um and you know whether it's conscious or not i have to presume that some of the efforts to kind of entrench a certain kind of republican party foothold through the courts and through the voting laws and through the senate which is the least democratic of our elected institutions you know part of that may be kind of buttressing um you know who controls power in this country kind of an anticipation of that demographic change and if that's truly what's happening if we're kind of in this this pivotal moment for the idea of multi-racial democracy as we're becoming a more diverse country the only way i think we're going to get through that peacefully with some degree of social cohesion and stability is if as you say there is a a portion i mean just you know what whatever the number is but it's not an enormous number but enough um of of the kind of middle of the road folks here um to stand up and say you know we we we can't flirt with this liberalism we can't flirt with um what the republican party is doing now and you know joe biden's election was kind of that margin of victory of you know bringing back enough of those people um into the fold um in places like pennsylvania and wisconsin and and michigan that that we we kind of steadied the ship here and the question is going to be election after election you know can can the democrats and frankly all i think civil society in this country that cares about this thing um can we ensure that the dam doesn't break again as it did in 2016. you're a counterfactual uh which i know uh people love let's say six years ago and this this is in the context of your global point six years ago let's say trump decides he's gonna keep keep playing golf uh [Music] jeb bush or rubio to use some florida names uh cruz uh you know whoever was in that field ends up faced off against against hillary and and let's say a republican nominee who was not named trump won in 2017 not one in 2016 and became president do you think we're having this conversation i i you know part of the reason why i wanted to tell this story in this book is that i think yes um you know the the my experience of kind of being at the center of political power in this country for those eight years was one of becoming increasingly aware of a kind of radicalization taking place in the republican party you know for for a bunch of reasons but you know before donald trump you know we were already beginning to see you know a ruthlessness and a kind of illiberalism to the kind of pursuit of power emanating from the republican party and fueled i think in part by you know what it's describing with the fracturing of the media the opening up of the floodgates to money in our politics you know the voting rights act was gutted by the courts the citizens united act opened up this flood gate of money again into american politics the mcconnell and the kind of extremity of the obstructionism to obama was there birtherism obviously related to trump but you know conspiracy theory that like a majority a healthy majority of republican voters believed in part because they're locked in this information ecosystem of of what they're being mainline on facebook that all created a circumstance where by the time donald trump comes down the escalator he is the republican party he was the frontrunner of that whole race and it's interesting if you remove him you know as much as i think jeb bush would have been a different character keep in mind remember who the last man standing was after donald trump it was ted cruz ted cruz was the runner-up and actually won a bunch of states and you know um i'm not i'm not sure ted cruz is any better right and so i i think yeah if jeb bush was elected we'd be in a different place but i actually don't think there was any i think the republican party couldn't nominate a jeb bush um in 2016. it was only going to nominate somebody who who reflected kind of the you know for lack of a better way of putting it the world view of a fox news viewer you know um and and and and so i think we have to recognize that that trump and again looking at this globally there's like a lot of trumps out there you know there's again like a bolsonaro or modi uh boris johnson to some extent victor orban like trump is not alone in terms of being a kind of bombastic cult of personality nationalist that's actually you know the the trend bibi netanyahu right now in israel saying that the the election was stolen from him and and so this is happening and it's happening in too many places to to think that this is all because donald trump just came along yeah yeah i just i think that when we write the history of this era it would make this this timeline uh i'm reminded what henry adams said about the move from washington to grant disprove darwin uh to some extent the movement from a romney ryan ticket to trump now if you'd gone straight from you know if palin had caught fire yeah in the after you all beat her in in that inner regnum in that in that period the the line would be clearer to me it gives me some scintilla of hope uh but i do think the the the franchise model uh of trumpism in the united states and you're making the point that it's also a global one uh is incredibly sobering and i i honestly i've been doing this a long time now i i didn't think we would be having a plausible conversation a non-you know hysterical data-driven conversation about the durability of american democracy let me ask you about january 6th where were you what was your reaction so you know what was so um interesting to me about that is i was finishing kind of the final review of this book that i'd written um about what leads to our attorneys at least at least it didn't upset your thesis well that's that's the thing that's what was so jarring is how logical it was i was right i basically had been you know writing about how conspiracy theory had embedded itself deep within this kind of strain of authoritarianism in america the kind of information ecosystem that juices a sense of grievance the kind of disregard for norms that can lead to even more extreme behavior so you know what may start with you know i mean there's a connection between saying we're going to stop respecting the norm of like not meddling in justice department investigations or you know even the way we approach you know issues like the court once you kind of start break breaking through the the democratic guard rails um you can lose control of that you know and and so and i always you know because i was looking at these other countries that were really losing it i mean russia is not there's not a trace of democracy in russia anymore they're certainly not in china hungary is further on the spectrum than than we are um i'd seen places where you know the unthinkable keeps you know what what you think is the extreme version of what can happen keeps keeps advancing while i'm writing this book the hong kong protest movement that i'm kind of profiling gets swallowed up alexei navalny who's my main character in russia gets poisoned in prison like i keep seeing the worst thing happen in places and i was watching this when um you know after the election when trump wasn't you know abiding by then people kind of laughing they're laughing at like rudy giuliani and how absurd this all is but it it didn't look that funny to me you know like it was a president not like acceding to a peaceful transfer power and his own political party kind of sheepishly backing him up um isn't was new terrain and and we we had trouble kind of finding the language even to describe what was happening because with trump i mean one of the problems is he's such a cartoonish character that sometimes you fail to take seriously enough like exactly what's happening before your eyes you know and so i was watching it at home and i was watching because there'd been such a buildup um you know i was actually watching the the debate on c-span i remember and then i just started to see these reports and you know i i walked into that building so many times john um because i used to have to go talk to congress a lot i drew that straw um and it's a majestic experience to walk into the u.s capitol and the best thing about it is you could just walk in you know like it's not a fortress like the white house and you you sense the history around you you hear the echoes off the marble walls and to see that kind of temple of democracy invaded like that in a way john that like i've seen that happens in other countries the parliament is often overrun by the supporters of some autocrat or populist that that's not you know again what americans realize is like these aren't uncommon things we just didn't think they could happen here and and to me that was my main takeaway from that event is again it can happen here like anything can happen here like we thought we were the country that kind of escaped from history that had figured this out that had this story um of of an inclusive multiracial multi-ethnic democracy where we worked this out peacefully and what january 6 really drove home to me was the extent to which no we have to recognize anything can happen here um and and we should learn from the fact that it's happened in lots of other places less uh uber dorky question but i'm i'm i'm playing to type um well you said a minute ago about the post-cold war world argues that samuel huntington was was probably largely correct in the clash of civilizations right uh and i'm wondering as you watch the democratic party now and where the republicans are in weaponizing everything do you have any cause for alarm are you anxious about the future of identity politics that is that i'm thinking about it i live in tennessee uh when the tennessee legislature bans teaching something it tends not to work out uh you can ask h.l minkin about that but my legislature has banned the teaching of critical race theory uh and i think florida's done it too i'm just curious where you see that debate uh it it's it feels like this just mixed metaphors just add water wedge issue uh but the argument that the president has to make and that you're making and the president obama made is if we are devoted to the declaration of independence then equality of opportunity has to be the engine and doesn't matter what you look like or where you came from and republicans are with you until that part and so i'm just wondering how you see the politics of identity unfolding yeah no i think this is the issue we had to figure out and it's why i kind of subtitled this book you know being american um in the world we made because we have to figure out again what it means to be american that's a very contested thing right now i mean i'd say two things about this john is like the first i found strikingly again in this kind of playbook authoritarians always try to control history um you know in just this book but i've walked through this story of how essentially the chinese communist party has completely whitewashed any study or awareness even of tiananmen like it's it's out of the schools it it's offline you cannot find it on the internet and i had young people you know kind of about 30 years old from china telling me that like they didn't know what happened in tiananmen until they left china and learned about it you know in russia putin has significantly tried to whitewash in the curriculum the excesses of stalinism um given you know putin's own affinity for a certain brand of total control in hungary orban has really dug into the curriculum to kind of downplay the crimes of the the right and hungary who were collaborators with the nazis and complicit in the holocaust elevate the crimes of the communists because that's the left and and and so these these you know again what can seem like a cable news debate like the idea that you want to control what history is is about not just the past it's about the future right and that's why historians like you are so important because we don't learn the full complexity of the past you know there's an agenda for that we have to know where the darkness of of kind of white nationalism can lead that's why we need to learn about tulsa you know we need to deal with structural inequities in the society that's why you have to understand why those structural inequities exist and seeking to whitewash that is a way of i think controlling not just the understanding of the past but kind of narrowing the pathway for the future i think you know the challenge for democrats is this um how do you embrace and obama was really good at this um how do you embrace the need for change progressive change if you will without having that be a rejection of the past a rejection of american identity you know obama would always say like and no other country is my story possible that there's there's yes you know a country founded with slavery um like that is something we obviously fully reject but that the the evolution set in motion by the founders was the capacity to keep making this place better and so with each leap forward for civil rights or social equality it's an extension of the american story not a rejection of it because it's very hard to go to people whether they're in northern england or in rural hungary or in tennessee and tell them in order to kind of embrace change you have to kind of reject who you thought you were entirely you know and i tell this story at the end of the book about about this kind of joyful speech that obama gave in selma which you know you know well on the anniversary um which i think is his greatest speech and he asked me and and the other speechwriter cody keenan to assemble a cannon of of the the progressive heroes or name progressive the the underdogs of american society you know and so we make this list and it's harriet tubman and sojourner truth and jackie robinson and emerson and thoreau and whitman and the inventors of jazz and the inventors of country and western and and everybody who kind of looked at power from the outside the pioneers for women women's rights and he kind of joyfully kind of did this recitation and i realized he was claiming american history for everybody you know um and that to me is the answer like the that that we we are all part of our history we all have to be a part of our future it's a story of progress and it's the story of progress it doesn't ask you know someone in tennessee to reject who they are um but ask them to continue to be a part of this journey of making america better you know that's a hopeful framing of it and i think the trap for the democratic party can be sometimes uh you know things i'm very sympathetic with in terms of the pursuit of social justice and racial justice can be framed in ways that that that that are not you know a story of like continued progression but rather for understandable reasons you know basically challenging people to reject um deeply held parts of their identity and i think that's just harder a harder message frankly uh for the achievement of democratic progress then a more inclusive approach like an obama and a biden has taken to this yeah yeah one of one of the things one of the when i try feebly to make that case i'd like to say that the folks who hit the beach at omaha beach were not doing it as captors they're used liberators right and and that's the american story um one small anecdote about the tiananmen square george h.w bush's biographer and the chinese publishers reached out and said we'd love to publish it in china by the way could you take out the chapter about tm1 square no no we can't so uh yeah uh oh i wanna get some some questions let me ask you a last question uh this is actually george h.w bush's uh 97th birthday uh if if he were still with us um he was in power uh when the wall fell when the soviet union uh dissolved on christmas day 1991 over the last 30 years what should we have done uh as a country to secure guard rails that are now so flimsy to non-existent and what does that tell us about what we can do going forward so you know there are a couple things um the first is i think that you know america has been both an enormously positive influence on the world but also i think in some ways has been a negative influence in in other areas and usually in the last 30 years where we've run afoul and made mistakes is through excess you know and i think when you achieve a level of power in the world that the united states achieved at the end of the cold war almost unparalleled in human history um you know power corrupts power leads to excess and you know in some ways in tracing the story in this book like it made me reckon with the reality that like the excess of the explosion of markets and the explosion of capitalism around the world there was excess in the inequality it created and then chiefly the the financial crisis the kind of unregulated uh explosion capitalism leads to the bottom falling out and a lot of loss of confidence in america that was the the excess of kind of a profit driven society the excesses of the post-9 11 moment whether it's the invasion occupation in iraq uh you know torture um people will say you know under obama like obviously the continued uh prosecution of the war on terror i do think that those excesses were mimicked by authoritarians you know the chinese use the phrase people's war and terror for what they're doing to their uyghur population putin has used counterterrorism as a justification doesn't make us responsible but i do think the the excesses of that war um you know did bleed into other places um and then the excesses of technology you know the the um the the deployment of these the tools before we kind of fully understand what they would do to a society which is common in american history you know usually it takes some time to catch up to new technologies yeah i think those are the those are the excesses and the other thing that i was forced to reckon with in the in the china example is you know i i kind of just went back through the you know how did they get from tiananmen to now um from this moment where they looked like they were on the losing end of history to it looks like they are the future um right now and there's a lot to that story um but you know i also think that if you look at the american relationship with china um i mean the way i put this in the book is i had this kind of sobering experience in shanghai i'm there with former president obama in 2017 i get woken up in the middle of the night by some chinese officials who want to warn me that obama should not meet with the dalai lama in india which is a normal warning for them but was weird about it other than them waking me up is that we hadn't announced the meeting so so they basically were in my email or the dial on this guy's email so i wander outside and i look at the shanghai skyline which kind of looks like the future it's glittering skyscrapers lights everywhere everybody's taking selfies and i kind of thought to myself well this is kind of a logical next step if you take these 30 years of american dominance the capitalism the technology the national security fixation and you just strip out any democratic values you would get what i was looking at and what i'd experienced in shanghai and i think we didn't prioritize democracy enough at home and abroad you know if i think about the chinese relationship every president bush clinton bush obama trump there was always a higher priority with the chinese for instance you know with us it was like the financial crisis and then the paris agreement climate change good things that you have to work with the chinese on but causes you to be a little cautious on democracy h.w bush you know was seeking to kind of land i mean you know this better than me but kind of let them out off the hook in some ways after tiananmen in part because we were moving out of the cold war and we thought that these things were settled and we we thought there'd be time to kind of have china do an evolution clinton brings him in to international trade because he wants access to those markets because that's going to raise american living standards again understandable but deep prioritize democracy bush wanted partnership on the war on terror and when i think about those kind of four things you know security national security profit and capitalism technology and democracy we never prioritize democracy in a relationship with china as much as those other three things if you were the chinese you would think that the americans care more about profit national security technological innovation than democracy the trade-off always put democracy lower and i think that's something was kind of mirrored at home too you know i go back to clinton and i don't it's not a criticism because it is what it is it was a good slogan but you know it's the economy stupid kind of became the mantra of you know government is about economic it's all about the economy in the cold war for all our flaws values had to be front and center like our national identity was anchored in the reality that we were four set of values freedom and democracy and the other guys weren't and and that was a part of what it meant to be american and certainly our politics and you know other than kind of the i think somewhat problematic embrace of democracy after the iraq war is kind of a justification for for for what we were doing in the middle east i think democracy has been too deprived um in in our in our domestic affairs and our our global affairs uh we'll take some questions i'll just tell you it's just there's an analog story quickly well uh while miami weighs in um barbara bush when they were the uh which i think was the second representative uh before we had diplomatic relations and she complained one day in 1974 that she didn't have any stamps and george was the only person in the room and the next day there was a box of stamps some things never changed exactly exactly yes ma'am so we have a question from katie in both your books you speak very highly about chancellor merkel and how her style of politics has influenced even obama since she's not running in the german elections this year do you think that her stepping down will cause a shift in the world order in general and how will it influence the relations between the us and the eu it's a good look uh i uh angela merkel has been and i think the history books you know will look back and say that she was the support in the storm she was the the fortress of democracy and democratic values in europe at a very stormy time i mean from the through the aftermath of the iraq war through the financial crisis through this rising tide of liberalism through brexit i described my first book that she told obama when he went to visit her after trump's election she was not going to run for another term as chancellor trump's election is what motivated her to run because she's like somebody's got to kind of mine the store for the free world here you know and so we owe her a debt of gratitude i also think though it's you know she's been around for a very long time and and there there does have to be a change i think what it does mean is that german politics will be a little bit more fractured um and for the eu she was the first call that you always made and and now that's kind of an open question and the challenge is i think the world's democracies as president biden is trying to to do now need to kind of come together around a whole bunch of issues right now and that's actually going to get a little harder without her the marshaling consensus in europe um but but i mean we're definitely in a better place than we were five years ago when obama had that conversation with her after trump's election so i think she she leaves feeling like you know there's enough antibodies and there's been enough pushback in europe against this kind of far-right nationalism that you know the baton can be passed here thank you so from andrew in light of her tremendous success during the 2020 elections what role do you see stacey abrams playing in protecting the franchise for all u.s citizens going forward look i think she's really the template you know um i mean when people ask me what what what what do we need to do what can we do i i say you know look at what stacey abrams has done because like for instance looking at the current effort around voting rights i'm frustrated obviously like a lot of people that you know joe manchin doesn't want to support that you know the filibuster has been used to kind of entrench what i think are anti-democratic trends but i think it'd be wrong to just kind of throw up your hands and be like well we have to wait for joe manchin that's not how change happens in this country change happens when you go out and you you register people to vote you organize them and sometimes you have to win more than one election to get done what you want to get done and sometimes you have to educate people on the ground okay there are these voter restrictions but here's how you can still vote and and so i think she is really the model for what civil society needs to do in this country not just through the the 2020 election but i think it's going to be for a few elections here each one is going to feel pretty existential um at least for the next two and four years um so i think we should look to her and frankly other people around the world have looked to her as an example of how to how to organize people who've been left out of the political process and assert you know your political power when people are trying to to keep it for them you here is a question for both of you are there any places in the world that are giving you optimism about the future of democracy i can go first john i mean i i you know i i there are a couple things that are making me optimistic um one thing which i you know again focus on my book is we're seeing a lot of popular mobilization around the world and again some of it's not succeeding as in hong kong but if you look at hong kong and belarus and movements against inequality in latin america and the black lives matter movement and the way that went global even climate strikes there's a kind of mass mobilization that is happening particularly among young people and you could say well these movements are failing but movements fail and fail and fail until they succeed and usually it's kind of a storm a dam breaking and then there are other trends like young people getting involved in politics and particularly young women getting elected to office if you look at jacinda ardern and new zealander if you look at recent people have been elected prime minister in a number of european countries who are women in their their 30s and early 40s it seems to represent kind of a particular backlash to the you know if the nationalist kind of authoritarian trend i'm describing was a bit of a backlash to liberalism and globalization there's now a bit of a backlash happening to that um and and you've seen that in in in a in a bunch of different uh elections um around the world particularly in europe and um in canada obviously so i i think there's cause for hope but you know i think we also just have to to to recognize it we're not moving in the right direction right now and america gave itself a second chance with the election of joe biden but it's not settled here either um so while the the bright spots to me though speak to again the pendulum maybe being prepared to swing back um young people getting involved people mobilizing more women moving into higher office all that kind of suggests where things may go if we're able to turn the tide yeah i'll just say very quickly to connect the last two questions to me it's the state of georgia not the nation of georgia but without the voters of georgia joe biden is in a very different place the country's in a very different place uh with those senate races uh part of this is my uh my deep historical affection for john lewis and and what that insistent movement in the face of state-sponsored white supremacists totalitarian violence that's what the civil rights movement was and it was 55 years ago 56 years ago so almost in our lifetime uh we dealt with something that if you took it out of the context of american history and looked at it you would think oh that that couldn't be us well of course it's us of course it is and i i know a lot about georgia it's a state that has given us raphael warnock and marjorie taylor and so if you're looking and stacey abrams and so if you if you're looking for a microcosm of what works and what doesn't work and on all the issues we're talking about i think georgia is the place to look so we have quite a few questions but we only have time for one more so here's a good one um you describe how the autocratic side has found its identity in hatred and nationalism what do you think should be the identity of the progressive side so you know i thought a lot about this um you know because i also had to kind of unlearn some things in writing this book you know i realized that um my political consciousness was formed around the end of the cold war that's you know when i was kind of starting to pay attention to things which did suggest seeming inevitability that we figured out this identity question you know we were we were for freedom and freedom won and that's it and bad things may happen along the way but the journey is kind of preordained and having unlearned that i thought a lot about american identity um and you know i described in the book kind of bottoming out like a lot of us did during the pandemic i'm home i'm working on this book and you know you have covid you've got the incompetence kind of cruel incompetence of the government you have blm happen and i'm walking my daughter around my neighborhood and all the shops are boarded up with murals painted of brianna taylor and george floyd and other people who've been killed and i'm having to explain to my daughter you know um this these are black people who were killed by white people and but they didn't try to explain about martin luther king who she learned about in school remember dr king addressed this and we've made progress and then with the kind of six-year-old child's wisdom she said to me but daddy uh dr king was killed by a white man too you know and and then the the you know kind of like a street scene because you're taking the same walk on kovid the national guard was deployed there the next day and i'm having to explain to them to her why are there soldiers in our streets you know and i was really angry and then the next day i come out and there's a protest and i'm by myself this time i kind of join in this protest and it's an incredibly diverse crowd being led by uh by black people and i'm totally anonymous it was kind of a full transition from being this guy in the white house who's like in the room when things are being you know decided i'm just a middle-aged guy with a mask you know walking in this crowd of people and you know we all kneel down at the end and i'm looking around at particularly the the the black faces in the crowd and thinking these people have much more reason than me to give up on america you know to say this place is just rigged against me the whole system has been built against me and they're out here trying to make america live up to its better story whatever you think about the black lives matter movement the idea that people are channeling their anger towards like we need to improve this place we're in and to me that's the american identity that i settle on and i think it's what my my former boss uh would settle on is it's about doing the work like that's our identity that this is a multi-racial multi-ethnic democracy but it's not preordained and each generation does have to do the work we have to to struggle against our own demons and face down that darker story inside of america but we also have to do our own part to say we are the story we tell ourselves about being a democracy where anybody from anywhere in the world can come here and be american what a what am and if we can do that and this is the hope i find yes i there's been a fall here but that means we're recognizable to people around the world we're not just sitting on a mountaintop lecturing people about democracy we are working this through right now and if we can do that and we can again assert that our identity is you can be from anywhere and be american you can look like anything you can believe anything and you can be an american here then i think that that really will ripple out around the world so we have we have an opportunity but we have to embrace that identity of doing the work i love that we have to do the work and you certainly do the work every day so thank you congratulations for this book and i just want to thank you both for joining books and books tonight for supporting us being here in our little virtual bookshop and i hope that the next time it's going to be in person um i'll just thank our viewers for joining us and remind everyone you can purchase a copy of that green box screen box anyway thank you so much and good night everyone thank you guys be well

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Length: 58min 4sec (3484 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021