(theme music playing) HOLLAND: Hello, I'm Julia, a bookseller with Politics and Prose.

We're live with Ben Rhodes and George Packer discussing "After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made".

In 2017, as Ben Rhodes was helping Barack Obama begin his next chapter, the legacy they had worked to build for 8 years was being taken apart.

To understand what was happening in America, Rhodes decided to look outward.

Over the next 3 years he traveled to dozens of countries, meeting with politicians, activists and dissidents confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that was tearing America apart.

Part memoir and part reportage, "After the Fall" is a hugely ambitious and essential work of discovery.

In his travels, Rhodes comes to realize how much America's fingerprints are on a world we helped to shape through our post-Cold War embrace of unbridled capitalism and our post-9/11 nationalism and militarism, our mania for technology and social media and the racism that fueled the backlash to America's first black President.

Rhodes will be in conversation with George Packer, an award-winning author and staff writer at "The Atlantic".

On behalf of Politics and Prose, please join me in welcoming Ben Rhodes and George Packer.

Thank you, both.

PACKER: Hey, Ben.

It's good to see you again.

RHODES: Good to see you, George.

PACKER: This is such an impressive book and there's so much to talk about.

In some ways even though your first book "The World As It Is" is a memoir, this book feels more personal and more.

It has a stronger voice.

I felt that your first book sort of fused your voice with the voice of President Obama who shaped your career and your thinking about so many things and had such a huge influence on your life.

This book, it feels like you, in some ways, discovering your own voice and ideas and place in the world and in America and it's just wonderful to get something quite unvarnished and yet really deeply reflective from Ben Rhodes, whose words in the past have mostly been words written for somebody else to read.

So first of all, congratulations on this achievement.

RHODES: George, thanks, thanks so much and I was particularly excited about this event.

Politics and Prose was my home base for a long time.

I actually ghostwrote an entire book there in the coffee shop downstairs and George, if you'd asked me what I wanted to be when I was 25, I thought I wanted to be George Packer because.

PACKER: Not anymore, I hope.

RHODES: No, no.

This book draws on that tradition, in fact, one of the models was one of the books you write that kind of blend the personal and the storytelling and the analytical, but you're right.

I'm so glad you, the first book was, I wrote it fast, which I don't regret because the experience was very fresh in my mind, but I hadn't yet digested this awesome experience of two years in the Obama campaign and eight years in the White House and then this book forced me to really find my own voice.

In that first book too I realized when I looked back on it, as much as I was trying to break free of it, it's not just Obama.

It's that voice of a government official you know and really shedding that skin so that I could be, I think you're right, much more personal, challenge my own assumptions more honestly and not worry about how any phrase may be taken out of context.

It was kind of a liberating writing experience, albeit a difficult one, but ultimately I have much stronger feelings for this book actually.

PACKER: Ben, there's a lot of things you could have done, coming out of eight years really at the center of power, as closer to the President than maybe anyone other than the Vice President in the Obama administration.

You could have gone to Silicon Valley, as many of your colleagues did.

You could have become a TV commentator.

You could have waited for the next round of government service while making a bunch of money on Wall Street, but instead you sort of, it seems to me you almost returned to where you left off when you were turning yourself into a writer in your 20s and a traveler and you began to travel and you began to write and you also became, I'd say, seized with a kind of anger.

Rage is a key word in your book, at what was happening to the world and all of those things make you a very unusual Washington figure, a kind of anti-Washington Washington figure.

So tell us why you didn't take those obvious paths and instead you took the path of someone kind of groping, searching, talking to people as journalists do out in the world to try to understand their world and looking inward at yourself to understand who you had become and who we, as Americans, had become.

RHODES: Well, you know I write a bit about this, in the sense that I was, look, if I'm honest with myself, I was a kid when I went to work for the Obama campaign.

I was 29 years old, which now that I've reached the heights of some form of middle age, that seems very young to me and I just, a decade in my entire 30s where it's consumed by this incredibly intense experience of being by the side of President who I worked for and became kind of very close to personally and then to be spit out of that experience was going to be disorienting, in any case.

To go from a position of being on the inside and being in every room and having some form of power to be spit out of that experience with Donald Trump coming in, kind of amplified the disorientation, added an element of trauma to it and I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

I had really not thought a second about it.

I knew I was probably going to write a book and it took me some time to get my footing and that time allowed me to travel a lot because I was still traveling with Obama when he was going abroad.

I just kind of took every opportunity if someone said, "Hey, can you come out here and speak at this thing?"

to go abroad and then I started to kind of be critical of Trump, like a lot of people were and actually in writing the book it was kind of interesting, I started to get taken to lunch by some of my former colleagues, good friends of mine, all of whom are now in the administration, who advised me, "Tone it down.

You're going to deal yourself out.

You might need some Senate confirmation votes from Republicans one day," or, "You're going to define yourself as partisan," and something in me kind of completely rebelled against that advice, which it's good advice for a future in government, but I was like, "I don't know."

It didn't feel right.

The combination of who I was, which is someone who's more of a writer and entered politics through the door of writing and someone who was just totally revulsed by what I saw around me, made me think, "Well, that's not for me."

The way things clicked for me was as I was traveling, particular with Obama to some of these events he was doing with young people around the world, I started to meet some really fascinating people.

I remember meeting characters in the book, Zhanna Nemtsova, whose father is Boris Nemtsov, who is Putin's kind of chief oppositionist for a while and was assassinated in the shadow of the Kremlin.

Meeting her just a few months after leaving the White House, she drove to see me in Baden, Germany, in Baden-Baden, Germany and we're just having a drink and she's telling me the story of her father and trying to get an investigation and could I help, or could Obama help and it occurred to me what a remarkable thing to have been in power and then to then meet someone like this who experienced all the things I worked on, Putin, Russia, personally and that to me was the jumping off point into this book.

What if I, someone who was just recently in power, just traveled around and met with the people who lived these things that I worked on?

And that was just a very exciting idea to me and I was actually struck by "Why hadn't anyone else done that?"

So before I knew exactly what the book was about, I knew it was going to be somehow that was going to be the center of it and yeah, I just kind of ended up voting with my feet.

The private sector thing didn't appeal to me, the kind of the revolving door.

Maybe, I don't know.

I'm not saying I won't ever go into government again, but the idea of shaping your life around preparing to go back into government didn't appeal to me and the opportunity of getting out in the world and meeting interesting people and writing about that, that felt both what I wanted to do and the constructive way to do something other than Tweeting and going on TV during the Trump years.

PACKER: It all felt familiar to me because what you were doing was what someone like me has done for years, which is meet, find people abroad who can give me insight into both their own lives and in their countries, often by happenstance, sometimes by design and then one thing leads to another and soon you have a sense that you're really being let into some kind of privileged view and I'm wondering, how did that compare to your experience as a White House official?

First of all, what was it like to talk to people as Ben Rhodes, writer, versus as Deputy National Security Advisor?

And second, what did it do to your sense of what you had done and been for eight years?

Did it make you rethink it, question it in any way?

Now that you were seeing people without the veil of power, kind of between the two of you.

RHODES: Yeah, those are great questions.

First of all, it was interesting.

On the one hand that I was Ben Rhodes, former Obama confident, got me access to a lot of people.

And I had to kind of convince them, though, sometimes that I was not approaching them from that perspective, but actually I was trying to tell stories and tell their stories.

I remember, I relayed in the book, I finally connected with Alexei Navalny, who I really wanted to talk to for this on FaceTime and he kind of approached it I think somewhat warily.

And we get on the FaceTime and he's like, "So, are you writing a book about how to do color revolutions better?"

And he said it in kind of a not friendly way like, "Oh, here's another American official who wants the Alexei Navalny to play into the stereotype of America wanting to overthrow the Russian government," which doesn't help him.

There was an undertone of, "This is not helpful to me for you to write the color revolution manual that plays into the Putin whataboutism," and I was like, "No, no.

I want you to know, I want you to start when you were a kid and tell me your whole story.

That's all I want and we can chat while we do that."

And, and so, and he got there.

He just started talking and that happened a few times where I had to kind of do what you do, George and be like, "Start at the beginning," and everywhere I went and I ended up kind of centering this in the post-Cold War years.

So in Hungary I was like, "Tell me what happened when the Wall fell, how old were you?

Just take me through your whole story to where you got to Viktor Orban has taken Hungary today."

In Hong Kong I said, "Look, just start at the handover.

I want to know everything that happened.

If you were a kid, what was that like?"

Again, this isn't that novel, but it's novel for somebody like me who's been in government.

PACKER: Right.

First, but even before that, you had to tell them, "I'm here to listen to you.

I'm not here on behalf of the US government or the next president after Trump or anything like that.

This is, I want to know about you" because they had some assumptions since you were the right hand of the most powerful man in the world for eight years so yeah.

RHODES: That's exactly right.

In Hong Kong I was careful where the Chinese government often charges with foreign interference.

I kind of went out of my way in Hong Kong and I was really glad I did, to not talk to the leaders of the Umbrella Movement, who were very prominent.

I was, I wanted to find just kind of young people wrestling with this.

Some who were hardcore protesters, some were kind of sympathetic but not that politically involved because I think if I had engaged with the leadership, that would have been a very particular conversation that actually might not have gotten to the truth of, not that I don't have tremendous admiration for those people, but they would have been making a case to me as someone who's in the US government rather than someone just sharing their experience with me.

So that became a much more interesting and richer way for me to explore this and then, yeah, to the second part of your question, I found myself, When I was in government I began to be I don't want to say skeptical, but I took intelligence reports and kind of the information that reached a government official with a bit of a grain of salt because it reflects the kind of US prism through which we look at countries, which is usually a securitized prism.

What's the threat here?

And I always found, even when I was in government when I traveled, just meeting with some civil society folks, you'd get a much kind of more interesting picture of what was actually happening and so when I did this, I did find myself, it's like, "Oh, I'm understanding much more from these Hungarian civil society folks what's been happening in terms of the rise of the far right in Europe than I", with all due respect to the US government, "Than if I was sitting and reading kind of a dry report about that in my West Wing office."

I would implore and have communicated to a lot of my friends in the White House, "Do this.

Get sources of information that are the people living in these countries, both because they can tell you what's going on there, but they can tell you what is America doing that is not helping, that were in some cases hurting and what could America be doing differently."

I'm not saying America should formulate its whole foreign policy based on the advice or directive of civil society, but it should be incorporated and that was something I took away from this too.

PACKER: Well, I want to talk about the themes of the book.

One thing that our viewers who haven't read it yet should know is it's a very critical view of the US.

It essentially says something that you would never had said as President Obama's speechwriter, that the post-Cold War period, which is the period you are writing about, was, in some ways, misshapen or corrupted by three expressions of American power: our military power, especially post-9/11 which militarized so much of our foreign policy and in turn, created a militaristic reaction abroad, our financial power, which sent the world reeling and really, in some ways, destroyed the consensus around liberal capitalism with the 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed, and our technological power, with social media and the internet itself becoming a vehicle for poisonous disinformation and authoritarian control.

So it is not a triumphalist view of America that everything was essentially going okay until big, bad Donald Trump came along in 2016.

Instead, you create a picture of, maybe inadvertently, a hegemon, a superpower sowing the seeds of its own destruction and the destruction of the world it thought it was creating, a world of expanding freedoms and expanding free markets, by virtue of its own blindness to these three incredible expressions of American power.

Is that too dark of view?

And tell me how you came out of the White House to that darkness, to that really serious criticism of the world that made you, that made Ben Rhodes as a child of the post-Cold War era?

RHODES: I didn't set out to write that.

I found that, you know.

You know I started, at the beginning, I was trying to understand this and I tell this story very near and dear at the beginning of the book about meeting a Hungarian anti-corruption activist and saying, "How did your country became basically a single-party autocracy in a decade?"

And he said, "Well, that's simple.

Viktor Orban got elected Prime Minister and the right-wing populist backlashed to the financial crisis.

Then he redrew the parliamentary districts to favor his party, packed the courts with right-wing judges, changed the voting laws to make it easier for his party to vote, enriched some cronies who then bought up the media and turned it into kind of a right-wing propaganda machine, wrap the whole thing up in this kind of nationalist bow of us versus them, the real Hungarians versus the immigrants, George Soros, the Muslims."

I'm like, "Well this is the Republican Party in the last decade," and so I thought I was going to be writing about that, but then it became more fundamental to me the more I looked at this and interrogated it.

I mean first of all, how can we deny the reality that America has had this unprecedented period of hegemony and this is the outcome.

We have to wrestle with that.

Even if people are uncomfortable with the argument I'm making, how can you argue otherwise that we reached this ascendance in global affairs in 1990 and here we are and I had this kind of experience in Shanghai that I write about where I get woken up in the middle of the night by the Chinese government to warn me against Obama meeting with the Dalai Lama and it was disconcerting in part because I had not announced it.

They were being unsettled about, they were in somebody's e-mail, mine or the Dalai Lama's people and I walk outside and I look at Shanghai, the skyline, which kind of looks like the future.

If you've ever been there, The Bund.

It's this futuristic skyline with lights everywhere and people taking selfies and you know it looked familiar, except I had in the back of my head how illiberal it was that people are in my communications and I thought to myself if you took American, the logic over the last 30 years, American capitalism, American national security obsession and American technology and you just stripped the democracy out of it, you kind of get what I was looking at.

The Chinese Communist Party is actually the logical next inheritor of this system, in the same way that we were from the Brits and I kind of walk people through in this book, what we're talking about is the excesses.

I think if, we reach this kind of artificial position of power, as Obama describes to me in the book.

There was always going to be transitory but, whenever, power corrupts and the accesses of American hegemony, the financial crisis, which very much represented the excesses of American kind of unregulated capitalism, that was the opening for people like Orban because people in Hungary suddenly were like, "This deal, this is a raw deal.

We're getting screwed by American-like globalization," and Orban comes along with the oldest story in the book, "Well, I can offer you the comfort of traditional identity," and that's why you get a right-wing backlash to the financial crisis and not a left-wing one because it solved the identity issue that was so unsettling to people.

I found, in so many places, that the post-9/11, Putin made, and look, America didn't do this alone.

Putin had autocratic tendencies, but the post-9/11 framework and the war in Iraq, both he was able to appropriate that for his own purposes and justifications and consolidating rule in Russia and then to kind of launch a counterrevolution around the American-led order, post-Iraq.

The Chinese used the same language in their policy against the Uyghurs that I went back and found the exact same language was used to argue against allowing Uyghurs to be released from Guantanamo who have done nothing wrong in the United States, radical Islam and the like and then technology, how can we avoid the reality that these tools that we thought were going to connect people and be tools of empowerment and they have been, could become the perfect tool of disinformation for Putin or the perfect tool of surveillance for Xi Jinping, right?

So it's not like we didn't, it's not all on us, but I think we had to wrestle with how, what we've done is not disconnected at all from some of the trends we see around the world and in fact, it may have been inadvertently had a lot to do with that.

PACKER: I think Microsoft had an ad, in the '90s, that ended with someone saying, "Isn't this a great time to be alive?"

It was just a given that the '90s was a great time to be alive and the three things that you're talking about, less national security but certainly financial and technological power were, plus cultural power, which you don't talk about quite as much, but that was certainly an enormous soft way for America to insinuate itself into the minds and cultures of people all over the world.

They were unparalleled.

Was there a different post-Cold War that we could have tried to create that wouldn't have led to the Iraq war, the financial crisis, Donald Trump and the return of authoritarianism around the world?

RHODES: I think so and look, I wrestled with this.

What was interesting is I had, the book is in four sections: Hungary, which is kind of the vanguard of right-wing nationalism and Europe and the west, Russia, which has been the core of this trend that has kind of spread to places like Hungary, then China, which is kind of the future and the alternative, and then America.

I was actually originally going to have characters in the America section, the same way I do in other sections and then I realized I'm the character in the America section as well as Obama, who comes in and out, but the reason why I did that, George, was I realized my life traces the arc of exactly what you're talking about, that because I came of age, I became politically conscious around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

My understanding of the world was that it's just going to get better and better, that the big questions had been settled, that freedom had won, that we were inherently the good guys.

It was just, shaped me like osmosis and what I realized, to some extent and I felt this in government too, George, as someone who had to kind of help Obama tell the story of what America was and this is my personal view that I'm sharing and personal experience, that there was a real national identity tied to the Cold War.

When I became aware of being American, that was tied up in this fact that we were all for one set of values.

We're for freedom.

We're for capitalism.

They're for communism and for autocracy and we're on one side of this Wall and they're on the other and we're right and they're wrong and by the way, that's not to say we're perfect.

Of course, we're not, but everybody was kind of on board with that identity.

Well, not everyone but a lot of Americans, certainly in our politics and someone like Trump was unfathomable in the Cold War because there were kind of guardrails around someone like that ever becoming President.

I do feel like after the end of the Cold War we didn't really decide who we were again.

We didn't, there was this kind of period in the '90s where things were going well, so politics kind of drifted to the back drop, Bill Clinton, competent President, but what our identity was, other than being a hegemon, wasn't settled.

Then 9/11 happens and I think George W. Bush with great skill, whether, and I think it was intentional, kind of made our identity back.

If you go back and read those speeches after 9/11 that I found very stirring at the time.

It was like, "Okay, this is the new thing."

It was very deliberate.

The same way we fought down fascism and then communism, this is the new thing, the new twilight struggle and in looking back, it made sense at the time because 9/11 was such a traumatic event, but looking back on it, it's kind of crazy, right?

That we kind of made our entire identity in the world, how we interact with the world, what we care about, what we talk about, how we think about ourselves, kind of fighting this war against something as amorphous as terrorism.

I think that was the most damaging choice because I also think that, first of all, the us versus them, the them may have started as terrorism and then was radical Islam and it was kind of Islam in general to some people.

That kind of xenophobia that took root, particularly in the American right, if you take an average Fox News viewer, kind of morphed.

It can be transitioned to the black president or to immigrants at our southern border or to any, Antifa.

It's the same us-versus-them thing that was unleashed after 9/11 has kind of been repurposed in the same way that Orban and Putin have done similar things in their countries and then also, something we don't talk about enough in this country, George, it became apparent that we're not going to win these wars and that's also something that you don't say when you're in government, but what does that, that never does healthy things to a society and again, just put yourself in the position of a Fox News viewer, which I think is relevant because one of them became President.

For 7 years, under George Bush, that viewer was promised great victories and they didn't come about.

What happens when that takes place?

Always people start looking for an enemy within, particularly in the right.

PACKER: So can you imagine a better national identity that could have come out of the end of the Cold War, that would have been an American identity without the unbridled capitalism, without the paranoid national security state and without the insanely confident technology that we didn't understand was going to bring out the worst in us more than the best?

Can you imagine a way we could have rethought ourselves after losing the clarity of that binary conflict with the Soviet Union that would have allowed us to arrive at something that's like what you describe at the end of your book, which is an America that is not besotted with power but is skeptical of power and that is open to the variety of humanity and that lives out the ideals that we all are taught of equality and freedom?

Is there a way we could have done that, or was it inevitable that once we bestrode the world, there was no way we were going to check ourselves.

No country checks itself once it has the opening to have this sort of super-power that we had once we found ourselves alone at the top of the world.

RHODES: I think there's some inevitability and I say this at the end of the book that power corrupts.

Nobody has ever been immune to that, nobody ever and so the idea that once everything opened up, And all these countries were on the other side of the Cold War like Hungary, Russia and China, that people were going to make as much money as possible and people were going to want to exert as much influence as possible and something like the Iraq War is unthinkable unless you're hegemon.

And technologies are going to explode.

Some of that is inevitable, but there were choices made along the way.

Choices made in the '90s to kind of have the most amped up version of globalization, deregulation, markets who have gone awash across the world and that was going to change things for the better and certainly the choices made post 9/11.

An alternative, I think, might have been a deeper investment in the success of our own multiracial, multiethnic democracy.

We let, at home, issues like immigration fester and linger without thinking through what kind of country do we want to be and what is an immigration policy that deals with that?

We obviously let, globally, one of the things I walked in the China section is, we did not prioritize democracy and the China story's at the center of that.

At every turn, there was some reason that we were prioritizing something more than democracy and human rights.

If you were China, why would you think America really cared about that?

In the '90s, it was, opening up that market and getting access there and bringing them into the WTO because there's a lot of money to be made in China.

Post 9/11, Bush was like, "They're a security partner.

They're a partner in the war on terror."

With Obama, after the financial crisis, it was like, "We need the Chinese to help us get out of this economic hold and then we need their help to get to a Paris agreement."

And our country's gone to the mat with the Chinese more over soybean purchases than over human rights.

Human rights is something you dealt with at the concert for Tibet or something.

And so I don't think we, so an alternative identity would have been one that focused on our own identities and multiracial, multiethnic democracy and how that projects outward and how we are truly prioritizing those values abroad.

Because the only time that we kind of seemed to was post Iraq War when that became the kind of post-facto justification.

And that, ironically, discredited democracy significantly in the eyes of the world because it was attached to the US war.

PACKER: Yes.

In other words, we could have modeled a multi-everything democracy rather than tried to impose it or to assert ourselves elsewhere and in some ways, restrained ourselves as a power while perfecting our democracy at home and that would have given the world something it could believe in.

Something that didn't make it cynical, as the world became about the United States.

So let me ask you about and this is going to put you on the spot just a bit, but about the eight years in which you were in power and your boss was in power.

Because although this book is very much the book of an outsider and even I think you sort of see yourself as a bit of a dissident at this point and you've been hounded by Black Cube and Israeli Intelligence Firm and by right-wing media and by millions of trolls and they pretty much hounded you out of Washington.

RHODES: Yeah.

PACKER: At one point, your wife says, "I'm done.

We're going to Los Angeles.

I can't stand this anymore."

And so, in a way, you have been driven out of not just being in power, but seeing yourself as someone who is connected to power.

But those eight years when you were in power, do you hold President Obama or yourself in any way responsible for anything that you describe in the book as the trend that has led to the authoritarian world we're in now.

Whether and I would ask about maybe, in particular, perhaps not emphasizing human rights enough as the administration went along which is something you described in your first book, or perhaps the reaction to the financial crisis in which the banks were brought under control and made stable, but they were not, I'm sorry if there's a noise in the background.

RHODES: No, it reminds me of home, George, as a New Yorker.

PACKER: It's actually a smoke detector, I think.

But we're not punished, either as banks or as leaders of banks who committed a fraud.

I would say, if I were to hold President Obama responsible for one thing, if he did one thing that I would point to that created the right-wing populism, or didn't create it, forget, scratch that, but contributed to it, it would be giving Americans this sense that the system was rigged because the bankers didn't pay a price.

It was the ordinary people who paid the price of the financial crisis.

So I'm wondering how you see it now that you have these years outside to look back at it.

RHODES: Yeah, I think two big structural things that I've talked about, the nature of the American economy and the War on Terror.

We made a lot of efforts to kind of redirect those policies but not to change fundamental structures and I described how Obama described America as the ocean liner.

It's tough to turn around and point in a new direction.

I think we did, but I think we didn't renovate the ocean liner.

And Navalny told me, "Look, Putin's argument is, 'Yeah I'm corrupt, but so is their system.'"

And that when the financial crisis happened and people saw the bankers get bailed out, it was like the perfect what about-ism for Putin, right?

"See?

And their system is just as corrupt as ours!"

The decision was made to save the American economy in 2009 and the things that were done to save the American economy, which also created a lot of growth and a lot of job creation, also left in place the inequality and some of the structural issues, as well as, again, not punishing certain people.

So there were good reasons to do that, at the time.

It would have been politically hard to let the whole thing collapse and rebuild it and maybe Obama wouldn't have been re-elected anyway and so we're, these are not easy things.

But I think you're right.

The lesson is particularly in that window when we had these huge majorities because I think some of these other things, we would have liked to have done more to protect voting rights and deal with immigration.

We made the mistake that Biden has clearly internalized, that sometimes you only get two years to really govern in this country.

That said, George and I think while people will find I interrogate the Obama legacy to some extent, what I find troubling about it is the thing that was most triggering, that led most directly to Trump, was the fact that he was black and we can't deny that.

I mean, Donald Trump is impossible without a black president coming before him.

The guy's whole political brand was built on birtherism.

And I was kind of angry, even throughout the Obama years, at the inability of people to name that.

When people in the Tea Party are out chanting "Take our country back," it was framed as people upset about deficit spending.

Well, are those people out in the streets today?

So that's the complexity resting with the Obama legacy is that there were some limitations on what he could do because he was black and there was a backlash to his race.

PACKER: I remember interviewing a woman outside a polling place in southern Virginia, southside Virginia, which is a very conservative area, on election day in 2010.

The mid-terms that created the Tea Party revolution, she was telling me how angry she was at that man in the White House for the way he speaks, for his lack of respect for the office, the way he dresses, his body language, the things he says and I was thinking, "Who are you talking about?"

RHODES: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

PACKER: This man shows nothing but respect for the office.

The language he uses is utterly dignified and restrained and high.

His, I've never even seen him without a tie on!

RHODES: Yeah.

PACKER: I mean, what are you talking about?

And I just realized, "Oh, I know what you're talking about."

RHODES: Yeah.

PACKER: You don't want to say it.

I'm not going to force it on you, but I know what you're talking about and that was a big part of the explosion of the Tea Party which, in some ways and of Palinism, which preceded it.

RHODES: Yeah.

PACKER: Which, there's a direct line to Trump and to today's Republican party.

RHODES: I totally agree with that and look, some of this is unconscious kind of bias that, tragically, political leaders in this country indulge.

They knew what they were doing.

They knew they were stoking the most dangerous fires in the American psyche.

PACKER: Yeah.

RHODES: From the Tea Party on.

And you know even though race is not one of my kind of three categories that you address, it infuses all of them.

And it was very striking to me, very emotional for me, having kind of traveled a lot.

I did a lot of the writing for this book, including the entire section that's on America, which is the longest section, during COVID and then the Black Lives Matter protest.

And that felt like the final step that I took and kind of, and I described this thing, of being in a BLM protest in my neighborhood out here and I was so angry at first because my kid, my daughter, we're walking the street and she's asking me, "Who are these people painted on the walls?"

and I have to explain that they're black people killed by the police.

There's National Guard.

"Why are there soldiers here, Daddy?"

"Well, they're here to protect us."

"Well, why do they have guns?"

This is too complicated for me.

Children sometimes force you to see things through different eyes.

PACKER: Yeah.

RHODES: And then.

And she actually said something.

I said, "Well, remember Doctor King you learned about in school?"

And she said, "Well, he was killed by white man, too," which was, again, a child revealing the inadequacy of our narrative racial progress better than I could.

But then I went to a BLM protest, George and it was kind of the completion of me being just another guy in the crowd.

Suddenly, I'm in a protest.

Suddenly, I'm not in the White House.

I'm not out interviewing people who protest.

I'm just a guy walking in a mask down my neighborhood street.

And I had this overwhelming emotion looking around because I was feeling very angry at America.

And when I looked at the black participants in that protest, I just remember thinking, "Man, these people have a lot more reason to be angry than I do and they're out here trying to make this better."

And I found that to be incredibly hopeful.

Whenever you think about some of, it makes you realize that if you look at what is darkest about America, it makes you care that much more about what it's supposed to be.

It actually weirdly makes you love America more for what it is supposed to be.

PACKER: Yeah, I mean, there was that line during the 2008 campaign.

I don't know where it came from.

"Rosa sat, so Martin could walk, so Obama could run, so we could all fly."

And that line encapsulated the progressive narrative of America bettering itself, that we were gradually becoming a more just and more diverse society.

And I feel that at some point in the last six or so years, that narrative has been rejected by a lot of young people, especially, that that was not true.

It was kind of a fiction that my generation told our kids' generation or the generation just ahead of them and that something darker has replaced it.

Something more like, "Nothing really changes all that much."

Um, and so, in a way, I feel that President Obama, these days, is being pushed aside by some of the very people who might have very much welcomed him in 2008.

And I find myself really resisting that.

I was critical of him while he was president, especially about the financial crisis and the economy.

And I remember you and I had a conversation right after a piece I wrote called "Obama's Lost Year" came out in March of 2010.

But now I find myself wanting to defend him and just say, "This man showed us the best of our liberal Democratic values."

We could not have asked for a better example and spokesman of what democracy means.

And it's our fault if we couldn't keep it, if we couldn't live up to it.

But I don't want, I just find myself hearing so much criticism of him nowadays, especially on the left.

And I think, "Don't be so quick because no one has all the answers."

And this generation will find out it's not as easy as it seemed, as it seems now.

And let's remember how much he showed us we could be, even as he didn't succeed in all that you and he would have wanted to do in power.

Nonetheless, the example is there for all of us to aspire to.

I don't know.

Reading his book made me very much feel that way.

I don't know if any of this is resonating with you or not.

RHODES: No, it is.

I, obviously, I think about this all the time and, in many ways, he was like Jackie Robinson, right?

He was so early and had to do everything perfect and I think we'll look back and see and be kind of uncomfortable with the degree of racism he faced which and how he just shrugged it off because he wanted to set this example.

I also, I end the book on this thing that he did that is relevant to what you're saying, where he gave this speech at Selma.

And it was towards the end of the Obama presidency and he asked me and Cody Keenan, the other speech writer, to make our own canon of basically secular saints for the progressive story of America.

And he said, "Have some fun with it."

And we started doing it and I realized, as I was doing it, how radical this was.

That we've got Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman and Thoreau and Whitman and Jackie Robinson himself and everybody who kind of worked for the underdog in American history and the radical work of defining American identity as bigger and different.

I think Obama did more than the younger, I mean, look at me, man, "the younger generation."

PACKER: Yes.

RHODES: Recognizes in disrupting.

It wasn't just the example he set.

I think he, I'm not sure that you have this generation of people who are very critical of Obama without Obama.

And not because they're reacting against him, but because they're kind of the next step in this thing, like, "No, that's not enough.

It's not enough to just have representation in the White House.

We need," and I hope that that is seen as something of a continuum because I do think he, by getting in the room, kind of changed the way people thought of themselves and thought of what was possible and frankly, some of the racism he was met with made people think, "Well, wait a second.

This is not something I can accept."

And so I ended on this note because I wanted to situate Obama in some way as, He always knew full-well, George, better than anyone, that he wasn't solving, that thing you said, it wasn't true, "Obama is going to run so we can all fly."

But what he was doing was simultaneously governing as well as he could, conducting himself as well as he could so that he didn't put at risk the idea that people like him could get elected to office again.

What needs to happen now is, I get very uncomfortable sometimes, George, when people are like, "Can Joe Biden be more ambitious on some things because he's a white guy?"

The answer, unfortunately, is yes.

And that can't be the answer, okay?

What has to happen is the kind of top-down approach that Obama took and this kind of bottom-up activism thing that's out there, they have to come together in some fashion.

For us... PACKER: I think in your book, you quote Obama saying, you two had an ongoing conversation, "Is history made by individuals or by mass movements?"

And his answer was essentially both.

We, of course, change comes from below and when a mass of people have a new idea.

But it has to be realized through power.

RHODES: Yeah.

PACKER: It can't realize itself except through power and each generation has to learn that.

So where does this leave us as Americans?

I'm interested in whether, You have a lot to say about nationalism as a destructive force in the world today, our own, Russia's, China's.

We could even, we haven't talked about Burma but which you spent a lot of time on, but Burma is a not-often-looked-at example of some of the trends that we've been talking about.

Is there a positive, maybe we should call it patriotism that you would wish upon Americans that allows us to be in the world in a way that is not destructive and to have an identity in the world as Americans that does make us distinct and yet also makes us capable of being partners with other countries?

How would you describe it, if you do feel that way?

RHODES: Yeah, I mean, what I describe is and what I'm really critical of is ethno-nationalism, blood and soil nationalism, a nationalism that is exclusive in its definition, wherever it is.

And in the United States, there's always been these kind of competing stories, right?

And Donald Trump and Barack Obama, I say this in the book, couldn't more perfectly represent the competing stories.

We were founded on the principle that all men are created equal.

Well, the guy who wrote that owned slaves.

There's always a backlash to progress and reconstruction, Jim Crow, Trump and usually race enters into this picture.

And so, to me, America was supposed to be the country that had solved that problem because we had this template, right?

Because we had these documents that are flexible, we can have a multiracial, multiethnic democracy where you can be from anywhere and be American.

I was talking to someone who's a diplomat friend of mine, who's, he said at the Fourth of July ceremonies when he was ambassador, he'd say, "The thing about America is anybody can be American, anybody from the world can be American."

And during the Trump years, that was definitely not, I think, the sense of what America is.

So I think there's a very patriotic nationalism in that.

I think the uncomfortable reality, though, is that means one side of this debate has to win.

Given how radical the Republican party has become in this country and I wish that wasn't the case, George.

In a way, we're writing speeches about red states and blue states coming together.

There's no division, I wish that was true.

But the reality is, one story is going to have to win here and I think that the reason the stakes feel so high on the right, in part, is because we're headed towards a future where the demographics of this country is to be a majority non-white.

And so this kind of effort to entrench minority rule through the courts and through voting laws and the rest of it is, to some extent, it's got to be tied to that.

And so the next 20 years, we're going to define our national identity and we're either going to embrace that and make it work, or we're going to be in a pretty unstable place.

PACKER: It's interesting, I totally agree with that.

I'm not sure that America becoming a majority minority country will mean blue America wins and red America loses.

RHODES: Yeah.

PACKER: I think.

RHODES: Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

PACKER: I think we'll rearrange a lot of our politics and there will still be competing narratives and competing politics, but what we have to get beyond and I totally agree with you, is a state of affairs where one party has rejected democratic values and democratic practices and wants power at any cost and that's what we have right now.

Just a couple questions and then we'll end.

This has been a really wonderful conversation, Ben.

This is from Katerina Molcow.

"I'm a student from Europe and I wonder what you think the most resistant," I think maybe resilient, "democratic system is in the world?

Because I grew up with the US and UK being shown as the models for modern democracies and now both of them are at risk of being overtaken by the backwards-thinking sections of society."

So what's the most resilient democratic system, if there is one?

RHODES: That's a fascinating question.

I think part of what I learned in the process of writing this book is that any system is vulnerable to the same human impulses, right?

We're all human.

These are all human institutions.

Anything can happen anywhere.

So I'm not sure that there's any one system that has it exactly right.

I think each kind of generation has to remake the existing wiring in a more democratic way or go in the other direction.

If I were to look out at the world today, Germany, right?

Because of the way that their system was taken over catastrophically, has the most guardrails and the like, but that doesn't mean they're immune either.

There's a far right party that got a foothold in the Bundestag.

So I think that you can design the system, I mean, America is a good example.

The American system wasn't designed to be working like it is now.

It's being manipulated.

Human beings can manipulate human institutions.

And that's something that I've learned in writing this book and being in government, that we count on these laws and institutions to kind of protect us from ourselves and they can do that, but they can't guard against the fact that human beings can get corrupted by power.

So I'm not dodging the question.

Democracy is certainly healthier in northern Europe than it is in most places, but I don't think that means that northern Europe has it all figured out, either.

PACKER: No, I mean, one thing that the last four years have taught us all is the word "norms," which is kind of an ugly word, but it's something that it turned out everything depended on which is, essentially, human beings agreeing not to do certain things.

RHODES: Yeah.

PACKER: Even if they could get away with them.

And once those are gone, no constitution in the world is going to save you.

RHODES: Yeah.

PACKER: Did Obama make a mistake, do you think?

It was a very hard call, but did he make a mistake in not calling out disinformation and Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and the possibility that there was cooperation coming from the Trump side until after the election?

It seems to me, both from your book and from news reports, he knew more than he said and decided that he did not want to appear to be putting a thumb on the scales of the election in the weeks and days just before the 2016 vote which probably would have actually helped Trump rather than hurt Trump.

Do you think that was a mistake?

RHODES: Well, I mean, it's two separate issues because I genuinely didn't know about the Trump piece of this.

Believe it or not, we really did abide by norms and so we weren't monitoring, I mean, nobody believes this, on the wacky right, that thinks, but we... PACKER: That you were spying on them, right?

RHODES: I didn't learn about some of these investigations until the last week or couple of weeks in office.

I actually write about that in the book.

PACKER: Yeah.

RHODES: Then, yeah, I absolutely think he could have said more about it.

His judgement, I think, was not just the kind of norm one, but that the people that were reachable by disinformation from Russia were not the kind of people that were going to listen to him, that essentially it wasn't just that he'd seem to be interfering.

It's that he wasn't the messenger who was going to convince those people.

And that said, I think that some of us often, I'd rather we just say what we think, you know?

I'm for much more radical transparency and I think the failure.

PACKER: What I remarkable idea right.

RHODES: No, seriously.

And like there's a straightjacketing of yourself in government and out of government, I mean, I laugh to myself George, when I see the political language coming out, you know, from the Biden administration, who I love because I'm so familiar with that.

I used it myself.

Sometimes there's such power in just being authentic and calling stuff out and being straight about it.

And for Obama, this was complicated throughout his presidency because if he opened his mouth, for instance, about racism, his poll numbers would go down, every time.

PACKER: The one time and there was one moment when he did with Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge incident and it didn't help it, so.

RHODES: No, it was the biggest drop in his poll.

So I think he internalized, like some things.

But I actually think that like, you know what, like it's all on the line right now and so, yeah, I think being more open and kind of letting the chips fall is the right approach.

PACKER: Yeah, yeah that's actually a really refreshing view.

I think Trump probably embodied that in a thoroughly disruptive way.

The one thing we can learn from Trump is when you say what you think, it actually might help you politically.

RHODES: Yes.

PACKER: Yeah.

Ben, this has been so much fun and also I just wanted to tell everyone who's here, this book is a really absorbing and beautifully written and deeply thoughtful account of the world we're in.

"After the Fall, Being America In the World We've Made", it made me think about things I thought I had been thinking about for a long time in a new way.

And so I have to thank my friend Ben for doing that and for writing this book.

And I wish you and it all the luck in the world.

RHODES: Thanks, George and I'm so, you've got a book coming out.

I mean, sometimes, I hope that because of the Trump years and there's going to be a lot of books that are, we're all trying to figure this out.

But what's refreshing is, that it's not about Trump, it's about bigger things.

Trump kind of distracted us.

PACKER: Let's stop talking about him.

RHODES: Anyways, thanks so much.

PACKER: Thank you, Ben.

HOLLAND: And we here at Politics and Prose really want to thank Ben Rhodes, George Packer and our audience out there.

From our shelves to yours, we hope everyone out there is staying safe, staying strong, staying connected and of course, staying well read.

NARRATOR: Books by tonight's authors are available at Politics and Prose bookstore locations or online at politics-prose.com.

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