>> I think that the U.S., the European Union, has taken this for granted for too long, that democracy was a settled question in our own countries.

Whether it's in the U.S. or within the context of the European Union, more needs to be done to make democracy the first priority.

♪♪ >> Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today, is America still number one?

Sure, we have the world's strongest military and advanced and quickly rebounding economy -- 7% GDP growth this year -- plus a knack for innovation.

Check out the iPhone.

You've heard of it.

But does the United States still serve as the mighty beacon of democracy it once was?

Yeah, you know the answer.

And how are our adversaries, like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, using America's growing polarization to their advantage.

I'm talking about that and much more with Ben Rhodes, a man who wrote some of President Barack Obama's most memorable speeches and the new book, "After the Fall: Being American in the World We Made."

Later, we'll introduce you to a journalist who followed insurrectionists into the U.S. Capitol building on January 6th.

Don't worry -- I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> Dear Americans.

Are you tired of elections that are confusing, meddled with, or disputed?

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... And by... >> This place called America, this shining city on a hill.

>> American power was indisputable in the 20th century.

The United States helped win two world wars, developed a resilient economy, a world-class economy, and, in 1991, emerged from the Cold War as the sole global superpower.

But today, the country is facing unprecedented polarization.

Its behavior in recent decades has left many asking, "Has the United States become less of a blueprint for success and more of an example of what not to do in the world?"

If the American century has come to an end, who or what will define the next one?

Though people are quick to point fingers -- just blame Trump -- the erosion of American leadership did not happen overnight or over four years.

True, withdrawing from the World Health Organization during a pandemic, leaving the U.N. Human Rights Council while devastating crises in Myanmar, Xinjiang, China, came into focus, sanctioning prosecutors from the International Criminal Court didn't exactly help.

It wasn't all Trump's fault, and it's not a new problem.

Past administrations had their share of failures.

The war in Iraq demonstrated the United States was prepared to act without any concern for international laws or norms because it could.

America's role in the 2008 financial crisis showed the world that corruption wasn't just for other nations.

We had plenty right here.

Headlines about police brutality, a botched COVID response, daily mass shootings -- America isn't living up to its status as a shining city up on a hill.

In fact, even though America's image has rebounded internationally with the Biden presidency, most people surveyed in a recent Pew poll no longer see the United States as a good model of democracy.

Canada, Germany, sure.

Not the United States, which is kind of painful to admit, if I'm being honest with you.

And that skepticism also resonates here at home.

More than half of younger Americans polled today believe that the United States is not an exceptional nation, a generational shift that's likely explained by the fact that decades-long wars, rising inequality, weaponized social media has led to more losses than wins during their lifetime.

Strongmen around the world are seizing on this moment.

Chinese state media argued that the storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6th was a sign that democracy doesn't work.

Vladimir Putin regularly cites the United States' record when his own human-rights violations are challenged.

>> This is an unlawful assembly.

>> If the arc of history bends toward justice and American values of liberty and freedom are to be preserved, what is it going to take to truly make America great again?

Did I say that?

Yeah, I just said that.

That's my question for Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser to President Barack Obama and author of the book "After the Fall: Being American in the World We Made."

Here's our conversation.

Ben, good to see you again.

Thanks for joining.

>> Yeah, good to see you, Ian.

It's been a while.

>> You and I met in the White House, and for an administration that made its name on wanting to build hope.

And I wonder, after your time in the Obama administration, how do you get to a point where you say that the world increasingly can't look to the United States as an example?

What has changed in your mind?

>> Well, I think there were two stages to this, Ian.

I think the first stage was, you know, coming fully to grips with the kind of radicalization in the Republican Party in the United States.

You know, the real danger that that posed to our democracy.

And then, the damage that did to our standing in the world.

And like, you know, I travel constantly.

And what I found, in the months after Trump's election, was it wasn't so much the fact that Donald Trump was president that concerned people around the world.

It was the fact that we elected Donald Trump president, and we could do that again and that maybe we weren't -- the kind of -- You know, countries disagree with our foreign policy, but they could at least look to us as a stable democratic example.

And then I think, in the process of writing this book, you know, I just wanted to kind of interrogate some of my assumptions as someone who worked in a high-ranking foreign-policy position.

Yes, America's done extraordinarily good things around the world, but the ways in which our era of American hegemony has also contributed to some of the negative trends we see around the world.

Now, I still think that what America is supposed to be is something that is incredibly hopeful.

>> Where were you on your travels -- and, yeah, you and I go all over the place, and you went to some pretty interesting spots, in terms of democracy and its failings.

What surprised you the most?

>> You know, Hungary and Hong Kong or two places that stood out to me that I spent a lot time on the book.

And in Hungary, what was so interesting to me was to talk to Hungarian Democratic activists and to have them essentially explain how, in a decade, Viktor Orbán turned what was a democracy into something more like a single-party autocracy.

And the playbook that he used was quite similar to the one in the United States -- get elected on a right-wing populist backlash to the financial crisis, redraw the parliamentary districts to favor your party, change the voting laws to make it easier for your supporters to vote.

Wrap it all up in an us-versus-them nationalist message -- you know, "Us, the true Hungarians, versus them, the immigrants, the Muslims, George Soros," a pretty eerily similar playbook.

But I think part of what surprised me was how much, you know, when I talk to these young people and I asked them kind of to walk me through the experience of their lifetime after the fall of the Berlin Wall, how unsettled democracy always was, the extent to which these questions that I think Americans thought had been settled, at least settled in the democratic world, were really not resolved in places like Eastern Europe.

>> Hungary is, of course, a member of the European Union, still in good standing, even though lots of people are very antagonized by them.

Do you think democracy in Hungary is lost?

>> I don't.

One of the things that I found and I kind of profile some of the opposition figures who've started political parties who've gotten real traction, making the same argument that another character in my book, Alexei Navalny, is making in Russia, basically, an anti-corruption argument, that autocracy fuels corruption, that Orbán is stealing from the people.

And I'm very disappointed that the European Union hasn't taken a firmer stance with Orbán himself.

He still benefits from all this E.U.

funding that he just siphons off the top to enrich his cronies who then finance his politics or buy up the media.

I think that the U.S., the European Union, has taken this for granted for too long, that democracy was a settled question.

>> Hong Kong, obviously, is another place where this has become an existential issue and where, I would argue, they've lost.

Right?

The democrats are done for it.

There's no going back there.

First of all, do you agree with that?

>> Yeah, I mean, the tragedy, and having spent time with a bunch of them, most of the people I talked to from my book are no longer in Hong Kong, which tells you everything you need to know.

You know, when I really reflected on the last 30 years, because I deal with this question, how did we go from Tiananmen Square, when it looked like that was the losing end of the direction of global events, to today, where Hong Kong looks like the future, and I think that's very important, is that Hong Kong should be seen as a warning of where this can go, I realized, Ian, there's an uncomfortable truth that, at no point in this 30-year period did the American government, American businesses, American entertainment, democracy was never the priority in the Chinese relationship.

You know, in the Obama years, in the first term, it was recovering from the global financial crisis, an important thing.

In the second term, it was getting to a Paris agreement, an important thing.

I know why we prioritized those things.

But then under Bush, it was new security issues and the war on terrorism.

Under Clinton, it was opening up markets, lowering prices, bringing them into the WTO.

At every stage of the last 30 years, a commercial interest or security interest or geopolitical interest was always above what our interests were on an issue like Hong Kong.

And so I don't know that anything could have been done in the last year or two to forestall the outcome in Hong Kong.

But I do think we have to reckon with the reality that, for all of our words about democracy over the years, can we really say that we've ever really gone to the mat on human rights and democratic issues with the Chinese Communist Party?

We have not prioritized democracy itself at home and in our foreign policy over the course of the last 30 years, in the same way that for all the problems of the Cold War -- Right?

I mean, we didn't get everything right there -- but there was this kind of paradigm where, like, democracy itself was at the top of a hierarchy of a set of interests because we needed to draw the contrast with the Soviet Union.

>> I mean, if you're the United States, and Saudi Arabia is a core ally, and we're focused on national security and alliances around the world and we're concerned about terrorism and the private sector is very important, how do you -- I mean, everyone that looks to the U.S. would say that human rights has played a role, certainly, but no one would say that human rights has played the priority role.

How do you change that?

And how much of a priority do you honestly think it could and should be?

>> Look, I've been in government.

I recognize the challenges.

I recognize that there are trade-offs and all the rest of it.

That said, I think we've just gone way too far in the other direction.

So I think it is time to say, if we truly believe -- And you hear this from the administration, that democracy versus autocracy is kind of the existential question of this time.

If you believe that, you cannot have the relationship that we have with a Saudi Arabia or Egypt, period.

It's difficult, sure, but you just -- at some point, you have to -- you have to show that you will make the difficult choice for democracy itself.

And I also think, with China, for instance, what's interesting is, there's so much overwhelming momentum towards wanting to get a piece of that Chinese market that we have all kind of collectively self-censored.

You know, the U.S. government has been pretty cautious in how it talks about human-rights issues in China until quite recently, with the excesses of the situation with the Uyghurs and Hong Kong.

U.S. businesses, like, I think, have to be candid that they kind of check their values at the door.

>> No, I saw I guess it was you and Samantha Power that were talking about the fact that on a much smaller issue, on the Armenian genocide recognition, where President Obama, when he was running, said he was going to make that recognition, then decided against it because of Turkey, which I mean, it's not China.

It's nothing close to China.

And you said that was a mistake.

And Biden actually went ahead and then did do that.

Turned out there wasn't much blowback as a consequence.

>> Yeah, it wasn't -- It was a mistake.

And I think that, you know, there's a couple of elements to this, Ian.

I mean, the first is that we are often cautious because of those extra responsibilities you talk about.

When you're the big superpower, you know, you feel like you don't want to rock the boat too much in other areas.

But the reality is, China's not shy on commenting on issues in America.

Russians are not shy, not just about commenting but actually really enga-- The interference that they claim that we do in their politics, it's projection.

They're doing much, much worse and much more aggressive in our politics.

Why can't we say what we think about the Armenian genocide?

Why can't we say what we think about the situation in Tibet or in Xinjiang province or in Hong Kong?

Some of this is just -- There's been this kind of self-imposed restraint that I, frankly, felt tension with when I was in government and at a communications function.

And I think, in some ways, as we're entering a period when America is really no longer a hegemon, that should be kind of liberating, in a way, you know, that we -- we're this country that can exercise its voice much more, I think, aggressively and stand for a set of values much more consistently, at least, I think that's what we need to do, because the reality is, American exceptionalism is the story we tell about America.

We obviously don't always live up to it.

And now the rest of the world has seen, well, we can have a corrupt autocrat with a son-in-law down the hall just like anybody else.

We can have a mob storm the parliament just like anybody else.

The opportunity in that is, if we can fight through that and we can preserve a multiracial democracy, we're setting an example that is more recognizable to the world.

It's not lectures on democracy from on high.

It's like, "Hey, we're doing the work here at home.

We're just going to talk about these things around the world."

I think that has the potential to ripple out and create a pendulum swing in the other direction more than kind of issuing dictates from Washington about democratic values on a written statement.

>> So, we've talked a lot about foreign policy.

And, of course, that was your principal role in the Obama administration.

But the book is also about the fact that democracy inside the United States is not moving where it needs to be, that it is hard for us to lead by example because we don't believe in our democracy the way we should, the way we perhaps used to.

What are some things that you think are actually plausible that would help to address, that would move the needle on that fundamental issue for American democracy?

>> Part of what's different is technology.

Part of what's different is the way in which social media and technology has literally made it possible for a very large chunk of this country to live in an alternative reality.

And I remember in the Obama years, you could look at polls that showed that huge majorities of Republicans believed that Obama was not born in America.

They go, "Those people are just nuts."

Well, no, those people, they believe that.

And today, the scale of the number of Americans who believe things that are not true in many cases are totally insane.

>> Believe that the vaccine will hurt you, believe that Trump won the 2020 election.

I mean, the United States today has a greater divide between Democrats and Republicans and who is and who is not being vaccinated than in any major democracy in the world today among political parties.

That is exactly the issue you are pointing to.

>> That's right.

And so you can't fix anything with this many people living in an alternative reality.

So I think that the Biden team needs to start thinking very, very constructively and very seriously about how to work with the tech industry to regulate social-media platforms so that they are not turbocharging disinformation and conspiracy theory in ways that are literally warping our nation.

This has to be -- I don't -- You hear a lot about voting rights and that is absolutely essential.

And if that effort can't pass because of the filibuster, people have to get down in the state and local areas and mobilize people to register and try to push back against laws, and, yes, we have to be protecting the right to vote, we have to be taking on the corrosive amounts of money in politics and the lack of transparency, all those sets of issues.

But this other issue, to me, may even be more important, because you can do all the things you want, if 40% of this country, like, will believe anything that is being mainlined into their social-media feeds and turbocharged by everything from Russian disinformation to top-down financing from from mega donors, like, there's gonna be a limit on how much we can fix our democracy.

So I do think this issue of tech regulation, of social-media platforms is one that, you know, weirdly, you hear a lot more about from the right than the left.

That's because they know that it's working for them, and they don't want it to change because they know that Facebook has become, like, a perfect tool for them to keep their people in this alternative reality.

So that's something I think we need to hear more about from the administration, and I hope we will.

>> If you had to point to the single biggest thing that the Obama administration could have done differently, in retrospect, knowing what we know now, what would it have been?

>> When I look back -- and I think the Biden people have internalized this lesson to some extent, we only had those first two years to make real structural change, because we lost the House of Representatives after that.

And I think, clearly, there were missed opportunities in terms of the efforts that were made to save the American and global economy, preserved, in many ways exacerbated, the very inequality that was the characteristic of the financial crisis.

Because when you're just pumping enormous amounts of money, not just from our stimulus or not just from the TARP program, but from quantitative easing, just so much money being pumped into the institutions that create the structures that perpetuate inequality, we should have been doing more up front to try to narrow inequality when we had those congressional majorities.

>> Given where we're heading, I mean, you know, how much -- how much do you worry that the 2024 election process is not just a repeat of 2020 but actually becomes more delegitimized, that the population becomes more broken on the back of it?

>> I'm incredibly worried, because, like, two big lessons that I take away from writing this book.

One, anything can happen here.

And, two, look at what the Republicans are doing, and they tend to be pretty up front about what they're doing.

So, when they're passing laws in states like Texas, like Georgia, where the laws had the intent of allowing elected Republican officials to overturn the results of the election, they're doing that because that is something that they want to do.

They're not just doing that to fill time.

And so the fact that there's even any possibility that we could have an election in 2024 that not only suffers from grave voter suppression but literally you could have people overturning the democratic will of the people?

Like, that should be a terrifying and mobilizing force for people.

I think what I'm hopeful about is, again, is that we can fight through that and overcome that in the same way that we did in 2020.

I think each one of these elections, we're getting closer to getting to the end of the tunnel here.

But this is not something that's going to be addressed in just two or four years.

But we, along the way, have to make sure that we don't allow ourselves to have the bottom pulled out from under us.

And right now, there's a lot of evidence to suggest that's exactly what the Republican Party is trying to do.

>> Ben Rhodes.

The book is "After the Fall."

Thanks for joining me today.

>> Thanks, Ian.

♪♪ >> Perhaps no single event in recent history has thrown into doubt the sturdiness of American democracy like the January 6th Capitol riot.

More than six months later, one British reporter who followed the violent crowd into the Capitol building that day worries that the worst may be yet to come.

>> My name is Robert Moore.

I'm a British foreign correspondent, based in Washington, D.C., working for the UK network ITV News.

We moved with the crowd.

We positioned ourselves where we thought the breach was most likely to happen, which was, not without irony, exactly where the inauguration of Joe Biden would happen in just a few weeks' time.

And the more I spoke to people, the more apparent it was to me that this was an insurrection being planned, being orchestrated in plain sight.

I was with Jacob Angeli, the so-called QAnon Shaman, who was with me on the steps of the building as we went through.

We were absolutely with a group of delusional characters who believe deeply, even profoundly, and in his case, spiritually, that what they were doing was absolutely right.

So it was this combination of the dangerous and the delusional that was the defining feature of that day for me.

I've reconnected with some of those characters who I crossed the threshold with in subsequent months.

No one's ever expressed to me any remorse or any regret.

What was really distinctive about this, not only was this happening in the U.S. Capitol, you know, the great citadel of democracy, the sort of shining city on the hill -- in that case, literally on the Hill -- where so many countries look to for stability and for democratic inspiration, was the level of delusion, fury with the government.

But never before have I seen a crowd so motivated by absurd theories of what's going on in their own country.

And then I realized, "This isn't just a challenge about one day or one election."

It's actually a challenge about truth, about facts, about how America sees itself, about how big tech leverages these conspiracy theories and spreads them so rapidly.

And it strikes me, looking forward to what happens next, is that is the danger because those conspiracy theories are still out there.

They're still being perpetuated.

They're still being spread.

They're still being invested in.

I think the big takeaway for the world is the fragility of democracy everywhere, that democracy can be easily undermined if we can't agree on a shared set of facts or a shared national narrative.

It really is much more fragile, much more delicate a political construct than we had ever imagined before.

This is a battle for journalists.

We need to make sure that we are in outstanding reporting and that we abandon these partisan political lines.

It's a challenge, too, for citizens to have to try and turn away from the toxic morass of conspiracy theories that are circulating.

And there needs to be a national conversation based on facts and on truth.

And it won't be won, this battle, in a week or in a presidential term or even won by a House select committee investigating January the 6th.

It's a generational struggle to try and understand the truth, and the national narrative is essential if we're going to have any degree of political stability.

♪♪ >> And now to "Puppet Regime," where we hear from the world's leading U.S. election expert, his puppetness, Vladimir Putin.

>> Dear Americans, are you tired of elections that are confusing, meddled with, or disputed?

Do post-election insurrections have you feeling blue?

Well, there is a better way.

It's Russian elections.

Let me explain.

In Russia, Election Day is on a Sunday, which makes it easy to vote.

You don't have to ask your jerk boss for time off just to cast ballot.

Second of all, there are no racist voting restrictions here.

In Russia, largest ethnic minority is Ukrainians.

And in Ukraine, we just start new civil wars rather than argue about old ones.

Third, and this is for my New York friends, ranked-choice voting in Russia is so easy.

You just vote five times for me.

I mean, why choose between lesser of two evils when you can just choose evil?

Democracy is such a drag.

So messy.

Who has time for all of that stress?

Just kickback -- I mean, kick back, relax.

When you always know outcome, you never have to worry about... >> ♪ "Puppet Regime" ♪ >> That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see -- you're concerned about American democracy, maybe you think it's just fine -- either way, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... And by...