“In Singapore,” writes Rhodes, who traveled the world to write this book, “a senior government official told me casually over drinks that Asia had moved on from America-speaking as if this gleaming capitalist construction had almost been seamlessly handed off to the Chinese.” Meanwhile, other global leaders behaved like Trump-notably Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who was once an anti-communist liberal but found more opportunities to exercise power as a nationalist, quietly suppressing opposition while keeping the beer flowing. With that diminution, other nations rose: Putin’s Russia, but especially Xi Jinping’s China.
“To be an American in 2020 was to live in a country diminished in the world,” he writes.
“In the span of just thirty years, this assumption would come crashing down,” he adds, undermined by the very thing that had heralded greatness: a robust capitalism that produced global inequality, undermined the working class, and encouraged official corruption. The assumption that America was somehow different from the rest of the world was an article of faith in his childhood, writes Rhodes. Ultimately, Rhodes writes personally and powerfully about finding hope in the belief that looking squarely at where America has gone wrong can make clear how essential it is to fight for what America is supposed to be, for our own country and the entire world.A former Obama administration adviser examines the slow fall from grace that led to Trump. The characters and issues that Rhodes illuminates paint a picture that shows us where we are today-from Barack Obama to a rising generation of international leaders from the authoritarian playbook endangering democracy to the flood of disinformation enabling authoritarianism. Along the way, he discusses the growing authoritarianism of Vladimir Putin, and his aggression towards Ukraine, with the foremost opposition leader in Russia, who was subsequently poisoned and imprisoned he profiled Hong Kong protesters who saw their movement snuffed out by China under Xi Jinping and America itself reached the precipice of losing democracy before giving itself a fragile second chance. He visited dozens of countries, meeting with politicians and activists confronting the same nationalism and authoritarianism that are tearing America apart.
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