"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 64

Episode 64: Why Anti-Democratic Populists Keep Winning Elections

Ben Rhodes, a former national security advisor to Barack Obama, has a theory. Based on interviews he did with journalists, activists, and dissidents facing anti-democratic movements around the world, he explains how right wing leaders with an authoritarian bent have exploited the downsides of globalization to seize power — and he says it’s due in no small part to major blunders made by the United States.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

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Peter Bergen: You've written recently in the New York Review of Books that November 5th, which is the U.S. election day, is judgment day for democracy.

Ben Rhodes: I really mean that, and I know that's hyperbolic, but if Trump comes back into office. If the U.S. tips decisively in this MAGA direction, Peter, I think it confirms globally this is where things are going.

Ben Rhodes spent eight years as one of President Barack Obama's main speechwriters and closest national security advisors.

Rhodes helped to negotiate Obama's nuclear deal with Iran and the brief end to America's trade embargo with Cuba. Since leaving government, Rhodes has launched a popular podcast.

ARCHIVAL:

Tommy Vietor: Welcome back to Pod Save the World, I'm Tommy Vitor.

Ben Rhodes: I'm Ben Rhodes.

Tommy Vietor: Ben is back from the Munich Security Conference. How’d it go?

Ben Rhodes: You know it’s this incredibly condensed environment and it’s crazy to walk into this old hotel in Munich…

Rhodes also writes best selling books about international affairs.

He's got the contacts and knowledge that come from spending the better part of a decade in the room with world leaders. But he still speaks and writes with the approachable language of a guy with a creative writing degree. The kind of guy who sometimes still sounds a little surprised that he ended up working at the White House.

ARCHIVAL Ben Rhodes: I think a part of my 28-year old self sensed that I was barreling down that dark highway from one life into another, deeper into the world of Washington, D.C., where I never felt entirely at ease amid the valedictorians and student body presidents.

That's Rhodes reading from his most recent book, titled, After the Fall. The book tells the story of how he undertook a very personal journey after Trump’s election in 2016 to investigate a pattern of similar elections happening in countries all over the world.

Maybe you noticed this pattern too. In the last couple of decades, in country after country, populist leaders with an authoritarian bent just keep getting voted into office. And a lot of them seem to be following a similar playbook.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 1: Prime Minister Victor Orban has crushed dissent politically and socially.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 2: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been accused of making Islamophobic comments during an election rally.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster 3: Erdogan has cracked down on perceived opponents, with tens of thousands of civil servants losing their jobs or going to jail.

As the United States heads into a presidential election where some people worry that democracy itself could be up for grabs.

ARCHIVAL Lawrence O'Donnell: Instead of talking about, will the Democrats hold on to the Senate or will the Republicans hold on to the House, as we used to, the question now becomes, will the country hold on to democracy?

Rhodes lays out an incredibly clear account of the forces helping anti-democratic leaders get elected around the world. You'll hear about where those forces come from and how to fight them. And Rhodes has also got some fascinating insights about how some of those forces got set in motion by the United States itself.

Ben Rhodes: What was interesting to me, Peter, is in reporting the book, I kept coming back to this fact that our fingerprints were everywhere.

I'm Peter Bergen. And this is In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC]

If you're not a regular listener of Ben Rhodes's podcast, Pod Save the World, or if you haven't read any of his books, or if you don’t particularly agree with his politics, I should say a little more about what I see as his particular appeal.

He's not one of those chroniclers of international affairs who sees himself as a fully paid-up member of the powerful set he's writing about. I think there's no better example of this than the story he likes to tell about the time had an absurd run-in… with Queen Elizabeth the Second.

It was 2014. And a bunch of world leaders had gathered in France to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the allied invasion of Normandy in World War II.

Ben Rhodes: And let's just say, I'd had a very late night the night before because I thought the trip was over.

In his book, Rhodes admits, he was pretty severely hungover.

Ben Rhodes: I'm, like, exhausted. I'm sweating. And I have to go to the bathroom. So I walk over and I find the bathroom and I go to open the door and it's – you know, when you try to open a restroom door and you can't tell if it's locked or not? And so I'm doing that thing where you're, like, jiggling the doorknob, pushing on the door and finally realize it's locked.

Ben Rhodes: And just when I let go and take a step back, it opens. And Queen Elizabeth is standing right there.

Peter Bergen: [LAUGHS]

Ben Rhodes: And, and, and she's got like her handbag on her arm and gives me a look that, in the history of that monarchy might have gotten you killed in the past, you know. So I just kind of shrunk back. Of course, then I told Obama and he doubled over in laughter and made fun of me about it for days on end.

As a close advisor to Obama throughout both his terms in office, Rhodes had a front row seat to what he sees as the defining confrontation of our time. Between democrats with a small D and the autocrats who'd like to replace them.

And since leaving the White House, Rhodes has traveled the world following the story of this confrontation.

Ben Rhodes: The genesis of that book is I was traveling a lot. Initially when I left government, a lot of those trips were with Barack Obama. So I had this interesting ability to, to both be meeting with world leaders, but also, we were building these networks of people in civil society and activism, to meet with the kinds of people that are in opposition movements, uh, in some cases they're persecuted, in some cases they're trying to solve their own puzzle of how do you stand up to authoritarianism in the same way that we were trying to figure that out in the U.S.

Ben Rhodes: And I'd started actually recording those conversations before I even knew what was going to come of that. And the main thing that became clear to me is that the far right itself was quite coordinated and had actually spent a long time sharing strategies, sometimes sharing political consultants, learning from one another, going to convenings, and, you know, they were replicating their methods in different places.

Ben Rhodes: I kept finding this. And so, the germ of that book, After the Fall, was discovering everywhere I went, the commonalities among different people that were dealing with the rise of authoritarianism and wanting to knit that together into a story that would be useful to people.

Peter Bergen: It feels like a very personal journey.

Ben Rhodes: Yeah. I mean, Peter, to be honest, at the risk of giving my antagonists on the Right a pleasure, I was pretty broken in January, 2017. I had a sense of, kind of, the darkness that was coming. I was already totally exhausted mentally and physically. And I knew that things that I’d really put my heart into — the Cuban normalization, the Iran nuclear deal — that these things were gonna be wrecked. And so I was kind of putting myself back together again.

Ben Rhodes: And the way that I did that was, I think, through travel, through looking at America from the outside in. To me, I could see America clearer from Hong Kong or Hungary than I could sitting in the United States. Having been in the room, as it were, for eight years, but getting out of the room, and talking to people in civil society and talking to journalists and talking to dissidents and talking to opposition politicians that I never would have met with in the White House. You know, that kind of filled me up again for the first time. That was the first time I started to feel reenergized after the devastation of the first Trump election.

Peter Bergen: There’s the great film, The Final Year, about Obama's final year, in which you play a prominent role. And, you know, the viewers watching the film know what is coming, but the participants in the film don't know what’s coming.

Ben Rhodes: Yeah. It's like Jaws, you know. [PETER LAUGHS] The shark shows up at the end.

Peter Bergen: And you know, everybody thinks that Hillary Clinton is a shoo-in. And there's an amazing scene with you.

Ben Rhodes: I know you're, the one where I'm kind of devastated after the election.

Peter Bergen: Well, yeah. So you're sitting in the middle of the street on a step and it's night time and you're not somebody who's usually at a loss for words, right? You're a professional wordsmith. And your mouth is moving but nothing's coming out.

ARCHIVAL Ben Rhodes: I just came outside to try to process all this. Um, it's a lot to, a lot to process. I mean – uh… I… I can't even… I, I can't… I can't, I can't put it into words. I, I don't know what the words are.

Peter Bergen: What were you thinking in that moment?

Ben Rhodes: I was thinking that, you know, there was no… you know, when you're in politics, and particularly, you know, Obama politics, you're always looking for the hopeful turn, right? And there was none. Some things are just horrible. You know, the Trump election had no silver lining.

Ben Rhodes: I'd watched and felt the rise of Trumpism because I was kind of a villain to the American, what became the MAGA movement, early on. And so I really, I really didn't like these people. And it wasn't like if Mitt Romney had won or, you know, even like a Marco Rubio, who criticizes us a lot, had won.

Ben Rhodes: These were, these were dark forces and, and so, you know, when asked to kind of put into words what this all felt like, I mean, I, I had no words because there was really nothing to say. It was as bad as it looked.

For Rhodes, Trump’s 2016 election sent a signal to the world that America's democracy just isn’t as healthy as it once was. But he thinks the story of how we got here begins long before Trump.

Ben Rhodes: My political consciousness was formed as the Cold War was ending and then the nineties and democracy spreading around the world. And it seems like we're headed towards a future of globalization that brings us all together and there's going to be perpetually rising standards of living.

Ben Rhodes: Well, that was wrong. History didn't go away. Nationalism didn't go away. There's a push and pull to history. And right now, history has been moving back to its darker sources.

Peter Bergen: You make a very interesting point at one point in your book. The Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis demonstrated that the elites who are running American foreign policy and American economic policy didn't know what the hell they were doing.

Ben Rhodes: Yes.

Peter Bergen: And you kind of connect the two. I mean the hubris and failures on the foreign policy side were in some ways also connected to the hubris and failures on the economic side that produced the financial crisis. And I guess so I have two questions. One is what's the connection?

Peter Bergen: Two, you know George W. Bush, because he's more of a gentleman than Trump, let's say, history is treating him much better, I think. Trump didn't get the nation in a ruinous, foreign, big war. Trump didn't preside over the largest economic collapse, arguably, since the Great Depression. He may have had plenty of his own issues. But has Bush, George W. Bush sort of got off?

Ben Rhodes: Yes. The George W. Bush presidency was far more damaging than the first Trump presidency. I should stop saying first — it's like I expect there to be a second. The George W. Bush presidency was much more damaging than the Trump presidency. As a foreign policy person, I was pretty familiar with the extent to which the decision to invade Iraq had eviscerated our credibility in the world, to do something that catastrophically and obviously wrong with your hegemony.

Ben Rhodes: What are we going to do with this moment of hegemony? We could mobilize the world to get ahead of the climate crisis, we could have done any number of things. We chose to spend trillions of dollars invading and occupying a medium sized country in the Middle East, for no reason, basically. That's such a self-evidently stupid thing to do, you know, that I think it called into question the judgment of the American national security establishment that cast itself as like the stewards of the global order.

Ben Rhodes: What I was more struck by in reporting out and living After the Fall, was that the global financial crisis was an even bigger event, I think, in terms of global politics. Because everywhere I went, that was the thing that opened the door.

Peter Bergen: A lot of American listeners recall the 2008 financial crisis being a very big deal in the United States. They may not have understood that it basically blew up tons of other economies, the Greek economy, pick your…

Ben Rhodes: It was much worse in most other places than in the U.S. because we were just wealthier. So we were falling from a higher level. But I think the Hong Kong official also said to me something quite interesting. He said, you know, that was the moment, the financial crisis, when there was a collapse in confidence in globalization and the West.

Ben Rhodes: And that's when Beijing was like, ‘Wait a second, we don't need to wait and bide our time,’ which had been the Chinese motto, essentially. ‘These guys don't know what they're doing. We don't trust them to do anything. We can begin to try to challenge their position, directly and frontally.’’ And Putin too. Why is that? It's because we were, I think, too powerful. There was too much of a margin for error. We were able to get away with invading and occupying a country.

Ben Rhodes: I think it's not healthy for a country to be as powerful as the United States was. And the same thing was true in the financial crisis. People could get away with it.

Ben Rhodes: One guy told me that the, the shot heard around the world — at least in Asia — was when Alan Greenspan, who was literally the embodiment of American stewardship of the global economy and the global financial system, testified before Congress.

ARCHIVAL Henry Waxman: Dr. uh, Greenspan, I want to start with you…

Ben Rhodes: And was asked about the underlying assumption that essentially, banks, corporations, wouldn't take certain risks because of their obligation to shareholders.

ARCHIVAL:

Henry Waxman: Well, where do you think you made a mistake then?

Alan Greenspan: I made a mistake in presuming that the self interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, was such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and the equity in the firms.

Ben Rhodes: And he said, well, we were wrong in that assumption, you know, and it was like, you know, this guy said that like the entire assumption underlying the more-more-more era of American capitalism through Reagan, up through the financial crisis was wrong.

Peter Bergen: It’s a great scene in your book because of course Alan Greenspan not only was chairman of the Fed, but he was basically the oracle of global finance, right?

Ben Rhodes: Yeah.

Peter Bergen: And here he's suddenly saying, actually, we just got fundamental things wrong.

Ben Rhodes: Kind of the fundamental underlying premise of — not to get too intellectual about this, Peter — but of like, the post-Milton Friedman pendulum swing away from New Deal, Great Society politics to Reaganomics and neoliberalism — that, it was wrong.

ARCHIVAL:

Henry Waxman: You found a flaw in the reality…

Alan Greenspan: A flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak.

So, after the twin fiascoes of the Iraq war and the 2008 financial crisis, America’s stewardship of the global order and global economy looked to be in ruins. And in many countries, would-be strongmen saw this moment as an opportunity.

As Rhodes traveled the world to chronicle the rise of anti-democratic populism after Trump’s 2016 election … there was perhaps no clearer example of how strongmen were responding to America’s fall from grace… than in Hungary.

There's this crystal clear paragraph in his book where Rhodes explains how Hungary's prime minister, Viktor Orbán, dismantled liberal democracy in his country over the span of a decade. I'm going to have Rhodes read it to you right now:

ARCHIAL Ben Rhodes: Win elections through right wing populism that taps into people's outrage over the corruption and inequities wrought by unbridled globalization. Enrich corrupt oligarchs who, in turn, fund your politics. Create a vast partisan propaganda machine. Redraw parliamentary districts to entrench your party in power. Pack the courts with right wing judges and erode the independence of the rule of law. Keep big business on your side with low taxes and favorable treatment. Demonize your political opponents through social media disinformation. Attack civil society as a tool of George Soros. Cast yourself as the sole legitimate defender of national security. Wrap the whole project in a Christian nationalist message that taps into the longing for a great past. Relentlessly attack the Other, immigrants, Muslims, liberal elites.

Peter Bergen: So, basically the Orbán playbook, I mean, it's a playbook that works?

Ben Rhodes: He says the quiet part out loud. He says democracy's failed, globalization's failed. The future doesn't look like the West. The future is going to look more like China and Russia. And that’s where we’re going.

Ben Rhodes: You know, Hungary is a, was a really, really important place for me to understand what had happened in American politics, because it's like a little mini laboratory.

Ben Rhodes: And what one of the Hungarians, who actually runs an anti-corruption organization, said to me was, the basic bargain of globalization was, you know, you may lose your identity in the sense that there's kind of cultural homogenization and the coarsening of pop culture. And if you're Hungarian, you know, suddenly everything's in English. But the basic bargain was you may be losing certain things that are precious to you, but you're going to get richer. And standards of living are going to go up. And that's kind of what sustained globalization for a time. And by the way, not that long.

Ben Rhodes: You know, 1990 to 2008 is not a very long time. And people started to notice widening and widening inequality. And then in 2008, when the bottom drops out, it's like, well, the bargain doesn't work at all, you know, because I'm losing my traditional identity and now I'm losing my money, you know. And I think that's what happened here in the United States.

Ben Rhodes: You know, my family's from Texas and when I would go down there in the eighties, you know, small town in Texas, it was your classic place of, general stores, charming main street, a lot of personality. By 2008, it's a Walmart and some boarded up buildings and the plant nearby is closed, you know, the hollowing out that happened. Now, standards of living seem to be going up because you can buy a big TV and, then when 2008 happens, it's like, wait a second, I've kind of lost my identity in terms of the traditional community I was in.

Ben Rhodes: And now I'm losing everything because some elites didn't think it through. And that anger that led to Orbán in Hungary is the anger that led to Trump.

Peter Bergen: Orbán used immigration in Hungary as a big issue.

Ben Rhodes: He built a wall.

Peter Bergen: He built a wall, yeah.

Ben Rhodes: Literally, yeah.

Peter Bergen: Um, so Viktor Orbán, one of the things I did not know before I read your book is he comes in as sort of a liberal guy, young, you know when he comes into politics, he's in his early 20s. And he's, so something switches what's his origin story and how did he come to this program?

Ben Rhodes: Look, Orbán is interesting in his own right, and he's also interesting in the way that he kind of mirrors, obviously, what's happened in the Republican Party in the United States. He burst on the scene in the ‘80s, in the dying days of communism.

Ben Rhodes: He actually gets a fellowship from George Soros, you know who's become his biggest enemy, and target. And he burst on the scene at some of these protest rallies, mass demonstrations against the Soviet Union. And so he's kind of associated with, like, liberalism and opposition to Communism.

Ben Rhodes: But there's always like a grain of nationalism there, right? Because it's part of the Hungarian anti-communist movement is, you know, we need to reclaim our nation. I think then what's also really interesting about Orbán is he gets elected prime minister. And this is where it really is like the Republican Party.

Ben Rhodes: And he governs as a center right guy, pretty conventional center right politician, and has a pretty lukewarm term and is voted out. And so then he can make a decision. You know, do I tack to the center and try to build a coalition that way? Or do I tack to the far right? And then what he does is he engages for a period of years in what are called kind of civic circles and building his party, Fidesz, where he's literally community organizing in the same way that the American conservative movement did in the seventies. Meetings in churches, meetings in small towns about, what is a traditional Hungarian identity? How do we bring back Christian values into politics?

Ben Rhodes: And so he's building this kind of right wing Christian nationalist movement, essentially, into a political party. Then the financial crisis happens. And the government loses all credibility and there's actually, like, phenomenal scandals that I learned about in reporting this, of like, politicians caught on tape saying, ‘We lied to everybody,’ like basically owning up to the corruption of the whole system.

Ben Rhodes: And so Orbán gets elected in this wave in 2010. Overwhelmingly gets these huge majorities. But then what he does is he methodically uses power to consolidate power. So this is not a guy that gets into power and is like, ‘I'm going to pass a healthcare plan.’ He's like, ‘I'm going to change the constitution.

Ben Rhodes: I'm going to pack the courts. I'm going to enrich some cronies who are then going to become the people that finance all my politics.’ Those people are going to buy up the media and turn it into pro-Orbán media. And so he redraws parliamentary districts so that even though in the next election, he loses a lot of vote share and he's down around like 45%.

Ben Rhodes: He still has like two-thirds of the seats because of how he's rigged the system. And so, he's this guy that figured out that you could move further right and have a clearer pathway to power than just the kind of, let's tack to the center. And he's thoughtful and deliberate about it. He gives a speech in 2014 in which he calls for ‘illiberal democracy.’

Rhodes says that Orbán didn’t come up with this playbook. Instead, he adapted it from what he saw in Russia, where Russian president Vladimir Putin watched the damage that America did to the rules-based international order in the 2000s and concluded the future is a future without international rules.

The U.S. invaded Iraq with little regard for international law or international opinion. The 2008 financial crisis impoverished people all over the world. But it left the billionaire class largely untouched. Putin saw these blunders as evidence that America’s talk about democracy, shared prosperity, and the rules-based international order ... was just that: talk.

Ben Rhodes: And I think essentially what ended up happening is the American superpower and capitalism itself led to excesses. The Iraq war is the excess of the American superpower. You know, suddenly the virtuous-seeming country is invading and occupying countries against any kind of international principle, is engaged in torture.

Ben Rhodes: Autocrats take a look at this and begin to think, well, wait a second. If the Americans can cross all these lines, maybe we can start to push some boundaries. And you start to see Putin doing that.

Ben Rhodes: Putin is exploiting and saying, you know, their system is rotten too, right? Putin doesn't need to convince Russians that he's telling the truth or that he's not corrupt. He just has to convince Russians that everybody is lying. The Americans are lying. Everybody's corrupt. And the financial crisis made it look like that because if the people that caused it, you know, are still rich and still compensated and still on their yachts then everything is bullshit.

From Putin’s perspective, the United States’ missteps in the 2000s meant that it was no longer truly in charge of the global order, and America no longer represented a real model that other nations needed to follow.

But, interestingly, Rhodes says that China in recent decades has actually taken its lead from the United States. It’s just that China is imitating behavior that America didn’t necessarily mean to export around the world.

According to Rhodes, Chinese autocrats watched the rise of mass surveillance in the United States after 9/11 and viewed it as an opportunity to boost their own domestic surveillance. Using a handful of bombings in China by Islamist terrorists as an excuse, Chinese leaders took technology that was invented in Silicon Valley and built the largest surveillance state in history.

Rhodes tells a story of how he got ensnared in this surveillance, during a visit to Shanghai in 2017. He was accompanying Obama on one of his post-presidency trips. Late one night, in his hotel room, Rhodes was startled by a knock on the door … from what turned out to be a Chinese official who’d been spying on him.

Ben Rhodes: And I was surprised because it wasn't a government trip, so I let the guy in, and he says, we understand that President Obama is going to India next. And he said, we understand he's gonna meet the leader of the Tibetan Separatist movement.

This is how the Chinese government refers to Tibet's spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Ben Rhodes: And I said, ‘Yeah.’ And then he launched into kind of this, démarche protests, you know, this would offend Xi Jinping and all the Chinese people and I said, ‘Thank you very much for the message. But you know, we'll meet with who we want to meet.’ Now, what was disconcerting is not the message, because I've gotten that kind of message before. It's that I'd only just been put in email contact with the Dalai Lama's representative. So basically, they saw something in my email. Which they were intercepting, presumably, and were like, let's wake this guy up and intimidate him you know, in the middle of the night.

A government that used terrorism to justify mass surveillance. A surveillance system supercharged by a wealth of personal digital data. That night, the knock on his hotel room door showed Rhodes firsthand the China that the United States had helped to build.

Ben Rhodes: And so then I walk outside with that kind of disorientation and I'm looking at the Shanghai skyline, which is, looks like the future, you know. It's lights and glistening towers and architecture that looks like it's way ahead of what's happening here. And it kind of occurred to me, like, if you took everything that I was experiencing there, the technology and their people taking selfies, the hyper focus on national security, right? Like, this experience I just had being woken up. The wealth on display, basically technology, capitalism, and national security, and you just drained all the democracy out of it, all the freedom out of it.

Ben Rhodes: America's handoff to China is seamless,

Ben Rhodes: That our fingerprints were everywhere.

Peter Bergen: One of the things I found striking in the book. You profile these Hong Kong protestors, who were taking their life in their hands often to protest against essentially Hong Kong being subsumed into mainland China.

Peter Bergen: You also profile the opponents of Orbán in Hungary and then of course Navalny in Russia. And you know, they are not making a difference. The Chinese have won in Hong Kong. It is part of China. Orbán has turned Hungary into an ethno-nationalist Christian state.

Peter Bergen: And Putin is going to be in power until 2036, if he lives that long, because he fixed the constitution. It's more of a one-man state, perhaps, than any Russian entity since Stalin. So, when you were talking to these dissidents and opponents, did you think, this is sort of a fool's errand.

Ben Rhodes: I wrestled with this a lot. It's a really smart question because, uh, to me, this was a really difficult thing to deal with in the book. And I'd say two things about that. I mean, one, the simple short answer for us is that this is a warning to us, what is happening in these countries. In that way, I think these people are making a difference because, if you look at what happened in France just now, for instance, where basically the far right was cruising to a victory and, there was kind of like a break-glass, national emergency movement of the center and the left coming together to just beat that back.

Ben Rhodes: And we've seen that happen in a few places. Frankly, I think that's what happened here in 2020. It's not like Joe Biden surfed a wave of charismatic enthusiasm. There's a growing recognition in democracies that if we don't hold the line we could end up like these places. And that's part of why I wrote the book, like, as a warning. But I think that the second thing that is really important, and this came across in Hong Kong. You know, I made a point in Hong Kong of really profiling relatively anonymous people.

Ben Rhodes: The kind of people that were just showing up to protest, which is a huge risk for them.

ARCHIVAL Hong Kong protesters: [Protesters chanting]

Ben Rhodes: What they said is they knew they were gonna lose. But they wanted the world to know that this was not okay with the people of Hong Kong and, one of them said to me, ‘You know, the Chinese Communist Party,they want a system where they can point at a horse and say it's a dog, and you have to agree with that’. And the act of protest was them saying, we want everybody to know that we didn't want to be in that world. And also, by the way, if it's 40 years or 50 years, at some point this is going to change, and it will have mattered, that there was this moment when Hong Kongers by the millions…

ARCHIVAL Hong Kong protesters: [Protesters chanting]

Ben Rhodes: Stood up and said, ‘We don't believe that the horse is a dog.’

Peter Bergen: Your former boss, President Obama, was fond of quoting Martin Luther King, that the arc of history bends towards justice, but your book, After the Fall, it's actually quite bleak. In Hungary, Orbán won, created this ethno-nationalist state.

Peter Bergen: In Russia, Putin has completely won, there is no opposition to speak of. In China, Xi is the most powerful leader since Mao. And then, of course, you know, Trump happened in America, and so do you have a theory about history? Does it have a purpose and direction?

Ben Rhodes: The first thing I'd say you know, anybody listening to this, it's dark, but it's, it's a great read. But like some of the reviews were like, you know, this is grim, this is dark. Well, do you want me to lie to you? You know, it's dark out there. And from when I wrote it, right, Hungary, Orbán has further consolidated control and become a more important figure to the global far right. Alexei Navalny, my main character in Russia, was killed.

Ben Rhodes: Russia invaded Ukraine. January 6th happened and Trump didn't get kicked out of American politics and now he's back. Chinese Communist Party swallowed up Hong Kong and all those protesters scattered to the winds. So maybe it wasn't dark enough.

Ben Rhodes: That said, weirdly, I don't think that is entirely inconsistent with the Obama comment because the arc doesn't move in a straight line. And I think what you find is you have these kind of leaps forward and then these like counter revolutionary movements that push things back. And then the leaps forward extend a little farther, and then the counter revolutionary pushes it back.

And while Rhodes does believe this upcoming presidential election will be a Judgment Day of sorts for democracy in the U.S. and around the world … there's only so far he thinks that the arc of history will swing.

Ben Rhodes: So, where I'll calibrate my hyperbole is I'm actually not — there's a talking point I hate, for instance — I hear some Democrats use, which is like, ‘Vote in this election, it might be the last.’ No. I do not believe that Donald Trump, if he's elected president, for instance, will be president after the end of his term.

Ben Rhodes: He's term-limited out, we’re not gonna have a dictatorship here. You're right that certain things that he might try to do, it's going to be worse for people who are most vulnerable. Mass deportations, rounding up of millions of immigrants — I think he can totally do that.

Ben Rhodes: I think the weaponization of the justice system and the kind of mass abuse of the pardon power, the kind of hollowing out of the state. If you start to have intelligence agencies and the State Department and basically you're decimating the EPA… Even if there's a huge swing back in four years and a Democratic president, Democratic Congress, it's generational damage to rebuild that. Like, that's bad enough for me and dark enough for me.

Whether you're talking about the U.S. or other countries, Rhodes thinks that the key to beating populist authoritarians on Election Day … is finding a better way to articulate the widespread pain that these leaders have been tapping into.

Ben Rhodes: You know, there was a young Hungarian politician who I talked to, who described traveling to more rural parts of Hungary for instance, where communities have been decimated. And at the same time, by the way, like the culture of globalization had come in and wiped out a certain kind of traditional Hungarian identity. All of a sudden, the shows on the TV don't make sense anymore. And then all of a sudden people's kids are staring at phones. Because I think this is what's happened in the United States too. Like, people have lost that sense of community, that sense of stability in their job, that sense of knowing that their kid's life is going to be better than theirs.

Ben Rhodes: And that is an incredibly painful thing because people, they feel like they're losing their identity itself. And so when a bunch of liberals or small-d democrats show up and tell those people, ‘Hey, you should care about democracy,’ you know, or ‘Hey, like we can't possibly turn our back on trade agreements ‘cause that's irresponsible,’ or ‘We do need to let immigrants in because that gives us like a larger workforce to sustain economic growth.’ It's not that those people are stupid. It's that they think that you don't see them.

Ben Rhodes: They think that you are telling them that they need to shut up and get in line with the project of globalization and democracy and whatever you want to call it. And I think Trump speaks to those people and sees those people. People have a lot of reason to be angry, and Trump captures that anger in the same way that Orbán captured a certain kind of anger in Hungary, in the same way that Putin captured a certain feeling of resentment in Russia. And just dismissing that as populist or crude or stupid is the biggest gift you can make to those people, because you need to show up in those places and see those people and speak to their grievance and sense that the system doesn't work for them.

Peter Bergen: You wrote thousands of speeches for President Obama. If you were writing the speech for the Democratic Party nominee, what are the big ideas that you'd be trying to communicate?

Ben Rhodes: We're in one of these transitional phases of history. Americans need someone to be narrating what is happening. They need someone to tell them… ‘What is going on? And why are we here? And where is this all going?’ I think if you look around the world right now, there are a lot of people that have filled this space with nationalism, right? So in India, Modi has a kind of Hindu nationalism. And Putin, obviously, it's all about a kind of return to Russian greatness through military conquest. But it's been hard for small-d democratic leaders to find the mixture of story and policy that kind of clicks in with people. I think we're getting closer to it though.

Rhodes believes that the storytelling prowess of some anti-democratic leaders has been the key to their rise. They’ve proven able to articulate the pain of people left behind by globalization in a way their opponents haven’t. It’s been the centerpiece of the story Trump has been telling voters from the beginning.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: We have to save our country. Because our country is going to hell.

Rhodes says the key for small-D democratic leaders is to borrow more from the playbook of really effective communicators like Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan. Something Joe Biden was not able to do.

Ben Rhodes: One of the things I've noticed about Biden, he's had a remarkable presidency in a lot of ways, right? You know, the investments he's made in infrastructure and climate and other things.

Peter Bergen: The CHIPS Act.

Ben Rhodes: CHIPS Act, you know, technology, innovation, these are great historic, things. And it does make him a historically consequential president, but people don't want to hear that. People want to know, why does it feel so bad right now? And so I think taking a big step back and talking about, like, almost telling the story, how did we get here, where we've lost trust in each other, And then where are we? Where could we go from here? And then, where are we going to go? And then you'd finally get the like five point plan.

Peter Bergen: I guess Reagan did some of that, too.

Ben Rhodes: Reagan absolutely did that. Reagan did that really well. You know, he told a story about the country. And I think the question is, where's the story working? Where's the policy working? You know, how can you meld that together? Frankly, that's, you know, I think the opportunity that Kamala Harris should be trying to fill.

ARCHIVAL Kamala Harris: We have doors to knock on. We have phone calls to make. We have voters to register. And we have an election to win!

And Rhodes believes the candidate who can seize this opportunity — tell Americans a gripping story about what’s gone wrong in their country, and also what it looks like to get things right — will most likely win the 2024 presidential election.

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If you want to know some more about the issues and stories we discussed in this episode, we recommend After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made by Ben Rhodes, which is available on Audible and is read by Rhodes himself.

CREDITS

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA.

This episode was produced by Erik German with help from Nathan Ray.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Luke Cregan, Holly DeMuth, and Sandy Melara.

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore and Jason Ross.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.

And our Delivery Coordinator is Ana Paula Martinez.

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Head of Content Acquisition & Development and Partnerships: Pat Shah.

Audible Executive Producer: Lara Regan Kleinschmidt.

Special thanks to Marlon Calbi and Allison Weber.