Podcast: American democracy is in danger, warns Ben Rhodes

TRANSCRIPT: American democracy is in danger, warns Ben Rhodes

Ben Rhodes:

I think that the US, 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 US or within the context of the European Union, more needs to be done to make democracy the first priority.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello, and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. Here you'll find extended versions of interviews from my show on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we're asking whether American democracy is still a model for the rest of the world. You kind of know the answer.

We'll examine the long-term implications of the storming of the US Capitol six months ago and how strong men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are using America's growing polarization to their advantage. I'm talking to Ben Rhodes, former Deputy National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama and author of the book After the Fall: Being American in the World We Made. Let's get right to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Ben Rhodes. The book is After the Fall: Being American in the World We've Made. Ben, good to see you again. Thanks for joining.

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah, good to see you, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

So you and I have 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?

Ben Rhodes:

Well, I think there were two stages to this, Ian. I think the first stage was coming fully to grips with the kind of radicalization in the Republican Party in the United States and the real danger that posed to our democracy and then the damage that did to our standing in the world. And like you, 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... 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, I just wanted to kind of interrogate some of my assumptions as someone who worked in a high-ranking Foreign Policy position about, yes, America's done extraordinary good things around the world, but the ways in which our era of American hegemony 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. But the reality is the gap between the story we tell about ourselves in the world and the current experience of American democracy needs to be closed for America to be a source of hope again. That if we don't get this right in terms of our own democracy, really, our foreign policy alone is not going to be a source of hope for people because it's going to be inevitably an extension of what's happening here in America.

Ian Bremmer:

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? Where did you come away from your meeting saying, That is not what I expected from the perspective of people that matter on the ground."

Ben Rhodes:

I think, for me, Hungary and Hong Kong are two places that stood out to me that I spent a lot of 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 district 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. 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, when I talked 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. And that there was a real opening for people to kind of return to the blood and soil nationalism of the past by capitalizing on the frustration with American-led globalization itself. The American-led globalization had both kind of assaulted people's sense of traditional identity, but it also fueled a kind of inequality that was exposed in the financial crisis that made people ripe for these appeals. And then to be in a place like Hong Kong and I had a Hong Kong official speak to me-

Ian Bremmer:

Let's stick with Hungary for... I'll get back to Hong Kong. Let me stick with Hungary because it's such an interesting place.

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Do you think that... I mean, Hungary is, of course, a member of the European Union. I'm still in good standing even though lots of people are very antagonized by them. Do you think democracy in Hungary is lost?

Ben Rhodes:

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 the other thing that the opposition's done there that I think is quite smart and that we're seeing in other places, I think including in the United States, is the entire opposition, which is fractured between different parties. That's the way Orbán wants it. Has decided in this next election, next year-

Ian Bremmer:

To come together. Yeah.

Ben Rhodes:

... to come together. Put one big umbrella over a very diverse opposition that includes everybody from a former far-right party to the socialist to... kind new centrists parties. And that strategy gives them a chance. They still face a stacked deck. Orbán controls the media, et cetera. But that kind of coming together, it represents people who are aware that there's an existential threat to democracy. And that has to be issue one, two, and three. I wish, and I'm very disappointed that the European Union hasn't taken a firmer stance with Orbán himself.

He still benefits from all this EU funding that he just siphons off the top to enrich his cronies, who then finances politics or buy up the media. I think that the US, 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 US or within the context of the European Union, more needs to be done to make democracy the first priority.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, the point you raised that in Hungary, for members of the opposition, today, they understand that there is an existential threat to the continuation of a democratic regime of a fair and functioning institutions that can push off a full-on kleptocracy. And obviously, whether you look at most of the EU or the United States, that level of urgency is nowhere close to the reality.

Ben Rhodes:

You couldn't have said it better, Ian. And it's funny. When I said I was going to spend a bunch of time in this book on Hungary, I got a sense that my editor was like, "Hungary." And I'm like, "No, actually, Hungary is kind of a laboratory for what's happening here." The section of my book about Hungary is also about America because there's such a parallel nature to the trends that we've seen there.

Again, the way in which the media's been turned into kind of a right-wing propaganda machine. The way in which Vladimir Putin has been a supporter of Viktor Orbán and provided something of the playbook that has been replicated, this endless cast of enemies of the Hungarian State. And what we see in Hungary is taken to some extremes there. You can get to a place where it really is starting to not feel like a democracy anymore.

And part of the point I wanted make is we are already there too. Democracy is a spectrum. Nobody's a pure democracy. Very few places are a pure totalitarian state, maybe North Korea. We're all on this kind of spectrum here, and we're pretty close to Hungary on the spectrum. We're not as far as they are. And I do think we can learn from the activists there in the sense that democracy has to be the first issue. It has to be the first priority because if you lose democracy itself, all your other priorities are gone.

And Ian, this was my experience. We can work hard on a Paris Climate Agreement and Iran Agreement. Those things are going to get tossed out the window. The policies you care about are going to get tossed out the window if you have this kind of flavor of authoritarian nationalism taking root. And I think the US and EU need to have the same urgency that the people on the front lines and places like Hungary feel.

Ian Bremmer:

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

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

The Democrats are done for it. There's no going back there. First of all, do you agree with that?

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah, I mean, the tragedy in is 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.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. And in fact, one of the countries that has done the most has been the United Kingdom and opening up their borders to allow a lot of them to come and have citizenship. So what are the lessons that you draw for Hong Kong? And what might, I mean, you say the European Union could have done more to respond and to punish the Hungarians?

And indeed, the Hungarians were allowed to sort of get all of this money post-COVID redistribution. They had to accept a little bit of political conditionality, but not much in Hong Kong. Was there anything credible that the United States or the Europeans could have done while the Chinese basically unilaterally changed the old one-country, two-systems playbook?

Ben Rhodes:

Well, 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.

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 prioritize those things. But then, under Bush, it was 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? I mean, we've gone to the mat over their purchases-

Ian Bremmer:

I mean, Canadians can't even really say that, nevermind the Americans, right. So that would be a... That's a pretty tall order.

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah. But again, I think that the democracy itself, what we're partly talking about, is kind of the prioritization of democracy. If you were the Chinese looking at us, would you think that we really cared about democracy more than access to markets or more than the development of new technologies, or more than even a kind of geopolitical hotspot in which we need Chinese cooperation?

Of course, they're reacting to what they see to be our preferences over time. And one of the jarring scenes I describe in the book is being in Shanghai. And you've been there, Ian. And I'm woken up in the middle of the night by some Chinese officials or late at night at least because they want to warn me that Barack Obama should not meet with the Dalai Lama when he goes to India. He's no longer even president.

And the weird thing about this, beyond just the fact that they're doing it, but they do that all the time, is that we hadn't announced the meeting. So they clearly in somebody's email, and they don't care that I know that. And I remember walking out and looking at the Shanghai Bund, the skyline, which looks like the future, right. Shining lights everywhere, people taking selfies.

Ian Bremmer:

Because he had a Blade Runner kind of feel to it all springing up on this river. Yeah, it's extraordinary.

Ben Rhodes:

Totally extraordinary. And I'm looking at this and thinking, "Well, this is kind of the logical next step." If you take American capitalism technology and national security fixation and you just drain democracy from it, you kind of get what I was looking at. It's actually kind of... There's a progression where it makes some sense that China's kind of up next year.

And again, I think we have to reckon with the reality that 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 with the Cold War. I mean, we didn't get everything right there. But there was this kind of paradigm where democracy itself was at the top of a hierarchy of a set of interest because we needed to draw the contrast with the Soviet Union. And I think, again, if we're honest, we've not been doing that for the last 30 years.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, so there are two different big structural points here. One which we will get to is the question of the United States moving away from its own values at home. But secondarily, the question of how the United States could have feasibly done a better job of promoting democratic values abroad. I mean, if you are the United States and Saudi Arabia's a core ally, and we are focused on national security and alliances around the world, and we're concerned about terrorism and the private sector is very important, all these things.

I mean, the US is not Canada. The US is not a Nordic country. It's a big country. It's the world's most powerful nation, most powerful military, the global reserve currency. How do you... I mean, everyone that looks at the US 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?

Ben Rhodes:

Look, I've been in government. I recognize the challenges. I recognize that 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 the Saudi Arabia or Egypt, period. It's difficult. Sure.

But at some point, you have to make... you have to show that you will make the difficult choice for democracy itself. I mean, people have seen the US make all these choices over the course of the last several decades. And at any time, it's very hard to find the cases where we made the hard choice on behalf of our values. I think that some of that has to change. And I also think with China, for instance, we, not just the government itself. 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.

The US 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 in Hong Kong. US businesses, I think, have to be candid that they've kind of checked their values at the door because that's what you have to do to get into that market. When's the last time you saw a movie that was critical of the Chinese Communist Party? Plenty movies critical of democratic governments, but nobody wants to be yanked-

Ian Bremmer:

Won't air in China.

Ben Rhodes:

... off the screen.

Ian Bremmer:

Won't air in China.

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

That's right.

Ben Rhodes:

It just won't air in China. And so, at a certain point, we have... it's both about these kind of policy trade-offs, but it's also kind of about do we as Americans really define ourselves first and foremost as standing for a set of democratic values. Are we... Because the same trade-offs that I talk about in the US government have to be made by businesses going forward.

What compromises are you willing to make to be in that Chinese market? Or where is that venture capital going and in terms of the Chinese tech sector, and are we willing to maybe lose a little profit because it doesn't feel right to us? I think these are the more fundamental questions that I was trying to get at in the book.

Ian Bremmer:

No. I mean, 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 do that. Turned out there wasn't much blowback as a consequence.

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah, it was a mistake. And I think that 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 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... The interference that they claim that we do in their politics it's projection.

They're doing 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 Xinjiang province or in Hong Kong? Some of this has just... There's been this kind of self-imposed restraint that I frankly felt tension with when I was in government and had 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.

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 the 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 issuing dictates from Washington about democratic values on a written statement.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I mean, one thing we can do in the United States, and certainly, I try to do on this show, is that we can call ball and strikes about ourselves.

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

We are capable. And indeed, it is patriotic to self-criticize when we feel like our elected leaders are not doing the job they're supposed to do. And so, I wonder if the role that the United States really needs to play more of is not trying to be exceptionalist America. It's not trying to evangelize to other countries the way they should behave, but rather being more honest about calling balls and strikes globally, right.

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Which is, as you say, frequently we kind of pull our punches internationally even though we're by far the most powerful country because, wow, we don't want to rock this boat. We don't want to rock that boat. If we're not going to rock it, who the hell's going to rock it? People, we don't want to rock it, right.

Ben Rhodes:

I totally agree with you. And look, obviously, the most important thing we have to do is get our house in order. But on this balls and strikes thing, I'll give you an example. Corruption, Alexei Navalny, who I talked to for this book.

Ian Bremmer:

Russian...

Ben Rhodes:

You know what? He...

Ian Bremmer:

... was major opposition figure now languishing in jail in Russia. Yes.

Ben Rhodes:

Exactly, right. And his central insight was that Putin's chief vulnerability is corruption. Again, like we were saying earlier, that unifies everybody. Nobody likes it when their government is stealing from them. And all he was doing was exposing the scale of Putin's corruption.

The day he was drawn in prison, he releases a movie that's had millions of views about Putin's absolutely ostentatious residences, right. The United States can do more to just expose corruption. How wealthy is Vladimir Putin in his circle? Where is their money? How are they stealing from people? Just laying this out there.

Ian Bremmer:

So a question for you, Ben. Question for you.

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

Because I mean, one of the things that I was actually quite frustrated with the Obama administration at the end was as the Russians are engaging in interference in our democracy, our democratic process, our elections, and the Obama administration is saying that they are doing that, our reaction is pretty limited.

And we did have the ability to put out public information about Putin and his inner circle, at the very least, and kind of expose some of that dirty laundry, some Panama Papers-type stuff. And we did none of that. Why not? Was that discussed internally at the time?

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah. It was discussed. And I mean, I agree with you. I think that there's... some of this is just... This was new territory, right. The United States has not kind of done that kind of thing in the past, but some of it is that kind of restraint of the superpower not wanting. So part of it is, well, that's crossing a certain threshold to kind of... Putin would obviously perceive that as a direct intervention in his politics. Well, guess what? Putin is directly intervening in our politics. It's not like he's showing any restraint in terms of... I mean, he's interfering in the individual social media feeds of every American, right.

So to me, you have this kind of legacy restraint around, "I don't know if I want to go there or this is something we haven't done before." Even on cyber issues, right. There were law enforcement concerns. "Well, there's an open investigation here, so we shouldn't talk about who's responsible for something." Bureaucratically, it was just difficult to even comment on something like that. But the reality is we are in a new world, and I think we have to use new tools.

And I think that if we're just calling balls and strikes, look, there's a public interest in knowing what corruption networks are and how people are stealing money and who's getting... who's on the take here. Just as there's also a need to kind of go after the money laundering aspect of that. So to me, there's more tools that could be used here. And I think your point about balls and strikes is it. It's just simply laying out the truth. It's not in any way just propagandizing. It's just saying like...

Ian Bremmer:

Well, I also say what

Ben Rhodes:

"... so here's what we're seeing."

Ian Bremmer:

The United States, historically, has engaged in COOs, has assassinated leaders, illegal rendition outside of our borders, torture. I mean, drone strikes, massive collateral damage, and whether it's Republican or Democrat, but then to say, "Oh my God. Well, we couldn't possibly release information on Putin and his family." That seems to be a bit inconsistent.

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah. Well, yeah, and I think that another piece of this is that the national, and I'm quite critical in the book of the excesses of the post 9/11 era. But the reality is that the national security enterprise of the United States, post 9/11, was kind of built into a machine to do this one thing to prosecute a war on terrorism without end. And again, there are lots of aspects to that.

But one of them is that means there's a lot less resources and bandwidth and going into understanding, "Well, how is Putin moving this money around because all the financial crime and anti-money laundering people are focused on terrorism, right?" There's a lot less senior officials coming up with creative ways to support democracy in the world because these agencies have been staffed and built into kind of counter-terrorism machines, right.

And it's not a criticism of the people doing that. It's just the enormous momentum, $7 trillion spent wars in multiple countries. The whole bureaucracy's built for this one thing. I do think diminished the capacity, the bandwidth, the resources, and the imagination that was applied to these other problems. And Putin and Xi Jinping took massive advantage of the fact that the United States was so overly preoccupied on this one thing, terrorism, relative to everything else.

Ian Bremmer:

So Ben, let me give you a real-life one right now that you don't have to take any responsibility for. You can just say what the right policy would be. We just saw poorest country in the western hemisphere, Haiti, and they haven't delivered a single jab of vaccine of coronavirus yet. There's massive humanitarian depredation, and the president is assassinated in his house.

President Joe Biden says, "Calls for a free and fair election." That's nice. Never going to happen. What should the Americans... We care. This is... We want democracy in our backyard. We've got more influence than anybody else. The Russians aren't playing, the Chinese aren't playing. It's just us, Ben. What should we be doing?

Ben Rhodes:

Well, look, Haiti's been an intractable challenge in a lot of ways. I think what we should be doing is, in this case, this could be a project for our hemisphere. What we should be doing is going to the big players in this hemisphere and saying, "Together." So it's not just going to be a US-led effort. We are going to try to infuse a lot of political attention here. We Americans can kind of come to the table with very specific things that we can do off the bat to improve the humanitarian circumstance.

So you talk about vaccinations. You talk about the need for some legal infrastructure to understand the criminal networks that have essentially taken over Haiti. But I think a kind of collective multi-year effort among the countries in this hemisphere to try to address some of the basic needs in Haiti. That's where you start. That's been derailed in the past by the inevitable corruption that arises in Haiti, but also our attention span shifts.

So once things start getting challenging, you kind of move on to the next issue. There has to be kind of a focused effort, I think, involving multiple countries in Western hemisphere to... If all we can achieve is an improvement in the humanitarian circumstance there that that's still worth the effort, given the scale of the suffering in Haiti.

Ian Bremmer:

And Ben, the Americans take the lead in that multilateral effort?

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah, I think we do. I mean, I think, inevitably, we can play the principal organizing role. We're going to have the most resources to bring to the table. I think we can enlist, hopefully, a large Haitian diaspora because, in part, because things are so difficult in Haiti the people have come here have had success. Diaspora populations can often be a great resource when we're trying to have a positive impact in other places. So yeah, I think there does necessitate a degree of US leadership.

Ian Bremmer:

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.

I mean, not a speech, just a couple of ideas about what you think the Americans plausibly could be doing right now that we're not. I mean, we're six months plus into the Biden administration. You can't really say that the basic issues of... that we just raised are getting fixed in that regard. 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?

Ben Rhodes:

Well, I think first of all, we're in this kind of basic question about American identity itself, a multiracial multi-ethnic democracy, or is it essentially kind of a white nationalist entity, right? And in terms of what can be done from a policy perspective. Obviously, they're the issues around voting, but also, we have massive problems with the... Because people often ask me, Ian.

They'll say, "Well, you're one of these people who's alarmist. Isn't there always some competition between democracy and authoritarianism? Doesn't the same thing happen generationally? And it's a good question. What's different now? 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 a huge majority of Republicans believed that Obama was not born in America and think, "Oh, those people are just nuts." Well, no. Those people are... 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.

Ian Bremmer:

Believe that the vaccine will hurt you. Believe that-

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

... Trump won the 2020 election. I mean, the United States today has a greater divide between Democrats and Republicans, 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.

Ben Rhodes:

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 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... You hear a lot about voting rights, and that is absolutely essential.

And if that effort can't pass as the filibuster, people have to get down into 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 and 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 will believe anything that is being mainlined into their social media feeds and turbocharged by everything from Russian disinformation to top-down financing from mega-donors, there's going to 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, 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 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.

Ian Bremmer:

You've focused most of your commentary, and not a surprise, given that you're from the Obama administration, on the challenges from the right. Though, when we talk about what Americans believe politically, the fact is that both the right and the left are increasingly in their own disparate universes.

And there's fake news on the left too, and we see a lot of it, and there's filtered headlines that don't really cover both sides of the story. I'm wondering where you... I mean, you've talked about where you see the problems on the right. Where do you see the problems on the left?

Ben Rhodes:

I mean, I do think that the left, in general, and you'll find exceptions, of course, is at least anchored and tethered to some form of reality. And that's the real difference between the parties is one is kind of, it's like watching someone drift off into space. The cord has been cut. I think when I look at the problems and some of the challenges on the left, I think that one... I'll speak to one that's kind of a political storytelling issue, for instance, which is that you have to find a language in a way to talk about the challenges that you want to see addressed, the changes you'd like to see, the progress you'd like to see in society that doesn't ask people to reject their own identity.

In other words, to be specific. Barack Obama, one of the things he was good at... Obviously, he didn't do everything right. But one of the things he was good at he told the story of American progress that was not a rejection of America's past. It was a validation of it. It was saying America's a country that gave itself these tools to make improvements. The founders built a system that wasn't perfect, but it was able to be perfected over time, and that allowed him to reach people on issues around whether it was gay rights or whether it was just the election of a Black president itself and be proud of America making progress. I think, sometimes, on the left today, too much people want to ask people to reject more innate things about their identity as Americans.

Just as a pure political matter, that's not effective. So I do think that the narratives of progress on issues needs to fully reckon with all of America's failures and sins. And I just talk about a lot of them in my book. But it also needs to tell a story that everybody can be a part of. A story, which is that America allows for itself to address injustice through democracy, right. So that, to me, is one of the challenges you see today is that there's an exclusionary aspect to how the left approaches some issues that, just as a matter of pure politics, is not a way to build a coalition. In some respects, it leads it to be narrower.

Ian Bremmer:

The establishment narrative is that actually Biden is much naturally better at that than Obama was. You worked with Obama for eight years. You knew Biden quite well. Is that true?

Ben Rhodes:

Yeah, I think so. I mean, Obama was better at it than people... And obviously, I'm about as bias as one could be. So I acknowledged that. But he was better at it than people think because he wasn't as nearly as good at Biden at it in kind of Washington. Spending that time, that extra time with a member of Congress, that kind of thing. But Obama actually liked hanging out with normal people out in the country, so he was pretty... he was better at the retail politics end.

I mean, I think the Iowa Caucus win was built on retail politics in 2007. But yeah, Biden, he'll go into that diner, and not only will he shake everybody's hand, he'll just sit down and stay there. So it is something that I think he can do. And I think that hopefully, post-COVID, one of the things that he can do is just get out in some of these communities.

And look, there are places that are just deep red, and it's going to be a long time before those people might be open to different choices. But there's a lot of contested areas in this country from Ohio to North Carolina, what have you, where I think Joe Biden's spending time and being in different communities is going to be part of the armor that he needs to withstand all the attacks that will come his way in the next two election cycles.

Ian Bremmer:

So tough question to close up here. I mean, all the years you spent in the Obama administration, the country got more divided, not less, over the course of that presidency. Country got more economically unequal, not less, over the course of that presidency. A lot of reasons for that, a lot of structural reasons. But 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?

Ben Rhodes:

I think on the division point, the awkward truth is the most divisive thing about Obama was his race. And so there wasn't much that could have been done there. 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 upfront to try to narrow inequality when we had those congressional majorities, right.

Ian Bremmer:

If I had President Obama here right now, would he agree with that?

Ben Rhodes:

I think he would probably. He would rightly argue that he proposed all manner of policies in the last six years of his presidency that would've done that and couldn't get support. And that, ultimately, the Republican obstructionism limited the extent of structural change you could make. But I think you can't look at this and think we can be proud of luck. We saved the economy, but we saved all the inequities in the economy too.

And a lot of those inequities are what fueled a sense of grievance or apathy or openness to, let's say, non-traditional appeals that I found in writing this book, the scale to which the financial crisis collapsed confidence, not just in the economy, but in everything. In governing institutions, in America as a world leader, in democratic capitalism itself. That opened the door to the Orbáns and the Tea Parties that became Trump and the rest of it.

And again, I think when I look back, and this was not obviously in my direct line of responsibility, and we could have done plenty of things differently in foreign policy we can talk about. But I think that inability to really take on the inequality issue in ways that people could see ended up hurting us. Because Trump comes along and says, "See, everybody's corrupt. Everybody, the system's rigged."

And you know, see Biden, he's internalized that lesson both in the scale of what he's trying to do, but also that he's trying to do it as fast as possible because they know he may only have two years, even if he's a two-term president. He may only have two years to really get big things done, and inequality better be part of it. And this is why just building roads and bridges does not address inequality. That's why they need this second package.

Ian Bremmer:

So given where we're heading, I mean, 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?

Ben Rhodes:

I'm incredibly worried because 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. They tend to be pretty upfront about what they're doing. So when they're passing laws in states like Texas, like Georgia, where the laws have 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 people, like that should be a terrifying and mobilizing force for people. I think what I'm hopeful about is, again, 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 that suggests that's exactly what the Republican Party's trying to do.

Ian Bremmer:

Ben Rhodes, the book is After the Fall. Thanks for joining me today.

Ben Rhodes:

Thanks, Ian.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter, Signal.

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