There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century
Hill’s basic premise is that lack of opportunity is the dangerous undertow drawing countries further and further into populism and authoritarianism.
Fiona Hill is getting a lot of attention lately, not necessarily for her recent book, There is Nothing for You Here, but because she is an expert on Russia and co-author of Mr. Putin, a book published by the Brookings Institution in 2013. Given that Russia invaded Ukraine less than two weeks ago (as of this writing), Americans are probably slightly more interested in Hill’s prior work than her new memoir. Yet, There is Nothing For You Here is an important topic and anyone interested in learning more about one of the key witnesses in Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial should absolutely read both.
Hill’s basic premise - that lack of opportunity is the dangerous undertow drawing countries further and further into populism and authoritarianism - draws on her experiences growing up in the decay of a shuttered coal mining town in the North East of England, her time as a student in Moscow in the late 1980’s, and her recent experiences watching her adopted American home flirt with populist authoritarianism under Trump. It is a compelling personal account of the many obstacles placed upon people based on where they live (forgotten places), how they live (class structures), and who they are (gender, race, ethnicity). For Hill, all of these hurdles combined to create impediments to her advancement in life. She had to overcome her country’s deep discrimination against “lower class” people from her area of England and with her Northern British accent. She faced other obstacles to opportunity given her gender in the “boys world” of both Harvard and government institutions. While she did not face racial discrimination personally, she certainly recognized its impacts on fellow students or co-workers and she addresses those instances in her book as well.
For Hill, her ability to overcome these obstacles came from family and community support, a desire to grab onto any little opportunity to climb the educational ladder, and a good bit of luck. She recognizes that her story is more about the exception proving the rule than a morality tale about how to escape economic hardship.
Chapter 8: Unlucky Generations
pg 148-150
But over time I came to understand that the opportunities from which I was benefiting were time- and even generation-specific. Younger generations of Brits and Americans from similar backgrounds could not replicate my success in overcoming the obstacles to socioeconomic mobility in subsequent decades. They were being thwarted both by critical changes in the existing infrastructure of opportunity - especially in education - and by the effects of a serious economic crisis, the so-called Great Recession: the December 2007-June 2009 collapse of the U.S. housing market and subsequent global financial crisis.
Despite the hardships of my childhood, I had managed to overcome adversity thanks to a confluence of factors that played to my advantage. My education in the UK had been subsidized by the government…And I had come to Harvard University through the two-year Knox Scholarship: everything was initially paid for, even my transatlantic flight. I was not encumbered by debt when I graduated…
In this regard, I mirrored the experience of millions of young Americans after World War II, who found college to be the door to a job and a better life than their parents’. But in contrast to the prevailing perception in the United States that anyone can go to college if they study hard, when I began work on this book, I found that 72 percent of students (men and women) at the 150 top colleges in the United States, including Harvard, came from the richest 25 percent of American families. Only 3 percent came from the poorest.
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As the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s - Millennials - reached adulthood, they suddenly found their much-anticipated employment opportunities dramatically constrained. This was the case even for those with a college degree (about 47 percent of the cohort). Suddenly the entire premise of the new educational paradigm collapsed: students who had taken out loans to support their educations could no longer afford to pay them off and sank into debt. Rather than a springboard to opportunity, advanced education suddenly seemed like a millstone around this generation’s neck.
Hill is also quick to point out that even in her impoverished childhood her family had the critical safety net of the National Health Service at their disposal. No matter the flaws of the UK’s Health Services there was at least the basic knowledge that a medical emergency would not force a family into bankruptcy or force them to lose their house or slide deeper into debt. Americans do not have even this tiny bit of security between them and financial ruin in a medical emergency or long-term-care need.
Hill’s overarching theme is that the “forgotten places” of the world - for England, the North East coal and manufacturing towns now closed down and empty of opportunity; for America the “fly-over” states, middle America, Appalachia, and some cities as well - are filled with forgotten people. People who lack educational and economic opportunities both for themselves and their children. Many who have also lost a part of their identity when the mines close or steel plants shut down. (Hill’s father always called himself a coal miner even years and decades after the mines closed and he was a porter at the local hospital.) She argues that these people, in their desperation and in many ways with their righteous anger at the systems and governments that have failed them, are drawn into populist politics and often authoritarian or extremist belief systems. As they cast about for someone to blame for their unhappy situations, along comes a strongman (or woman) to tell them who to blame - the globalists, the communists, the woke Democrats, the homosexuals, the Jews, the media - and who can fix all their problems (themselves, of course!) They make promises they don’t (and often can’t) keep to get elected and then use their position to enrich themselves while the forgotten remain forgotten. Except when it is election time again, and they use their demonization of the “others” to keep the voters loyal to them.
Chapter 11: The Price of Populism
pg 224-226
At one point, during huge demonstrations against his rule in Moscow in 2011, Putin visited a massive tank plant in Nizhny Tagil in the Ural Mountains, a place renowned for its fervent support of his presidency. The factory foreman offered to go to Moscow with “some of the boys” to “sort out” the protesters for Putin. The Russian president declined the offer, but later appointed the factory foreman to be his official presidential representative to the Urals region. It was a spectacular piece of political populism. It was also strikingly reminiscent of President Trump’s efforts to solicit support from the far-right Proud Boys militia, who would violently confront Black Lives Matter protesters in the summer of 2020. After public outcry on that occasion, Trump called on the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” instead of asking them to cease and desist their activities. They would not stand by for long: on January 6, 2021, in the waning days of Trump’s presidency, the Proud Boys would be among the militia groups and other Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol Building.
There were many other ways in which Putin and Trump resembled each other in playing to their similar crowds. Manipulation and exploitation of the media were one of the more obvious - a Kremlin stock-in-trade - but there were others that were perhaps less evident. Trump tried to prevent the removal of Confederate-era statues and the renaming of American military forts named after Confederate generals. Putin put the statues of Soviet-era figures back on their pedestals and restored Soviet memorials that had been toppled under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. Both created and invoked their own versions of the country’s “golden” or “silver” ages and their personal lists of “national heroes” to appeal to their voters’ nostalgia or conservatism. Both constantly talked about their direct connection to “the people.” They used this constant invocation to draw authority directly from the powers of the presidency, the number of votes in their favor, and opinion polls rather than from their nominal political party. And they always blamed bad bureaucrats for anything that went wrong.
Ironically, however, Putin was much more cautious than Trump in who he blamed and how he whipped up division. Putin would never blame the “deep state,” for example. He was a product of the real deep state, having walked the back corridors of the Soviet-era KGB to power. Putin ruled Russia as a state insider, unlike Trump, who wanted to rule America as an outsider. Putin saw the state apparatus as a useful tool for wielding power; Trump saw the state and its structures as an obstacle to his power games.
In part because he was such a consummate deep-stater, Putin was not keen on militias. Independent paramilitary organization could be dangerous in Russia, where the state always wanted to ensure the complete monopolization of firepower. Putin reined them in at home, although he often allowed them to operate abroad as proxies for the state in conflicts in places such Ukraine and Syria where he wanted to minimize regular Russian military forces’ exposure.
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Thus, when Putin tried to sow or exploit division, he homed in on the smallest and weakest possible groups, which were easy targets. These included Russia’s LGBTQ community and tiny political opposition parties or loose opposition movements that he dubbed “pro-Western, fifth-column liberals.” And of course Putin played up the United States as an external enemy which was - in his depiction - manipulating internal dissent in Russia to bring the country to its knees.
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In sum, Putin’s approach was a stark contrast to Trump’s efforts to emphasize America’s divides and pit political parties, politicians, social movements, and racial and religious groups against each other in 2016 and 2020. Putin wanted one Russia. Trump wanted many Americas, not one.
This was a telling difference, and a critical one, because Vladimir Putin was only too happy to unleash the Russian security services to exploit America’s divisions, playing up the many Americas and playing them against each other, all with the goal of weakening the United States. In this respect, Trump played right into Putin’s hands.
Reading this excerpt now, with Russian missiles striking Ukrainian cities and Russian troops surrounding Kyiv, it is particularly chilling how very close the United States came to a Trump second term, and a chance for him to consolidate his power. Who knows how the Ukrainian conflict would play out with Trump at the helm of the country. As it is, America seems to have barely escaped an anti-democratic president and is not out of the woods yet.
Chapter 13: The Horrible Year
pg 276-277
The Authoritarian’s Playbook
Populists feed off people’s grievances and seek to exploit them. In the case of the United States, the grievances were manifold and posed considerable danger to the future of American democracy as well as the American dream. The country had become dangerously divided after decades of postindustrial decline and the loss of mining and manufacturing jobs, economic crisis, shrinking opportunity, and the lack of socioeconomic mobility for many Americans, as well as more recent and rapid demographic change. The haves and have-nots in America essentially lived in and experienced two different countries when Trump came along.
President Trump was a have-a-lot rather than a regular have or a perpetually disadvantaged have-not. But he sought to rule over both sides of America’s unequal equation by channeling the despair of the have-nots into a powerful and unassailable political force. He was the self-declared champion of those in postindustrial towns or racially diversifying neighborhoods who no longer saw their reflection in the faces around them. His path to power - and his key to remaining in power, even after losing the presidency - was through the assertion of leadership over the disaffected.
Like Donald Trump, most populists, as well as revolutionaries, are not representative of the “unwashed masses” they seek to lead. All too frequently they are middle-class intellectuals or scions of the rich and privileged, like Trump. Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, Juan Perón, to list a few, did not start out poor. Karl Marx, the father of socialism, who called on the world’s proletariat to unite, throw off their chains, and revolt, wrote his Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital in the reading room of the British Library in London, not some hovel in the shadow of a “dark satanic mill.” Marx’s writing was facilitated by Friedrich Engels, his close friend, intellectual collaborator, and sponsor. Engel’s wealthy industrialist father owned several large textile factories around Manchester in the North of England as well as in Germany. In most of my studies of populists and social revolutionaries, I found that few had much of a direct relationship with the people and workers they presumed to speak for and mobilize. The Castros, Lenins, and Peróns of the past also sought to personalize their leadership and make everything about them.
Hill ends her book with two chapters titled “No More Forgotten People” and “No More Forgotten Places”. Here she lays out her recommendations to create what she calls the “infrastructure of opportunity”. Quite obviously, education plays a huge role in this infrastructure and creating educational opportunities for people no matter where or what class they are born into. Hill acknowledges that this isn’t just about having opportunities available - it is about showing people how to access them, how to pay for them or get them paid for, mentoring them. It is also about simultaneously building infrastructure for child care, for transportation, for health care, for housing, because people who want to take advantage of educational opportunities don’t exist in a vacuum. They have families, they need places to live, they need ways to travel. While Hill places the onus for creating this infrastructure on government and also the private sector, she points out that we all have a role to play - she doesn’t use these words, but what she describes here I would call a type of “opportunity mutual aid” and, more explicitly, collective action.
Chapter 15: No More Forgotten People
Pg 305-307
Everyone can play a role in creating this infrastructure, even at the individual level. We all have agency and the power to do something to make a difference in the lives of other people. Sometimes simple acts like offering a ride to an interview or giving someone a suit to make a workplace transition are all that is needed to provide opportunity. In other cases, the acts required are braver and riskier: for instance, when individuals - such as people serving on scholarship committees or hiring managers for internships and job placements - have to confront discrimination and give people a chance to prove themselves no matter what they look or sound like or where they are from.
In all these cases, but especially where discrimination is involved, people in positions of power must take it upon themselves to break down the barriers to opportunity that hold back the less powerful [italics are mine]. Yet we all have some power. As citizens of a democracy, we are all responsible for effecting change, especially when doing so will shore up the political system that we have inherited and prevent disasters like the Trump presidency from happening again.
Many discriminatory barriers, as I discovered firsthand, are deliberately used by specific group to reduce competition for scarce resources, including access to elite universities and jobs. I saw this in the UK, where the class system was explicitly used as a device to keep all but a tiny handful of working-class students out of places like Oxford and Cambridge for decades.
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In the United States, race is the primary obstacle to opportunity. Racial prejudice has been woven into the country’s social, economic, and political fabric over the centuries since the Atlantic slave trade began. Black and other minority Americans face the same constraints on opportunity as everyone else - poverty, socioeconomic class, place, and gender - but race plays into all of these. It amplifies the other disadvantages.
Biases and discriminatory barriers are systemic. They foster inequality. It takes concerted effort to break them down through targeted legislation and governmental policies at the federal and state level. Institutional reform is required alongside individual action. And this principle is not limited to discriminatory barriers alone.
This next paragraph is really the heart of it, in my opinion:
Working- and middle-class Americans need cross-racial and cross-generational coalitions to overcome the existing barriers to opportunity, as well as the long-term effects of disadvantage on their health and well-being, educational attainment, and job prospects…On all these fronts, the people who are at the greatest disadvantage cannot overcome the barriers to opportunity on their own. Everyone needs to pitch in. Only by working together, individual to individual and as the individual constituents of a larger system, can we begin to break down barriers of the kind that I overcame, whether they are related to a person’s place, class, gender, race, or other attribute or circumstance. Only then can we truly make strides toward addressing the socioeconomic costs of Thatcher’s and Reagan’s policies in the 1980s - and undoing the political damage inflicted by their populist heirs like Farage and Trump. Whether or not the damage is permanent, only time will tell. But if we don’t rally together, we may never know if it can be fixed.
I agree with much of Hill’s basic argument and take-aways in this book. Certainly the creation of opportunity is possibly the number one thing we as a society and a country can work toward in order to strengthen our democracy and heal the rifts of this last decade. However, there is a part of me that can’t get 100% behind the premise that lack of opportunity necessarily drives people into populism and authoritarianism. If that were true, there would be more clear-cut economic lines around the supporters of Trump and his political sycophants in Congress, but as more voting data emerges from the 2016 and 2020 elections, the myth of Trump’s “Working Class” coalition is largely that - a Myth. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/) In fact, much of the Trump camp is relatively well off, despite his casting of himself as a champion of the non-college educated working class.
There’s also the simple fact that one of the most economically disadvantaged groups in the United States, the group with the most barriers to opportunity, is also one of the most staunch Democratic voter blocs - Black Americans. A whopping 91% of Black voters cast their ballots for Clinton in 2016 and 92% for Biden in 2020. Median white wealth is 7.8 times higher than Black wealth which accounts for only 4% of the total wealth in the country. If it is economic insecurity that drives people to authoritarian and right-wing politics, then wouldn’t Black Americans be voting for Trump and those like him at a much higher rate?
The fact is, though Hill does take race and racism into account when discussing what motivates voters toward right-wing politics, I just don’t think she gives enough credit to how much racism plays a role - in both America and Europe - in grievance politics. How much white Americans (and presumably white Europeans as well) feel their “way of life” is under threat from everyone who is non-white - meaning the majority of the world population - and how they must protect their “heritage” from the many “others” out to diminish and replace them. This feeling of grievance very much transcends economic factors.
Another counter-argument: America is one of the richest countries in the world and the poorest person in America is still, on average, better off than great multitudes of people in parts of Asia, Central Asia, South and Central America. Being poor in America (or anywhere, really) is not a legitimate excuse to align with Nazism or turn against other poor people because they have a different skin color, religion, or heritage.
But mostly when I think about whether being poor and being right-wing politically are a natural fit, I think about Dolly Parton.
Here is a woman who grew up in some of the most impoverished conditions in America - her father being a sharecropper in the mountains of Tennessee. She was born in a one room cabin, 1 of 12 siblings. A child of the South, and deeply enmeshed in American Country Music she could easily have gone toward the Conservative and right-leaning side of the political spectrum, yet she gave a million dollars to fund the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine and encouraged everyone to get vaccinated. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests she stated in a Billboard interview: “Of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No!” She also was amenable to changing the name of one of her shows at Dollywood - then called Dixie Stampede” - when she discovered some found it hurtful.
“When they said ‘Dixie’ was an offensive word, I thought, “Well, I don’t want to offend anybody. This is a business. We’ll just call it The Stampede,’ “ she said. “As soon as you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don’t be a dumbass. That’s where my heart is.”
[Compare this to the years and even decades it took to get the name of the highly offensive Washington D.C. football team changed.]
Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Kris Kristoffrerson, Redneck Revolt - and Fiona Hill herself - all show that being poor - and even being poor and white - and falling into far-right conservative politics do not necessarily go hand in hand. There is no doubt that the “forgotten people” in “forgotten places” have legitimate grievances, and yes, their country has failed them, but far-right authoritarian politics is not the answer, nor is it the default. A person’s economic problems are often a result of circumstance - forces outside of one’s control. Turning to the far-right or nazism as a solution to economic hardship is a CHOICE and it is a morally and politically corrupt one.