There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill

Setbacks are a spur to action.

As is usually the case, macro-level aggregate figures masked individuals’ daily realities at the micro level.

My personal story is a testament to the power of social, economic, and geographic mobility.

Like other ailing polities, America is marred by low societal cohesion, political fragmentation, loss of public trust in government, weakened national institutions, and reduced civic engagement.

America is a rich country where millions of people have become so desperate and starved of opportunity, and others so disillusioned with the existing system of government, that they cling to whatever populist messages political leaders serve them, no matter how absurd or harmful.

Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future, a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust course and heal our political polarization.

Putin set a personalized, bravura style of leadership that others, including Donald Trump, sought to emulate.

The federal government, states, local communities, schools, colleges, companies, families, and personal and professional networks all help form the infrastructure of opportunity. When opportunity vanishes, it is because this infrastructure has eroded or even failed.

Lee and Molly knew the congressional hearing room well. It was cavernous and notoriously chilled. The air conditioning was cranked up and the temperature set low to accommodate congressmen in their layers of undershirts, dress shirts, and suit jackets so there would be no risk of sweaty armpits and brows beaded with perspiration. Molly warned me that, as a more lightly dressed woman, I risked freezing.

“Hey, Fiona, there are some suits on sale over here—might you need one for that impeachment thingy you’re doing?”

At the end of the day, as I wrapped up my testimony alongside David Holmes from the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, the Washington Post’s fashion critic gave us her verdict: “Their testimony was pointed. Their clothes were reassuringly dull.” Friends complimented me on my hair and makeup. Molly’s mission, at least, was accomplished. I had struggled against sexism throughout my professional life, in a seemingly unending effort to realize my potential and do my job effectively despite the difficulties that somehow seemed intrinsic to being female. Nonetheless, I would never have thought that I would need to worry about my gender being a liability for me—and for the country—at such a critical moment. Yet there I was.

The congressional hearings and the impeachment trial of 2019–2020 marked the culmination of decades of political polarization in the United States and several years of bitter partisan battles triggered by the contentious 2016 presidential race. They also represented a triumph for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who unleashed the Russian security services to intervene in the 2016 election.

Thatcher’s and Reagan’s respective domestic policy choices helped pave the way for economic growth in the 1990s and early 2000s. But they also created deep societal and spatial inequalities in the United Kingdom and United States between the places and people that could adapt to all the changes and those that couldn’t. This sparked and then fueled the partisan divides that would produce crippling political rifts decades later, in 2016 through 2020. In some respects the crises of 2020 would mark the final reckoning with the revolutionary reforms of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s.

According to relatives, Grandad had been shot ten times or hit with shrapnel from exploding shells, gassed with chlorine and mustard gas, and bayoneted along with his horse after they got trapped in the mud. He seemed invincible. Grandad never gave me any details—I was just a child—but he was certainly covered in plenty of scars. He had narrowly escaped a couple of rockfalls and accidents down the mine, including one just before his retirement when the “windy pick” (pneumatic drill) had pierced his pelvis, forcing him to wear a truss to keep his battered insides in for the rest of his life. Going down the pit never filled Grandad with terror, but he described World War I as hell on earth.

This was the most stressful period of my childhood and adolescence, with all of us crammed into our house 24/7—although the hospital loaned Dad a wheelchair so we could take Granny outside on nice days. Nonetheless, she couldn’t get up the stairs to go to the one bathroom we had, and we did not have a spare bedroom for her. In Roddymoor the toilet had been downstairs, in the space where a pantry had been; to go up to bed, Granny would sit on the stairs and push herself up while I or Grandad braced and held on to her. (Coming down was a bit of a nightmare and left her with huge purple bruises on her back, legs, and arms if she slipped.) The stairs in our house were far too narrow to carry out the same maneuver, so Granny spent two years living in our front room, sleeping on the sofa, with a commode so she could go to the toilet at the back of the dining area, in a little wooden addition that Dad built with the help of neighbors. Mam gave her sponge baths. Eventually Granny got assigned a nursing home place just a few blocks away. She lasted only another year. She wasn’t sick, but she was in chronic despair. A week before she died, Granny told Dad she had simply had enough.

In England, private schools are in any case known as public schools, open to the fee-paying public, not just the offspring of aristocrats, which makes for a great deal of confusion.

Even when opportunity presented itself, I was learning, it took resources to seize it.

Exam results were a time of dread, not just because of the revelation of the grades. The full results were posted on the school office window so that everyone could see everything. There was no hiding. The bullies would try to “knack” (hit) you for doing well.

Harassment was normalized by everyone around you. It was presented like a rite of passage: you would have to go through many feats of endurance.

The restaurant owner and manager, Alan and Gilbert, saw it all but laughed it off. The lads were just messing around—just being “stupid buggers.” All a bit of fun. No need to get upset. Don’t pay attention. Lots of people want these waitressing jobs. If you don’t like it, leave.

Everyone seemed to think it was somehow your fault, as a girl, if you were harassed, or didn’t laugh it off. Boys could get a job and go out and about in Bishop Auckland, anywhere, anytime, no repercussions or recriminations, but in your case, if something happened, well, what were you doing there? What were you thinking? Why were you, a girl, walking alone by the riverbank or down an empty street, or anywhere around town, at night on your own? You were just asking for it: trouble of some kind.

Angela and I didn’t tell Mam or Dad about most of these episodes in case Dad went berserk, hunted down the offender, and tore him limb from limb. No one wanted their dad in jail for giving someone a thrashing. You learned to keep things to yourself, band together with other girls to repel the personal space invaders, stick to your trusted circle of male friends for protection, and get away or fight back if necessary.

Thatcher cleverly played upon their vulnerabilities. She was essentially the nanny supreme, wielding authority over small boys.

Growing up in this self-sufficient and highly opinionated environment, Margaret Thatcher thought everyone should live as her family did. For her, England was not a society but a country of individuals.

She launched herself into politics not long after graduating from Oxford and was financially supported by her businessman husband. As far as we could tell, she had little insight into or empathy for the travails of the working class, women or men.

If you were lucky enough to get a good education in a place like the North East of England, you needed to give something back to people who were not so fortunate. You needed to guide others to the same opportunity. Getting an education was a right, but it was also a privilege.

In my last year at school, in 1983–1984, the United States and the USSR teetered on the brink of a nuclear confrontation after both misread the intent of a series of respective military exercises. As I later learned from declassified archives during my work in the U.S. National Intelligence Council, the 1983 “war scare” was real. But even without any formal validation, the international tension was palpable. Popular culture in the UK and Europe, as well as in the United States, was filled with rock songs like Nena’s “99 Red Balloons,” about the beginning of a missile strike in a divided Germany, and films like The Day After in the U.S. and Threads in the UK, about ordinary Americans and Brits trying to deal with the aftermath of nuclear Armageddon.

The announcer told us that if we were caught outside far from shelter in a missile strike, then we should lie down in a ditch. For years after this, until well into our teens, while we were out on a walk in the fields, Angela and I would scope out somewhere to throw ourselves in case we heard a siren.

He went down with the ship but was then blasted to the surface by depth charges.

“Your Fiona’s good at languages, Alf, she should get one and go and study Russian and figure out why the bloody hell they’re trying to blow us up!”

“Did you sleep with Mr. Hunt? How could you have done so well? You’re just a common northerner.” She had a stern, harsh look on her face. She was completely serious. She clearly couldn’t fathom it. I too was shocked. And not just because of my classmate’s disparaging comment. Like most people who find themselves well outside their social and cultural comfort zone, I had an acute case of imposter syndrome.

Unfortunately, when some people knew you were desperate for a job or a career-enhancing experience, they thought they could take liberties rather than just help you out.

One old golfer stuck his hand up the back of my skirt and into my underwear as I bent down with his glass of single malt. I reflexively elbowed him in the face and was ordered out. When I complained about what he had done, the bar manager offered to speak to the other places I worked in St. Andrews to make sure I wouldn’t have another job in town. He would also deny it if I reported it to the university, which had no official connection to the golf club apart from proximity.

Living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the entirety of the next decade, I was struck by the jarring disparities and similar developments to those I had seen in old England and the USSR.

Over the course of my studies and based on my personal experiences, it soon dawned on me that the Cold War, the proverbial Iron Curtain, and the ideological veil of the bitter struggle between capitalism and communism had concealed the fact that the United Kingdom, the USSR, and the United States had much in common. Once you lifted the veil, you could see the touch points beneath—especially when you knew what you were looking for.

The idea that the West had won the Cold War and capitalism had prevailed over communism deflected attention from the troubles of America’s old manufacturing centers and their displaced workers.

They referred to her as “Urine Face” for the rest of the year.

Led by a group of young Russian economists who were working closely with Western counterparts, the program was inspired by the same “radical” free-market policies that had been adopted in the United States and the United Kingdom by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s. The young Russian economists thought that the end of communism, the creation of private property, and radical economic change would automatically bring democracy to Russia. It would not take long for them to be proven wrong.

With no social protection fund of the sort that János Kornai had recommended, vulnerable Russian citizens were left to fend for themselves and navigate the transition on their own. The results were ugly.

Privatization was not as fair a proposition as it seemed.

In the 1990s, advertisements for jobs in the newspapers for what were traditionally female professions—secretaries, bookkeepers, press and communications aides, administrators—literally specified that they were looking for “women without complexes.”

Even when it was clear that I wasn’t the secretary or notetaker in academic seminars or meetings, my gender would get in the way. I would make a point and wait for a response, only to have some man repeat what I had said a few minutes later in a slightly different formulation. Every time it happened, imposter syndrome would kick in. I wondered, was it my impenetrable North East accent, did no one understand? Was it a stupid or irrelevant point? Was I simply not clear? Does everything a woman say have to be repeated by a man for it to be heard? On occasion I would find myself getting lectured on the very set of issues I worked on directly, sometimes even having to sit and listen as someone cited back something I had written in an article or policy paper, oblivious to where they had read it and whose idea it was. At every stage of my career, at Harvard, at the Brookings Institution, and in the U.S. government, something would happen to remind me of the fact that I was a woman, and not the same as the men around me.

So there I was, a nondescript woman, as innocuous as a flower arrangement or potted plant, some tableware framing Mr. Putin. Nothing to look at here.

This gender wage gap, combined with the central role that women play in supporting their families, would in turn help to explain some of the grim political trends that swept the world in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. It was certainly emblematic that in the 2016 American presidential election, almost 40 percent of women voters would opt for Donald Trump and his promise to blow up the existing social system, despite his open and unabashed misogyny during the campaign. In the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and every other country, the obstacles to opportunity—to accessing an education, finding a job, earning sufficient money to thrive, not just survive—no matter what form they come in, contribute to economic hardship. Over time the reality as well as the perception of being unfairly disadvantaged in some way and denied social mobility hardens into political grievance. People want their government to do something to address their difficulties. They want their political system to deliver some relief and to level the playing field. In the early 2000s, all the gaps and discrepancies that had built up in the 1980s and 1990s in advanced societies would push those who were most affected (and thus disaffected) toward politicians who promised to change the situation in some dramatic fashion—even, in the Russian case under Vladimir Putin, at the cost of curtailing their political freedoms.

Each time I got the impression that as a woman, I should consider myself lucky that I was getting a job in the first place.

These experiences were part of a common pattern for working women. Men get more pay because they ask. Men are viewed as strong when they ask for money. Women appear grasping or greedy. Men always seem to have more leverage in a negotiation than women. Employers presume men will walk away if they don’t get what they want. They have more job options because they are men. Women always fear that they have fewer options and there will be untoward consequences.

Rather than a springboard to opportunity, advanced education suddenly seemed like a millstone around this generation’s neck.

This lack of a direct relationship between ordinary people and prominent intellectual and political elites leaves the playing field open for others to step in and present themselves as advocates for the entire working or middle class or other distinct underrepresented groups. Indeed, politics since 2000 has been marked by the rise of populists—politicians who spurn “out-of-touch experts” and who claim to speak on behalf of millions of people with whom they in fact have no authentic connection, and in whom they have no genuine interest beyond securing votes to support their own often very personal agendas.

Referenda attract voters who stay home during normal elections.

Populism is a political approach with no fixed ideology.