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

by Fiona Hill

But behind this flashy showmanship there was a darker kind of substance. Under Trump, the United States began to develop its own version of “the people who run the country own it,” which was a description applied to Russia by the Carnegie Moscow program head Dmitri Trenin. In populist settings you frequently end up with crony capitalism. Those who have personal ties get preferential treatment and rise to the top of the economy. The grabbing hand of state becomes the grabbing hand of the head of state. Personalized leadership tilts the playing field away from good governance and the true private sector toward corruption and nepotism. In the public realm, the focus is on the political—creating jobs for “your” voters, which is something Trump always said he wanted to do. Inevitably, cronyism bolsters the desire for authoritarianism, retaining power by any means to keep you and yours in charge of the state and its spoils. In the end, this trend leads to economic stagnation. Democracy and growth are clearly correlated in Europe as well as in the United States. When democracy slides, so does the economy.