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

by Fiona Hill

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.