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

by Fiona Hill

Given the reach of the internet, the QAnon conspiracy quickly spread during Trump’s term from the United States to Europe, securing thousands of adherents in places like the UK and Germany. Trump assisted the spread by appearing to endorse it, while others in his circle, including former national security adviser Mike Flynn, openly embraced it. Given General Flynn’s background in intelligence and psychological operations while he was in the military, it was obvious to me that he saw the political utility of the conspiracy. But as a result of all this eagerness at the top to embrace fictional narratives for purely personal and domestic political purposes, the United States under Trump joined the historical pantheon of states promoting conspiracy theories. America was no different from Hitler’s Germany or czarist, Soviet, and modern Russia. George Orwell’s 1984 moment—of state manipulation of information to deceive and repress the population—came to fruition in 2016–2020 with the QAnon conspiracy and with Trump’s eventual Big Lie—that he had won the presidential election.

They were also quick to set an attack dog on us to rile up the internet trolls, because this always seemed to work. Ambassador Yovanovitch’s dismissal from her position in early May 2019 became the ultimate proof of the concept. Stand in the way and we will take you out.

Ivanka’s qualifications for this position as special adviser to the president appeared to be the facts that, first, she was a woman; second, she had children; third, she had worked for her father and set up her own fashion line (drawing on family funds); and finally, she had written a book, Women Who Work.

In 2018–2019, President Trump forced a government shutdown in a fight with Congress over the budget. It was another of his big shows. He figured that the federal government and its funding were easy political targets that would not elicit much public sympathy.

I was deemed “essential,” so during the shutdown I worked without pay. I was one of the lucky ones with savings as well as a working spouse. Like many other Americans, most federal government workers, including many single mothers, lived from paycheck to paycheck and were the sole breadwinners for their families. Most of my colleagues were deeply distressed by the way they were treated during the shutdown, as well as by the president’s constant depiction of government employees as an unaccountable privileged elite feeding off the rest of the country.

By fall 2019—a year that began with the government shutdown, and for me had initially seemed to culminate with my summer departure from the NSC—I had started to fear that the U.S. was stuck in a period of profound and dangerous disruption. It was not just that Trump was embarrassing our country in press conferences abroad and playing a tin-pot dictator at home. It was that the disaffection, decay, and divisions that had given rise to Trump and the MAGA phenomenon were getting worse. They threatened to corrode the infrastructure of our democracy, affecting not just the oft-maligned government steelworkers but also the support struts themselves.

The Democratic members of the committee protested Gaetz’s presence. He insisted that he had the right to sit there to observe a “secret political show trial” hidden behind closed doors and to protect the interests of the president. In fact several of President Trump’s stalwart congressional supporters were at the table, not least Ohio congressman Jim Jordan, who was leading the grilling of the witnesses. And there was certainly nothing secret about the proceedings. The press was everywhere. Even while we were in session, they seemed on top of what was going on. I never left the room, apart from an escorted bathroom break and then a lunch break, nor did Lee Wolosky and Sam Ungar, on my legal team. But members of Congress from both parties went in and out, evidently filling people in. By the time I got home late that evening, everyone seemed to know what I had said.

Gaetz clearly had no idea who I was, nor did he care. I was a witness who might have something to say that could damage the president, and in looking me quickly up and down, he decided that I was just some middle-aged female bureaucrat to intimidate. I stared right back and kept his gaze.

The lawyer’s question tapped into an ugly stereotype about my gender. Women are frequently deemed emotional or upset when they try to be as direct as men are in a given situation.

Women, moreover, are rarely given their due for holding their own in a debate or expressing themselves firmly.

Men use anger strategically. It’s a show of strength in the workplace as well as in normal life. Men’s anger is accepted and praised. Women’s anger is not.

I was immediately struck by how much the U.S., the UK, and Russia, the three countries that had defined my personal and professional life, now resembled each other in their failure to mount a serious, well-coordinated response to dealing with the pandemic. All three countries had some of the world’s highest levels of COVID-19 infection and devastating death rates among citizens and frontline health-care workers—as did other countries with populist politics and leaders, such as Brazil and India. In all of these places, scientific experts were drowned out by posturing populist politicians. Public health took a back seat to the exigencies of personalized politics. Political divisions became chasms over even the most basic medical advice, such as wearing masks and maintaining physical distance to slow the spread of the disease.

Populist governments are, almost by definition, ill-suited to handle complex problems of governance. Style, swagger, and atmospherics, superficial and simplistic solutions, and enthusiastic sloganeering form the core of the populist’s playbook—and are the antithesis of the toolkit needed to deal with a deadly pandemic.

At least a handful of people reported attempting to dose themselves prophylactically with sometimes toxic compounds seemingly endorsed by the president. As a result, Dr. Fauci found himself constantly having to correct the president to make sure that the American population received the appropriate public health message. Before long, Dr. Fauci ended up not just on the “nasty list” but on the enemies list for crossing the president.

It was, in its essence, the culmination of a slow-motion coup attempt, perpetrated by Trump to keep himself in power even if he actually lost the election. Although coups historically tend to be the product of clandestine plots and sudden, violent military takeovers, Trump’s attempt played out over a period of months. This did not make it any less threatening.

He would float these ideas to see if anyone contradicted him. People rarely did. If there was some pushback in the media, he would say it was a joke, he was only kidding, and move on.

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.

In October 1993, a bitter dispute between the Russian Duma (parliament) and President Boris Yeltsin over the respective powers of the legislature and the presidency in competing drafts of a new constitution degenerated into violence after the Duma refused to confirm Yeltsin’s prime minister. President Yeltsin tried to dissolve the Duma. His vice president, Alexander Rutskoi, and the speaker of the Duma, Ruslan Khasbulatov, sought to impeach him. Yeltsin invoked “extraordinary powers.” He eventually called out the Russian army to shell the Russian parliamentarians—who had holed themselves up in the “White House,” the Duma building—into submission. Both sides claimed they were acting in the name of the Russian people.

Authoritarian leaders like Putin always prefer to use someone else to do their bidding to promote their interests in a softer, subtler way, if they can. It was telling, for instance, that Trump used Republican senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, along with other GOP members of Congress, to contest the Electoral College count on January 6.

There were additional U.S. parallels to events in Russia in this timeframe. Following Tereshkova’s proposal in the Duma, Valery Zorkin, the head of Russia’s Constitutional Court, presided over a legal analysis that produced hundreds of pages laying out the legitimacy of amending the constitution in Putin’s favor. Zorkin was a long-standing Putin loyalist and fervent advocate of strong executive power. Similarly, during Trump’s first impeachment trial, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who was part of Trump’s defense team, argued in favor of a sweeping definition of executive power and privilege. Trump-appointed attorney general William Barr made similar speeches on maximizing presidential power, although in the end he refused to help overturn the results of the November election. Even enablers have their limits.

Succession crises and rebellions by deposed kings and queens calling up their own private armies were the dilemma of monarchies in earlier times. But in January 2021, America seemed to be embarking on one of its own, with the Trump family settling down at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s presidential “winter palace,” to plot a comeback.

In multiple analyses of the voting patterns, inequality as well as social grievance and cultural despair had undermined trust in democracy and fed populism.

Historically, polarization and populism—and their close traveling companions, extremism and authoritarianism—emerge from the politics of cultural despair. They arise from and circle around the idea that a specific “someone” is guilty and to blame for the negative changes and existential angst that people experience when things are in flux.

In his campaign speeches and public pronouncements, Trump particularly fueled white Christians’ fears of losing their distinct religious identity and way of life because of demographic and societal change.

Political polarization is ultimately a national security threat as well as a domestic challenge. It is a barrier to the collective action necessary for combating catastrophes like global pandemics, mitigating the effects of climate change, and, as I saw in my time at the White House, thwarting external threats from adversaries such as Russia. In the Trump administration, every peril was politicized. It was turned into fodder for personal gain and partisan games. Successive national security advisers, cabinet members, and their professional staffs were unable to mount a coherent response or defense to a national security threat in the face of personalized, chaotic, and at times simply opportunistic policymaking at the top.

The voters who had swung the ballot for Donald Trump in critical counties in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were swayed by consideration of their own personal, family, and communal circumstances, not by the fake internet personas devised by Russian intelligence services.

Local economies were stuck in a crisis of opportunity.

In many respects, the bias in the data sets was inevitable—and it underscored the potential perils of the new digital age. If there had been more diversity in the educational backgrounds of UK government officials, someone might have spotted the deficiencies of the algorithm. UK ministers had little experience or even knowledge of the struggles of students at a disadvantaged school.

After the 1970s, the expansion of external child-care facilities as well as schools had played a critical role in enabling women to support their families; without access to either of these, working mothers were in a vicious chicken- (really mother-hen-) and-egg cycle. In summer 2020, one academic study concluded that one third of the women under forty interviewed for the survey had quit the labor force to take care of children. By January 2021, the official U.S. jobs report showed that more than one quarter of a million additional women had stopped working or looking for work for similar reasons.

U.S. economists and analysts concluded that women faced an “unsolvable dilemma” that was as much a personal crisis as a jobs crisis.

The only people who seemed to be thriving during the pandemic were billionaires—the group that Trump had favored in his deregulation and tax policies. They got richer while low-income and middle-class Americans got poorer.

As a result of the sudden shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States was now at the kind of inflection point that Europe had found itself at after the devastation of the Second World War. To make significant, measurable progress in reducing inequality, alleviating poverty, eliminating structural racism, and removing gender discrimination, the United States needed to take bold steps.

A new homeland or domestic development agency could play a similar role for overseeing or coordinating efforts to restore and create a new infrastructure of opportunity for the decades ahead.

But to implement any or all of these fixes, the United States needed a federal-level vision and an organizing principle for action at the state and local government and community levels. First and foremost, though, legislators needed to begin by focusing on people.

The infrastructure of opportunity and other amenities should be there in some form at every doorstep. This is not simply an ethical imperative; it is also an existential one, at least so far as our democracy is concerned.

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.

Spurring collective action across racial as well as generational lines is clearly a difficult political and societal task. As Isabel Wilkerson points out in her book Caste, in the United States, the manufactured idea of “white supremacy” was deliberately promoted after the American Civil War to pit working-class whites against Blacks. It was frequently deployed to undermine workers’ solidarity in labor disputes. The concept and the racial categories underlying it were false, but that did not prevent it from taking hold and poisoning American race relations for generations.

Second, focusing collective action on education is an important aspect in countering the national security crisis of polarization and fragmentation. Lack of education—in the sense of acquiring the critical thinking skills that a good K-12 and some form of college education can provide—breeds suspicion of government, skepticism toward science and expert knowledge, and resistance to the very idea that there are things like basic facts and objective information. Poor educational attainment leaves people vulnerable to populists and political operatives—a fact underscored by President Trump’s persistently higher ratings among Americans without a college degree.

Part of the problem in ensuring equal access to a quality education for young people in both the United Kingdom and the United States, irrespective of their place of origin or race or ethnic identity, is the current composition of elites. Those at the top of the educational and political system find it hard to grasp the problems of low-income and minority students unless they have experienced poverty, discrimination, and failing schools for themselves. Poor students are dismissed as insufficiently academically gifted or hardworking rather than acknowledged as deprived. No one takes account of the fact that they are engaged in a constant struggle with economic disadvantage on top of social discrimination.

Systematizing Opportunity Individual agency will always be essential, but a systematic, coordinated approach to developing the infrastructure of opportunity would ease the way for more people to succeed.

Over the decades since the creation of the NHS, the UK’s primary problem has been the systematic government defunding of the NHS, not the basic provision of care, alongside the difficulties of implementing a wholescale reform of the system to keep up with the population’s growing demand for medical services.

Real communities and physical connections offer the antidote to populism.

Real relationships offer support and mentoring and improve well-being. They provide “best interest,” not just “self-interest.” They give individuals contact with people they care about. They make them feel as if they have a future. There can be no collective progress without this individual progress, just as there can be no national progress without local progress. In this as in so many other ways, the macro is dependent on the micro.

The well-being of the national economy and polity hinges on people’s quality of life and on their ability to fulfil their potential at the local level. When the physical as well as the information space is fragmented, voters don’t know whom to trust. But when people see concrete, personally measurable examples of positive change within their own immediate physical communities—programs and initiatives that bring real benefits to them and their families—they reach their own conclusions. They become more discerning and hopeful. And they b...