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

by Fiona Hill

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.

She had me practice pushing the balls of my feet into the floor to stop myself from shivering from the cold—or

They also represented a triumph for Russian president Vladimir Putin, who unleashed the Russian security services to intervene in the 2016 election.

I started life in the North East of England as a coal miner’s daughter. In the United States, I became a White House adviser on Russia and Europe.

In the United States, the gap between those on the lower rungs of the economic ladder and those on the top, in terms of their economic and social circumstances and life opportunities, widened dramatically between 2000 and 2020.

Educational attainment is now a significant predictor of whether someone will have the opportunity to secure stable full-time employment and, crucially, how that person will vote.

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

Vladimir Putin was the first populist president of a major country in the twenty-first century. He came into the presidency at the end of 1999 promising to make Russia a great power again,

Race is a deeply embedded, all-pervasive structural barrier to opportunity in the United States.

United States has wasted human capital on an enormous scale over the last forty years by constraining social mobility for millions of people.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan helped to drive the nail into the coffin of twentieth-century industry while ensuring that those trapped inside the casket would find it practically impossible to pry the lid off.

They espoused minimal state intervention, market liberalization, deregulation, and the privatization of public services.

But even with this privileged access, I spent several fruitless days looking for the electric kettle that we were allowed to have in our student hotel room. In the course of my search, I was literally chased out of the famous GUM department store on Red Square by an irate saleswoman. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was until I checked my earnestly rehearsed request in the dictionary. I had somehow mixed up the word for teapot or kettle, chaynik, with chayka, seagull, and had been on a futile quest for an electric seagull.

I sprayed Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw’s hair to keep it from blowing around during filming on the rooftop of the Rossiya Hotel across from the Kremlin.

By the 1980s, citizens of the USSR no longer fully associated themselves with the overarching Soviet identity the state had promoted. From the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to the Caucasus and republics like Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, former Soviet “comrades” started to return to older ethnic identities. Even in the Russian republic, ethno-nationalist tensions increased behind the Soviet façade, similar to the rise of English nationalism in the UK.

In the case of the USSR, its postindustrial difficulties were immediately obvious, even to the outside observer. In the UK and the U.S., postindustrial decline was more uneven. It was gradual in some places, sudden and brutal in others. It was not even apparent on the surface for most people at the national level, unless you lived in a blighted former industrial neighborhood, town, or city—like a Somerville or Bishop Auckland—where the collapse of the local economy was a reality and the rest of the country seemed to move on without you.

In Russia, Moscow mirrored London and some of the individual U.S. cities. It too became a boom town. By the 2010s it was a glitzy megalopolis that eclipsed every other Russian city and region.

America too was in postindustrial decline.

Accent, the way a person talked, the dialect or language and grammatical constructions they used, were also markers of class in the UK. A distinct regional accent from somewhere like the North East would automatically place you in the working class, even if your family were white-collar professionals.

In the 1990s, just like in the North East of England, people in Russia and Eastern Europe suddenly lost their jobs after decades of employment security.

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 decrease in government grants put higher education out of reach for many Americans. Coming on top of reduced employment opportunities after the Great Recession, this helped create the deep-rooted separation between low-income workers and college-educated elites. This cleavage in turn fueled worsening social divisions and political polarization in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century.

Cultural despair is the sense of loss, grievance, and anxiety that occurs when people feel dislocated from their communities and broader society as everything and everyone shifts around them. Especially when the sense of identity that develops from working in a particular job or industry, like my father’s image of himself as a coal miner, also recedes or is abruptly removed, people lose their grasp of the familiar. They can then easily fall prey to those who promise to put things—including jobs, people, or even entire countries—back in “their rightful place.”

early 2020, inequality in the United States had grown to such an extent that it mirrored the circumstances of the 1930s

as I had seen drugs and alcohol consume Britain and Russia in the 1980s and 1990s, the United States was engulfed by the opioid crisis after mass closures hit the U.S. coal, steel, and manufacturing sectors.

the United States did not enshrine citizens’ access to health care or housing as a basic right.

Welsh elementary schools had adopted a model created in Finland, which was replicable to an extent without a major infusion of resources and had a proven track record of success.

Nigel Farage in the UK and Donald Trump in the U.S. both fit Putin’s populist mold. They were charismatic leaders who dealt in pithy slogans that offered promises, not programs. Populists deal exclusively in “us” versus “them.” In their depiction, they are the only political leaders who can possibly fix tough issues. They always present themselves as the champions of “the people.”

Trump’s voters expected him to bring jobs back to forgotten places in America and push through policies that would create a new infrastructure of opportunity that would benefit them directly.

throughout the Trump presidency, America was at war with itself, including inside the government.

Trump was selfish to his core and had the most fragile ego of anyone I had encountered to date.

for Trump and those around him, it was all about the look, the image, not who you were and what you

The president’s vanity and fragile self-esteem were a point of acute vulnerability. He was a liability to himself and the country—a clear security or counterintelligence risk.

President Trump was attracted to “the tougher and meaner” leaders because he literally wanted to be them.

He wanted raw power without much in the way of constitutional or other checks and balances.

Trump called Mary Barra, the head of General Motors, to insist that she not close four factories in Ohio, a particularly important issue for his voter base.

When democracy slides, so does the economy.