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

by Fiona Hill

As the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s—Millennials—reached adulthood, they suddenly found their much-anticipated employment opportunities dramatically constrained. This was the case even for those with a college degree (about 47 percent of the cohort). Suddenly the entire premise of the new educational paradigm collapsed: students who had taken out loans to support their educations could no longer afford to pay them off and sank into debt. Rather than a springboard to opportunity, advanced education suddenly seemed like a millstone around this generation’s neck. Given their relatively high level of educational achievement, it is a testament to the toughness of the times that Millennials have been deemed the “unluckiest generation” in American history. In the early 2000s, which was supposedly “their era,” Millennials were hit by economic setbacks from which they never recovered. These included the Great Recession, which struck just as they were either entering or trying to establish themselves in the job market. Ten years after that crisis, Millennials had still not recovered. They generally had fewer savings and assets than previous generations. Most of those who identified themselves in this group in social surveys told pollsters in 2018 that they would be unable to cover $1,000 in emergency expenses. In interviews that I conducted for this book, Millennials described feeling economically and politically insecure and were acutely aware of their inequality. My niece...

In the United Kingdom, unlike the United States, students who take out loans for their education pay them back based on what they earn, not on the sum they owe. In theory, if they are in a low-paid job, they can defer the debt indefinitely. No one hounds them and puts liens on their earnings and property. Nonetheless, the idea of taking on a debt that you may never pay off is a daunting prospect for low-income students, no matter who or where they are, holding them back from enrolling in college. The provision of student grants, in particular for minority and low-income students, would greatly expand their opportunity to enter university as well as the chances to improve their life and material circumstances.

Consider that baby boomers, the generation of Americans born between World War II and the mid-1960s, are 82 percent white. Now consider the fact that within a century of this generation’s starting point, the nation will have undergone a demographic sea change. By 2045, if demographic trends across the subsequent generations adhere to current projections, the United States will be overall “majority minority.” But this is not happening for the reason that many people think: according to U.S. Census Bureau data, the Pew Research Center, and my colleagues at the Brookings Institution, the racial shifts of the most diverse recent cohort, Generation Z, born after the mid-1990s, are driven by domestic, internal, and personal factors such as interracial marriage and birthrates; they are not the result of immigration, which has been increasingly restricted by government policy in recent years.

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.”

Cultural despair

National statistics masked the plight of poor whites in America’s forgotten towns and deindustrialized regions. They had far more in common with Black and other minority group Americans than they might have thought. Inequality was a calamity for all the lower income brackets of the U.S. population. Americans were suffering regardless of their race.

Professor Alston conducted a similar visit to the United States and several other countries between 2017 and 2019. In the U.S. he noted the roughly thirty million people living in relative poverty. He observed that, unlike other Western and European countries (including the UK after World War II), the United States did not enshrine citizens’ access to health care or housing as a basic right. In an October 2019 interview with the International Bar Association, Professor Alston stated his conclusion that “in terms of social mobility, the sad reality of the ‘Great American Dream’ . . . is that statistically the U.S. is less [socially] mobile than almost any other developed country.” There were so many impediments to moving from a low-income group to another in the U.S.—ranging from poor health and inadequate health care to unequal access to food, limited job opportunities in blighted regions, and the consequences of accidents and sheer bad luck—that it was almost impossible to do it alone.

In 2020, 59 percent of Black students and 64 percent of Asian students in the UK would make it to university. Moreover, minorities tended to live in London and other larger towns and cities, where there might be more resources available to assist their progress. Committee witnesses stressed that the message low-income children tended to receive from teachers, society, and their families was that higher education was not for them. They shouldn’t even bother thinking about it.

Just as a college education is no longer a dependable way of improving one’s prospects, moving to a locus of opportunity like London or New York—and in some cases even living there—is no longer a guarantee of social mobility. Today students from the richest families have become the sole beneficiaries of this set of circumstances in the UK as well as the U.S. Their parents cover their education. Their networks help them find jobs. They have a different infrastructure of opportunity, one that has proved impervious to the impact of deindustrialization in the 1980s and recession more recently. The rest of their cohort of Millennials and Generation Z have not been so lucky. And just as female workers, former industrial workers, and other disadvantaged groups were chafing at the beginning of the twenty-first century under a system that was clearly skewed against them, so too would this new wave of younger aspiring workers come to feel an acute and justifiable grievance—one that would soon have a seismic effect on democratic politics on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in the United States.

Me the People

What a title

Many Tories believed that EU membership imposed onerous economic, political, and legal constraints on the United Kingdom. Membership drained tax revenues away for EU common funding and prevented the UK from charting its own course on trade and general business issues. Some decried the growing strain on the UK’s schools, public services, and NHS budgets caused by the EU’s free-movement-of-people directive, which had boosted Britain’s population by an estimated 3.6 million after 2004. Others saw benefits from continued formal membership but wanted to push Brussels on institutional and budgetary reforms to increase the UK’s room for maneuver. The prime minister at the time, David Cameron, fell into the latter camp. Cameron hoped to resolve the party’s internal disputes once and for all by throwing the issue open to the population at large. He gambled that he could use the referendum to improve his negotiating leverage with the EU hierarchy in Brussels.

Populism is a political approach with no fixed ideology. It can pop up on both the left and the right of political thinking, and pretty much in any setting. The essence of populism is creating a direct link with “the people” or specific groups within a population and either bypassing or eliminating intermediaries like political parties, parliamentary representatives, and established institutions. Referenda, plebiscites, direct appeals, and executive orders form the substance of populism.

Populism defined