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

by Fiona Hill

America is a rich country where millions of 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 and heal our political polarization.

Under the guise of Putin strengthening the state and restoring its global position, Russia slowly succumbed to authoritarianism.

Democracy is not self-repairing. It requires constant attention and renewal, especially during periods of rapid technological and social change and economic uncertainty.

But if there is one message that I hope to convey more forcefully than any other, it is that opportunity does not materialize from thin air and no one does anything alone. Barriers to opportunity and social mobility are personal and universal. Any individual success is a team or collective effort. Delivering greater opportunity for America in the future will be the product of hard work on multiple levels. The federal government, states, local communities, schools, colleges, companies, families, and personal and professional networks all help form the infrastructure of opportunity. When opportunity vanishes, it is because this infrastructure has eroded or even failed.

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

In many respects the United States has wasted human capital on an enormous scale over the last forty years by constraining social mobility for millions of people. Ultimately, the United States is only as good as the quality of its population, in terms of its general health and well-being and educational attainment. People, individually and collectively, form the core of America’s institutions and drive innovation, yet too often they are an afterthought in our national conversations and our leaders’ policy decisions.

Thatcher’s and Reagan’s respective domestic policy choices helped pave the way for economic growth in the 1990s and early 2000s. But they also created deep societal and spatial inequalities in the United Kingdom and United States between the places and people that could adapt to all the changes and those that couldn’t. This sparked and then fueled the partisan divides that would produce crippling political rifts decades later, in 2016 through 2020. In some respects the crises of 2020 would mark the final reckoning with the revolutionary reforms of Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s.

Labels proliferate. In the case of Brexit, those who opposed the idea of leaving the EU were “Remoaners,” not just “Remainers”—cosmopolitan elitists whining and complaining about the loss of their ability to roam around Europe as they pleased. For those in Trump circles, opponents were “globalists” or “liberals” or just “libs”—wealthy coastal elites wrapped up in the bubble of their own alternative cultural circles, who wanted to hold on to their privileges at the expense of everyone else. Much of the rhetoric around Brexit and the rise of Trump focused on the political combat of labeling any dissent or dissenters accordingly and then mobilizing “the people” to try to outwit and marginalize the Remoaners or “make the libs cry.”

Trump’s populist presidency had prioritized political opportunism over providing the economic opportunity that most of his voters had hoped for in 2016. His promises to his base and the American working class were left unfulfilled. Ultimately, Trump had played personal and polarizing politics rather than made policy. Not only the livelihoods but the lives of Americans were at stake. We needed to get our house, America, in order, not just fixate on which man was in the “people’s house.”

By the end of 2020, the fissures in America’s social and political fabric that Trump had repeatedly picked at looked hard to repair and perhaps insuperable. The pandemic revealed that the United States could no longer be relied on for policy continuity. America’s past successes no longer predicted its present performance.

Trump had been a one-man big show and his administration more of a personality cult than a representation of partisan politics. He was neither Republican nor conservative. He had thrown the existing Republican Party’s ideological and government policy frames for addressing issues out the window but failed to replace them with anything more durable. He had no real fixed ideas, although there were plenty of things he didn’t like or refused to contemplate and deal with.

Likewise, President Trump’s interpretation of executive power and his attempt to usurp the presidency may have paved the way for another, less personally insecure and more capable populist president—someone who actually did his or her homework and was skilled in project management—to pull a Putin in America.

In the United States, race is the primary obstacle to opportunity. Racial prejudice has been woven into the country’s social, economic, and political fabric over the centuries since the Atlantic slave trade began. Black and other minority Americans face the same constraints on opportunity as everyone else—poverty, socioeconomic class, place, and gender—but race plays into all of these. It amplifies the other disadvantages.

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.

While they lasted, however, these opportunities did create new networks and provide leadership and other skill development that I was able to list on my university and job applications. I am especially good at tying knots and map reading (always useful when the GPS fails), but I no longer play the violin, which is probably just as well, since it tortured me and everyone else for far too long.

Poor children are more likely to become poor adults. Poverty then extends across generations, as I experienced with my own family. My dad could not break out of his parents’ pattern. They did not break out of their parents’. I succeeded at school and won a place at university not because I was exceptional but because I had help. No one does anything completely alone. Life is a team sport.

Far too many people who were born into similar circumstances in the generations after me did not have the same opportunities. Deprived and disadvantaged, they will continue to be preyed upon by unscrupulous politicians who offer them a promise of opportunity in return for their votes. These left-behind people deserve better. But their problems are everyone’s. They are our fellow Americans and fellow Brits, in some cases our family members and friends. Helping them will not be purely a selfless act. Because as long as they feel that there is no hope for them, there will be no hope for the rest of us. There will be nothing for us, anywhere.