There Is Nothing For You Here

 

Fiona Hill, “There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity In The 21^st Century,” Mariner Books, 2021, 361 pp.

This book by Fiona—the same Fiona who, as a Russia expert, was a critical witness during the first impeachment—provides an excellent analysis of the deindustrialization of her home area in northeast England, the same deindustrialization occurring in Russia and the US, all seriously obvious by the late 1980s.  This book’s title is taken from her father who recognized Fiona must leave the mining town in northeastern England, where she was born, if she wanted to have any success in life..  Hill took her father’s advice and left — studying Russian and history at St. Andrews in Scotland, then spending time in Moscow, and finally getting a Ph.D. at Harvard.  She eventually served in the administrations of three American presidents, most recently as President Trump’s top adviser on Russia and Europe. “I take great pride in the fact that I’m a nonpartisan foreign policy expert,” she said before the House in November 2019, when she delivered her plain-spoken testimony at the hearings for the (first) impeachment of President Trump.

Looked at from afar, Hill’s story seems like a triumphant tale of striving and accomplishment. Born in 1965, she grew up in a “blighted world.” Her father followed the men in his family into the mines when he was 14.  As the industry started to collapse in the 1960s, he found a job as a hospital porter. Hill’s mother worked as a midwife. As late as the 1970s, Hill’s grandparents lived in a subsidized rowhouse without modern conveniences, including indoor plumbing.

Fiona recalls being in a shop in 2019 with her mother, who yelled out: “Hey, Fiona, there are some suits on sale over here — might you need one for that impeachment thingy you’re doing?”  As for that “impeachment thingy,” Hill doesn’t say much about the actual hearings, though she has plenty to say about Trump. Instead of making the usual insider-memoir move of fixating on all the brazenly outrageous behavior — the bizarre comments, the outlandish tweets — Hill notices his insecurities, the soft spots that, she says, made him “exquisitely vulnerable” to manipulation. Yes, she writes, the Kremlin meddled in the 2016 election — but unlike the #Resistance crowd, which insists that such meddling was decisive, Hill is more circumspect, pointing out that Vladimir Putin wasn’t the force that tore the country apart; he was simply exploiting fissures that were already there.

Just as concerning to her was the way that people around Trump would wreak havoc on one another by playing to his “fragile ego” — spreading rumors that their rivals in the administration had said something negative about Trump was often enough to land those rivals on what the president called his “nasty list.” Hill says that watching Trump fulminate made her feel like Alice in Wonderland watching the Queen of Hearts, with her constant shouts of “Off with their heads!” In Hill’s telling, Trump’s norm-breaking was so flagrant and incessant that she compares him, in her matter-of-fact way, to a flasher. “Trump revealed himself,” she writes, “and people just got used to it. ”But neither Trump nor Putin — who was the subject of one of Hill’s previous books — is what she really wants to talk about. What she sees happening in the United States worries her. Economic collapse, structural racism, unrelieved suffering: Even without Trump, she says, none of the country’s enormous problems will go away without enormous efforts to address them. Hill the expert points to heartening examples of benevolent capitalism at work. But Hill the memoirist knows in her bones that the neoliberal approach, left to its own devices, simply won’t do.

My Notes:

Pg. 3:  Fiona came into the US government in early 2017 to deal with the national security consequences of the Russian intervention in the US 2016 election.  By the end of 2019, she was center stage embroiled in partisan politics.  Trump’s first impeachment trial focused on a July 25, 2019 telephone conversation between Trump and President Zelensky of Ukraine.  In the call, Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate Joe Biden who would run against Trump in the 2020 presidential election.  Ukraine was in Fiona’s official portfolio. 

Pg. 9:  The US today, like many other countries around the world, is beset by an ongoing democratic crisis—one preceded and precipitated by this decades-long series of hidden-in-plain-sight events.  Like other ailing polities, America is marred by low societal cohesion, political fragmentation, loss of public trust in government, weakened national institutions, and reduced civic engagement.  America is also geographically polarized into areas of haves and have-nots. 

Pg. 11:  Russia’s fate over a twenty-year period shows how a country’s political path can turn away from democracy toward autocracy.  No state, no matter how advanced, is immune from flawed leadership, the erosion of political checks and balances, and the degradation of its institutions.  Democracy is not self-repairing. It requires constant attention and renewal, especially during periods of rapid technological and social change and economic uncertainty.

Pg. 46:  In 1947, almost 50 percent of students admitted to US colleges were veterans (GI bill).  Again in 1965, Pell grants in the Higher Education Act provided a similar opportunity to students of limited means.

Pg. 145:  Between 1960 and 2016 the proportion of children under the age of eighteen in the US in a single-parent home increased from 10 percent to more than 27 percent. 

Pg. 152: A series of reports in 2020 regarding higher education showed that student debt in the US had reached $1.6 trillion, more than tripling since 2006 as increasing numbers of students pursued master’s degrees and other qualifications. 

Pg. 155:  By 2045, if demographic trends continue, the US will be overall ‘majority-minority.’  But this is not happening for the reason that many people think: according to the US Census Bureau data, 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.

Pg. 226:  Putin wants one Russia; Trump wanted many Americas, not one.  Putin was only too happy to unleash the Russian security services to exploit America’s divisions, playing up the many Americas and playing them against each other, all with the goal of weakening the US.  In this respect, Trump played right into Putin’s hands.

Pg. 265:  It is astonishing how much the US, the UK, and Russia 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 devasting death rates among citizens and frontline healthcare 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.  Then came the May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Pg. 273:  The failure of Trump’s slow-motion, in plain-sight attempt at a self-coup was not preordained.  Ultimately it was thwarted only by individuals at the key institutions that typically would be involved in executing such a plot.  (Read the book “Peril” for more detailed information).  First and foremost were high-ranking members of the military and their resistance to Trump’s efforts to personalize their power as Trump demonstrated when he had Esper and Milley accompany him to Lafayette Square for a photo op.

Pg. 274:  Some commentators even raised the possibility that Trump might find a pretext to declare martial law and halt the ballot certification.  On January 3, underscoring this public concern, the ten living former US defense secretaries—including Esper, whom Trump had forced out of office right after the 2020 election for insufficient loyalty—submitted an unprecedented public letter to the Washington Post in which they reminded the Defense Department officials and US military personnel of their oath to uphold the Constitution.

Pg. 275:  Trump did not physically take radio and TV by storm, but he continually discredited the ‘mainstream media’ who were critical of his behavior.  Trump instead recruited Fox News, Newsmax, and One America Network (OAN) and used social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to sway public opinion in his favor.  He directly messaged the eighty-eight million people who followed his account to propagate blatant lies.

Trump had appointed more than two hundred judges, three to the Supreme Court, which he referred to as ‘his judges.’  Yet Trump judges all the way up to the Supreme Court respected their oath of office rejecting sixty cases Trump filed.

In Georgia, the officials that Trump tried to coerce into changing the results repeatedly called out the lie that he had won the election.  They held press conferences and recorded him in a phone call demanding that they change the results.  It was a disastrous repeat of his July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky and clearly now part of a pattern.

Pg. 276:  In the end, even after the Capitol was seized by the violent mob, 147 Republican representatives endorsed some of Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election results. 

Pg. 333:  In 2019, thirty million Americans (9 percent of the total population) were uninsured,  with premiums for health insurance well beyond their or their employer’s financial reach.