Book Review of There is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21rst Century by Fiona Hill. This is one of the best books I have read in several years and I highly recommend it to all my former students and anyone who wants to understand the rise of populism. Hill is an expert on Russia and a political economist who wrote a bestselling book on Vladimir Putin. She served on the National Security Council during the Trump years and testified to Congress during his first impeachment proceedings. There is so much in this book with which I can both personally and professionally identify. She was one of the few to escape the loss of opportunity and growing poverty of the deindustrialized, coal mining region of northern England during the Thatcher years and was able to study in Russia, earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, become a US citizen, work for Brookings, and ultimately serve on the US National Security Council.
While the book serves as the autobiography of Dr. Hill, there are two primary themes. She explains the process of deindustrialization in the US under Reagan, the UK under Thatcher, and Russia during the 1990s. She illustrates the similarities of the process in all three countries and links it to the rise of populism in each of these countries. She effectively shows how populism erodes the institutions of democracy in the US and UK and has led to authoritarianism in Russia under Putin. As a student of Latin American populism and someone who identified Trump’s populism early on, I greatly appreciate her analysis. She presents an insider’s view as to how Trump's populism undermined and is still undermining US democratic institutions. A second, interrelated theme, both personal and with an eye to the future, focuses on the barriers to education and the opportunity to improve one’s socioeconomic position due to place (geography), class, race, and gender.
If you read one book this year, this is the one you should read.
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