There Is Nothing for You Here, page 2
All along the way, from the late 1980s to the 2020s, in the heartlands of both Russia and the United States, I saw grim reflections of the decline of my hometown and my family’s experiences in the United Kingdom, and I watched similar populist impulses emerge in the politics of all three countries. The opportunities that enabled me, literally as well as metaphorically, to go “from the coal house to the White House” seemed to vanish for later generations. In recent decades America and Britain, two close allies, have offered a depressing reflection of each other’s struggles and failings.
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. Nowhere is this more apparent than in unequal access to education. Manufacturing jobs that were once widely available for Americans without a two- or four-year college degree were decimated over the course of twenty years. This intensified the United States’ political divides. 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. Geography has become a similar determinant. The places people live, either in a major, more affluent, and densely populated urban area or in a rural region or small town, affect their life prospects and political preferences.
But increasingly, even getting a higher education or moving to a place with more opportunity isn’t enough. In a fast-changing economy with diminished government support for the education system, it is all too easy for college graduates to find themselves out of a job, burdened by debt, and off the clear path to a brighter future. College graduates in the twenty-first century can feel just as forgotten as everyone else. And as the sense of hopelessness spreads, so does the anger—and the potential for people’s fears and frustrations to explode into the political arena, with disastrous consequences.
The United States 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. It is also geographically polarized into areas of haves and have-nots. “Forgotten places” blighted by postindustrial decline, like the “flyover states” of the Midwest and Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, offer a stark contrast to hubs of innovation and opportunity like the northeast corridor and the Bay Area. Even within cities the uneven allocation of opportunity is becoming more pronounced.
Our health and politics show the effects of this profound imbalance. 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.
Postindustrial decline in the United States began with global economic and technological shifts away from large-scale heavy and extractive industry in the 1980s under the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Over the next four decades, this affected some localities far more than others. It hollowed out towns and communities in specific regions through the steady loss of employment and educational and other opportunities. Economic or spatial inequality (the term economists and geographers use for geographic economic disparities) in the United States was further exacerbated by the Great Recession of 2008–2010. In combination with demographic, social, and cultural shifts, the economic downturn facilitated an upsurge of populism in America’s politics, culminating in the contentious 2016 election campaign and the selection of Donald Trump, an outsider, “wild card” candidate, as president. Trump’s presidency took a dark turn, resulting in two congressional impeachment trials, in 2019 and 2021. The second followed the unprecedented events of January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol Building as he attempted to stay in power despite having lost the November 2020 election.
The cause and effect of the decline of industry, the crisis of opportunity, and the rise of populist politics across the decades are reflected in the chronology and events of my personal story, which I relate throughout this book. I was a participant in the social history of the period and a witness to its political history. My life and career were directly shaped by the defining challenges of our time.
The example of modern Russia, which I have spent most of my career closely studying, offers a cautionary tale for the United States at this juncture. 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. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Russia entered a promising period of democratization that was ultimately weakened by political upheavals and attempted coups, overwhelmed by economic crisis, and undermined by declining opportunity. 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, blazing a restorationist political trail at home and abroad. Putin set a personalized, bravura style of leadership that others, including Donald Trump, sought to emulate. And over the next two decades Putin rolled back Russia’s democratic gains to firmly entrench himself in the Kremlin. First he served as president, then as prime minister, and then as president again. Each time he made adjustments to Russia’s political system, until finally, in 2020, he amended the constitution. In theory, Vladimir Putin can now stay in power until 2036. Under the guise of Putin strengthening the state and restoring its global position, Russia slowly succumbed to authoritarianism.
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.
I have seen firsthand just how vulnerable America is to the political afflictions that have befallen Russia. In the second half of this book I offer an account of my own experiences of populist politics in action inside the Trump administration. I share what I learned from this and my observations of how Donald Trump began to follow “the authoritarians’ playbook” scripted by Vladimir Putin and other “strongman” leaders. By November 2019, when I was subpoenaed as a fact witness in the first impeachment trial of President Trump and found myself in the international spotlight, I knew that America had embarked on an authoritarian swing of its own. When the global coronavirus pandemic hit, the U.S. teetered on the verge of a system failure. We needed to address our opportunity crisis and pull ourselves back from the brink.
I cover a lot of ground in this book, and a great many interrelated topics. 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.
Back in my personal dystopia of the North East of England in the 1980s, the main obstacles to opportunity were spatial and structural. They were the product of geographically concentrated postindustrial decline, deep-rooted multigenerational poverty, and regional biases and social discrimination based on class and accent. When I moved to the United States, I encountered the classic glass-ceiling issues of sexism and gender and wage discrimination. On the other hand, I discovered that being white in America canceled out some of the impediments to educational and employment opportunity posed by being low-income working class in the North East of England. Race is a deeply embedded, all-pervasive structural barrier to opportunity in the United States. The class distinctions I navigated in the United Kingdom were subsumed, if not completely erased, by race in America. In this case, I was an active observer of how racial discrimination played out in the U.S. for friends and colleagues. I was not on the receiving end of this type of prejudice.
In the North East of England, I overcame the inherent impediments to opportunity with help from national and regional government assistance programs that were initiated after World War II. The people who formed my network of contacts in my local community played an important part in my social mobility. Family members, friends, schoolteachers, university professors and administrators, and professional mentors helped me find scholarships and jobs and generally pointed me in the right direction. It was the same once I came to the United States. I benefited from educational scholarships at Harvard University, and people went out of their way to advise and assist me. I learned that everyone can play a role in eliminating the barriers that hold people back by volunteering, mentoring, and donating time and money wherever and however they can.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union is certainly the specter of a grim future that could lie ahead for the United States, but it also provides some ideas of how to address our opportunity crisis. After I came to America, I spent the decades after 1989 looking at Russia’s attempts to rebuild its economy and regenerate its cities after the collapse of the USSR. At Harvard University and the Brookings Institution, I studied what worked, or did not, in Russia and several countries of the former Eastern bloc as they tried to move from central planning to a market economy. For many years I helped the Eurasia Foundation and other U.S.-based and international technical assistance projects scope out programs to redevelop regions in the former USSR. These programs helped populations acquire new skills and create local job opportunities through training workshops, small business development schemes, and venture capital investment funds that were specifically tailored to local conditions. The lessons from all these programs were that individual, group, grassroots, philanthropic, and private-sector actions were just as critical in putting communities on a new path as any top-down government intervention or large-scale transfer of funds.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear to many of the economists I worked with that the United States faced its own reconstruction challenge. Thanks to rapid deindustrialization, poor-quality education, and other indices of poverty and inequality, parts of the United States were in the same need of regeneration and redevelopment as low- and middle-income countries in the former Eastern bloc. Like Russia, the United States is a vast continent-sized power. Individual states are the size of most European countries. For anyone traveling across America, the socioeconomic as well as the geographic and demographic diversity is inescapable. What all this means is that, on the national level, it will require a major policy effort to create the kind of comprehensive antipoverty, education reform, and jobs-creation programs for the United States to succeed in creating a new infrastructure of opportunity for all Americans in the twenty-first century. One-off initiatives and temporary interventions are insufficient. The problems the U.S. faces in the 2020s have festered since the 1980s, so whatever we do will take time—certainly a generation or more to achieve measurable outcomes. Yet there are things that each of us can do today to ensure that the America of the future delivers better outcomes for its people than the America of the present.
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.
Absent sustained individual commitment alongside large-scale intervention, America’s crisis of opportunity will continue. It will keep on empowering the political extremes and reinforcing the polarizing appeal of populist politicians. It will make the traumas of the four years from 2016 to 2020 seem like a preface, rather than a postscript, to the United States’ democratic demise.
Donald Trump’s presidency was both a product and a symptom of the set of complex problems intertwined beneath the surface of our polity. If we fail to fix our ailing society by not addressing them and providing opportunity for all, another American president, just like Vladimir Putin, might decide to stay in power indefinitely. And the next insurrectionary force that invades the U.S. Capitol Building might be better prepared than the January 6, 2021, mob. They might just manage to hold it.
Part I
The Coal House
1
“Call the United Nations”
It wasn’t until the late 1970s, when I was thirteen, that I became aware that there was a working class and that I was in it.
I was on a school exchange to Tübingen, Germany, sponsored by the education authority of my regional government, Durham County Council. With only one exception, the other students were not from my school or town. In our first encounters, many of them grilled me with a set of three questions that would follow me from childhood to adulthood, all in the following order:
“So, where are you from, then?”
“What does your father do?” (there was no follow-up about my mother), and
“What school do you go to?”
The questions seemed innocent at first, yet I quickly realized that they were anything but. They were not the opener for a “let’s get to know each other” conversation. This was a highly determinative trifecta of questions—the beginning of a socioeconomic class sorting exercise. Depending on how you answered, you could be either accepted or written off. And indeed, some of the kids on the exchange decided not to bother talking to me any further after learning where I was from, what my dad did, and where I went to school:
Bishop Auckland.
Coal miner, then a hospital porter.
Bishop Barrington Comprehensive School.
The kids who wrote me off surely assumed that our interactions would be fleeting. Based on the information I provided, we presumably would never meet again after that one trip to Germany. Why take the time to get to know me? I wasn’t “their sort.”
My first answer—Bishop Auckland, in County Durham, in the North East of England—demarcated my geographic place in the United Kingdom. The second and third answers delineated my place in society and the parameters of the social networks and opportunities available to me. All three of my answers, including my hometown, put me definitively in the blue-collar, working class.
The United Kingdom was, and still is in the twenty-first century, an acutely class-based society. My father’s career, or really his job—the people I grew up with in Bishop Auckland had jobs, not careers—as well as the kind of school I went to were supposed to chart the limits of what I might do with my life and how people would regard or judge me.
In the UK, the middle class—at least as I came to understand it growing up—was the category accorded to white-collar workers, accountants, lawyers/solicitors, teachers, and those in similar professions. People in the middle class were the products of different schools—what used to be called grammar schools—as well as private schools and universities. (This is what masquerades as the upper middle class in the United States, although class distinctions in the U.S. are not so defined or rigid. In the United States, race blurs similar distinctions, but class is still a feature of American life. It is not just defined by individual or household income and wealth, it is shaped by the kind of place you live in, your zip or postal code, your educational attainment, and the type of school and college you attended, along with your family structure, your overall health and well-being and projected lifespan, and your leisure pursuits. It also determines whether you even have time for leisure in the first place. Most workers in the lowest income brackets do not. They are too busy surviving.)
The UK is in a league of its own when it comes to mapping, cataloguing, and identifying the particulars of class. The upper classes in the UK always knew exactly who they were. They needed no categorization. They were the hereditary aristocracy, the landed gentry, people who were born into an exulted status. You could move in and out of the working and middle classes with some effort on the one hand or some misfortune on the other. Being propelled into the upper classes was an anomaly—perhaps the result of a lucky marriage. Even if your family fortunes took a turn for the worst, the most impecunious earl or duke or his offspring remained firmly part of the upper class.
The questions the kids first posed to me in Tübingen were generally on the mark in terms of predicting my prospects. Three of the most critical factors in shaping opportunity and determining socioeconomic mobility in the United Kingdom as well as the United States were, and remain, geographic origin (whether you hail from a poor region or a prosperous area), your parents’ educational attainment and professions (no college/college, blue-/white-collar), and the kind of school you attend (state/private, underresourced/well-funded).
