My Amazon Review of Fiona Hill's "There is Nothing for You Here"

Coal Miner’s Daughter

 

On November 21, 2019, Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council staffer in charge of European and Russian affairs, made headlines around the world with her explosive testimony at President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial. I was prescient enough to review her coauthored book, “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin” on July 19^th.  ( Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy's " Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin" ) Although her biography touches on her experiences as a National Security Council staffer, Hill spends most of her time recounting her experiences of growing up in the northeast England coal mining town of Bishop Auckland and her overcoming sexism and classism in both England and the United States.

 

Her life experience in Bishop Auckland gave her great insights into the rise of rightwing populism in the U.S., England, and Russia. She witnessed firsthand in her family and her town the debilitating effects of the collapse of the coal mining industry. It helped her understand why previously Labour voters in England and Democratic voters in the U.S., supported Brexit and Trump, respectively. Further she understood how Putin built his political base among the industrial workers and miners in Russia’s declining cities. She clinically observes that instead of Russia becoming more like the United States, the United States is becoming more like Russia in seeking out authoritarian leadership as our political divisions deepen. The Russian intelligence services successfully exploited those divisions during the 2016 presidential election, but the divisions go so much worse that they didn’t have to lift a finger in 2020.

 

While Hill lived in a depressed community, her family was intellectually curious and encouraged her education.  She took her father’s advice when he told her, “There is nothing for you here.” In order to advance she had to overcome three very English questions (where are from, what does your father do, what school do you go to.) Further her northern England accent was a telltale sign of her lower-class origins. She overcomes it all graduating form Saint Andrews College and then goes on to a Ph.D. program at Harvard. She made her own breaks by meeting influential Americans as an interpreter during a Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Moscow which opens the way to Harvard. She is an almost pure example of baseball executive Branch Rickey’s aphorism, “luck is the residue of design.”

 

At Harvard she shines, but she was aided by an administrator who told her that torn jeans and a sweatshirt were not the appropriate attire for high-end Harvard seminars. She took her to T.J. Maxx and bought her more professional attire which opened the way to seminars with Professors Graham Allison and Richard Pipes.

 

From Harvard she goes onto posts at the National Intelligence Council and the Brookings Institution. At both places and at Harvard for that matter, she was grossly underpaid and that carried over to the National Security Council. At various meetings she was assumed to be either a tea lady, a secretary or while in Russia, a prostitute. Simply put, sexism at work.

 

In discussing Trump, she does not believe that the Russians had something on him. Instead, she views him as a person with a very fragile ego who has a deep admiration for authoritarian leader. Hence his bromance with Putin. She found that Trump had a complete lack of intellectual curiosity about foreign policy with the glaring exception of nuclear arms control.

 

Fiona Hill is a remarkable person who I highly admire. Nevertheless, I have a few quibbles with her book. She places much of the blame for the post-1980 industrial decline and the rise of rightwing populism on Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The decline long preceded them. The coal industry has been in secular decline since World War II and the collapse of the great steel mills in Ohio’s Mahoning Valley occurred in 1977 when the Democrats controlled all of the power in Washington D.C. Hill mentions once that there were broad impersonal forces at work that led to deindustrialization, but she goes back to bashing Reagan and Thatcher. She also fails to note that across Europe parties of the right have been strengthened. (e.g., France, Hungary, and Poland)

 

She also believes that the polarization of American politics is due to economics. Although economics has a role to play, it is not surprising to see Americans living in the South and the middle of the country to resent a very haughty cultural elite on both coasts who look down on all too many Americans. I fear that the coal miner’s daughter may have joined that elite.

 

At the end of the book, she presents a host of policy prescriptions that come out of the Brookings think tank. Some are sensible, some are not, but I am especially critical of her support of place-based policies as opposed to people- based policies. Put bluntly some towns and cities deserve to die; it makes little sense to prop them up.

 

With these criticisms aside, Fiona Hill has written a remarkable autobiography. I am so glad we welcomed her into our country and that she has done so well.

For the full Amazon URL see: Coal Miner's Daughter (amazon.com)

My Amazon Review of Amy Chua's "Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations"

The Return of Tribalism

Yale law professor Amy “Tiger Mom” Chua has written an important book on the role of tribalism in our modern world. She demonstrates how U.S. foreign policy went awry in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Venezuela because how we completely failed to understand the tribal motive behind those conflicts. In particular she highlights the role of economically dominant minorities who breed resentment among the broader population. In particular the Vietnam War was more about deposing the economically dominant Chinese minority rather than a struggle for and against communism.

She then moves on to the U.S. where after years of promoting multi-culturalism it is not surprising to see a broad section of the white community seeing themselves as being victimized by an economically dominant coastal elite. But this is not new to the rise of Donald Trump. In the 1990’s we witnessed New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani criticizing a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum that depicted Christ in a jar of urine entitled “Piss Christ.”  The exhibit stood, but what if the museum exhibited “Piss Moses” or “Piss Mohamed.” Later “The Book of Mormon,” a satire on the Mormon religion became a hit Broadway show. I doubt if Broadway would have run “The Book of the Koran.”

What I liked about Chua’s book is that she notes that tribalism through years of evolution is built into the human psyche so we shouldn’t be surprised to see it manifested in the United States. A tribe needs to include and a need to exclude. Quite a bit of this, unfortunately, is based on race.  However, for the most part, we rose above tribalism by establishing a “super group” (her words) to rise above it to become Americans. With the return of tribalism the notion of America is pushed into the background.

I also like her noting that the coastal elites have become a tribe of their own as they dominate most of our culture. On the far left the culture has become so strict that the doctrine of intersectionality, which means to be in our tribe you have to be with us on everything to be with us at all. A world where deviation is not tolerated sounds very much like the worlds of Hitler and Stalin in the 1930s. Unfortunately that is where the left is today. To be sure Amy Chua is not as harsh as me, but is clear-eyed on the issue.

All told, Amy Chua has written an important book about where we are in America today. It should be read in conjunction with the works of NYU professor Jonathan Haidt.

For the full Amazon URL see: https://www.amazon.com/review/R73L2N1MYL46U/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv