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 19th. ( 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)
