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Kitchen Table Kibitzing: 'Democracy's Done?' [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-09-06
You may remember Dr. Fiona Hill, former member of the White House National Security Council, from the first impeachment of Donald J. Trump. At that time she might have ended up being just another in a blur of now-forgotten witnesses confirming Russia’s involvement in attempting to influence the outcome of the 2016 election. But Hill, in her testimony, provided more than Trump or his sycophantic GOP stooges were prepared for that day, effectively countering and refuting the false memes concocted by the Republican party and its adherents that had attempted to blame such interference on Ukraine (Ah, how quickly we forget them, and where they are now...)
Long lost memories, as reported by the Guardian:
In her answers to the initial round of questions, Hill took that argument apart. The judgment that Russia had successfully intervened in the election was underpinned by the consensus of the US intelligence agencies, and was based on facts, many of them in the public domain. The Ukraine story was built on falsehoods, many of them propagated through social media by the Kremlin. It is a distinction that has been in danger of being washed away. Hill was there to re-establish clear lines, and it was not clear how Trump and his camp would respond. Trump, normally quick to launch attacks on perceived threats, especially women, had restrained his Twitter thumbs for the whole morning. Republicans on the committee, even Jim Jordan, the most aggressive among them, veered away from taking her on directly.
They didn’t know what to do with her. They couldn’t shut her up. So they decided the best strategy was to say nothing, ignore her (although Reince Priebus helpfully referred to her as the “Russia bitch”).
Jump to September, 2025, the present day. (Ha! I’m stealing too much from John Dos Passos, I know!)
****THE CAMERA EYE****
I don’t usually like to review books before I’ve finished them, but because of some unusual time constraints, many other books, and a lot of intervening family issues I have only now gotten around to reading Fiona Hill’s 2021 memoir (and autobiography of sorts), titled “There Is Nothing For You Here” and even then in relative fits and starts. Being only a little more than halfway through it, I probably won’t be finished for a couple weeks. But I’m OK expressing my thoughts about it now, because at this point I’m confident my current opinions of it won’t change.
I’m not a big fan of reading “current” political memoirs, because they’re usually self-serving, trite and overhyped, or the writing itself leaves something to be desired. This one, however, is something far better than that.
For those looking for a breathless “tell-all” regarding the Trump administration, it’s really not that kind of a book, although Hill’s impressions of Trump and the people that surrounded him during the first iteration of his tenure are certainly there. But the first 166 pages don’t deal with Hill’s experience with Trump at all. They’re devoted instead to discussing Hill’s background in the context of her upbringing in County Durham, northern England, the class divisions she experienced growing up in serious poverty there, in the 1970’s and 80’s, and the similarities of the British experience --from Thatcher to Boris Johnson, and to what has occurred in America, from Reagan through Trump.
She also vividly describes her early experiences studying in Russia and the lurching path of that country from Yeltsin through Putin. Along the way she emphasizes how class divisions are exacerbated in all three societies by systematic gender bias, as she recounts her experience of institutionalized sexism all the way (and including) Harvard University — where she earned her Ph.D -- its Kennedy School of Government, and finally, into her experience in the Trump White House.
Fiona Hill
Hill’s writing talent is acute; her analytical capacity is unforgiving but refreshingly relatable; and this makes it stand out among political memoirs. It effectively encapsulates and explains an era, one now beginning to fade from memory, that unmistakably and inevitably led us to where we are now. In particular she highlights all the political and socio-economic assumptions that ultimately proved to be grievously and fatally wrong.
I’m going to be a little lazy here, and rely on professor John Tomaney’s review of her book, written for the London School of Economics Review of Books.
He writes:
What distinguishes Hill’s contribution is the deep empathy she displays toward people in ‘left-behind places’ that allows her to show what people feel they have lost; and her ability to link their predicament to shifts in geopolitics, rather than to seek explanations rooted solely in the character of the places themselves or in simple claims about the outcome of market forces. About this, Hill writes perceptively and lucidly, and the text is enlivened by always effective, and often funny, anecdotes.
For those who need a refresher course on British economic and social policies, the colossal misjudgment of “austerity” and the popular motivations underlying the Brexit fiasco, it’s all there, but Hill’s focus on Russia and her brief time in the U.S. as witness to the highest levers of power provides a unique comparative perspective. Her thesis is that the economic conditions afflicting post-Soviet Russia are not that far removed from what occurred in the UK and the U.S. She perceptively explains the rise of so-called “populism” — replete with its requisite elements of racism and anti-immigrant sentiment — in all three countries ( which is where I am right now in the book).
But summarized below is the part of “There Is Nothing For You Here” I haven’t gotten to yet, so I quote it with some trepidation. However, Tomaney’s review seems pretty cogent so I’ll risk it, even if it’s a bit of a spoiler.
Tomaney writes:
Her job gave her a ringside seat at the West Wing. She describes the undisguised and pervasive misogyny of Trump’s White House, where her role and expertise were consistently belittled. She confirms the President’s unbridled narcissism and gigantic but brittle ego and how this translated into policy and diplomatic choices that destabilised world politics. Trump, she writes, suffered from ‘autocrat envy’ (226), coveting the strongman status of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and China’s Xi Jinping, and was especially envious of Putin and his vast ill-gotten wealth. But although presenting himself as an ordinary American against the ‘elites’, while holding the public in contempt, Trump was less adept than Putin at fomenting and exploiting social and political divisions to maintain power. In office, Trump was lazy, never read his briefs and could not stick to his own policy plans. His administration was characterised by incessant pettiness, chaos, vindictiveness and infighting, all of apiece with Trump’s worldview, leaving national security exposed and his manifesto unfulfilled.
By now we know all this, right? Still, it’s useful to see an analysis like Hill’s again playing out again in real time, with this newly-reconstituted gang of many of the same type of corrupt or simply power-hungry actors and thugs. Even as the domestic destruction is being directed by the likes of Russell Vought and his cadre of fanatic Christian theocrats, this time around, to fulfill Trump’s “manifesto” (of course, Trump’s only real “manifesto” is himself).
Somewhere, somehow, the history of this horrific, awful period will be written down for everyone to see, whether or not there is any semblance of a “United States” still around in a few decades with citizens able to read it.
But barring some remarkable resurgence in self-awareness (or sudden interest in self-preservation), it seems more than possible that this country in its current form will not survive these horrendous people, or their amoral, sociopathic billionaire backers with their technological and religious delusions. The simple fact is that there may be too many Americans who support them, who want things exactly the way they’re heading right now, and by the time they discover the horror they’ve inflicted on us and themselves, it will be too late. And there also may be too many, buried in their phones and social media bubbles who simply don’t care enough to stop them. We may, in effect, have reached an inflection point, a critical mass of sorts, of clueless, apathetic or just plain ignorant people.
In 2021 Hill herself declared that if Trump was re-elected in 2024, “Democracy’s done.”
I feel like we’re at a really critical and very dangerous inflection point in our society, and if Trump — this is not on an ideological basis, this is just purely on an observational basis based on the larger international historical context — if he makes a successful return to the presidency in 2024, democracy’s done. Because it will be on the back of a lie. A fiction. And I think we have to bear that in mind. And I was hoping that with the book, I might be able to reach out, because I’m not a partisan person, to people who care very much about the United States and about its democracy to really think about this long and hard.
(emphasis added)
We’ll see, I guess.
At any rate, her memoir is a good place to start, for anyone in the future who wants to understand just what the hell happened here.
For reference purposes, if nothing else.
I’m out to dinner tonight but will check back in later. Have a great evening!
[END]
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