The Exile Myth

Much like in 2004 and 2016 (emotionally this election feels like the former, although in terms of legal and physical vulnerability it resembles the latter) folks are talking about abandoning these United States for fairer shores abroad. I don’t like this kind of talk, whether as emotional eruption or serious intention. I worry that it suggests an unwillingness to fight the fight that needs to be fought; moving abroad can be a form of taking one’s ball and going home. It leaves the fight to the people who can’t leave, and makes them weaker for the abandonment. American citizenship is a great privilege but it is also a responsibility. We need you here, with your money and your vote and your voice affecting the course of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful political instrument.

For my part, I have four hundred years of ancestors on this continent and I’m not going to abandon them because of a Fritz-come-lately like Donald Trump. I’m fifty now and might give a different answer if I were twenty, but if it gets bad I plan to stay and see it out. Admittedly, I enjoy a degree of privilege that many who are considering emigration do not. I’m white, male, hetero, culturally Christian, gainfully employed, and in possession of a home with all the signifiers of middle class. Which is not say I lack vulnerabilities; my salary is, after all, paid for by a (very red) state, and part of my job is public commentary on foreign policy. The US university system as a whole is likely to come under attack from the Trump administration, so my job isn’t as safe as I’d like. One promise of Project 2025 is to put ideological guardrails on the faculty at Professional Military Education institutions, which would limit my future job options. Still, there are many who are more vulnerable than myself, including my teenage daughters.

But there are also practical reasons to be skeptical about emigration and exile as options. For one, unless you have significant means it’s probably harder than you think to resettle to a foreign country, even one where you can get by with English. For another, anti-immigration sentiment is global, and especially if substantial numbers of Americans begin to emigrate they might find themselves welcomed less eagerly than they hope. Most importantly, if things go very bad here there is no guarantee that emigration will actually keep you safe. Russian exiles are not safe in the United Kingdom; Indian dissidents are not safe in Canada. Even setting aside the fact that Canada is likely to elect a right wing government next year, if things go bad in the US to the extent that you have to flee the country for safety, the Canadian border ain’t gonna be much of an obstacle to the people who want to hurt you. No country in the world is going to welcome dissidents and asylum seekers from a violent, fascist United States, and few countries are going to complain overmuch when that United States wants its dissidents arrested and returned in handcuffs.

Last week, Donald Trump won Kentucky with 66% of the vote. This is deeply frustrating and saddening, and we need to acknowledge the reality that a very substantial portion of the American population is willing to tolerate a President who spews fascist garbage as a matter of habit. But last year, Andy Beshear won Kentucky with 52% of the vote. Those electorates weren’t identical, but they definitely included both people who voted from Trump in one year and Beshear in another, and people who didn’t vote because they didn’t mind the idea of Andy Beshear as their governor. There’s hope in that, and it’s altogether better to think about how to mobilize the part of those voters who thought Andy was dandy and not the part that should be dumped because of Trump.