Fight or Flight? Is it Time to Quit America?
The lease on democracy may be about to run out. Time to take up residence elsewhere?
My wife is on my back to purchase a house in her native Netherlands as insurance for the day when America goes full fascist. Three in our family are dual nationals. I, alas, am a mononational. In the same vein, several friends and acquaintances of Irish ancestry tell me they are applying for Irish passports. Others are consulting Canadian lawyers regarding the legal requirements for acquiring Canadian permanent residency status. It appears many Americans are getting cold feet about their country, and are looking for ways to pack a parachute — just in case.
So, the question presents itself: Has the time come for you to pack your own parachute? To be able to bail on America, “just in case”?
I just finished watching HBO’s brilliant miniseries drama, The Plot Against America, based on the late Philip Roth’s book by the same title. It poses an alternate history of ’40s America in which celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh is elected president on an isolationist, xenophobic, pro-Nazi platform. The repercussions bear on the Levins, a Newark, NJ Jewish family. Paterfamilias Herman, skillfully played by Morgan Spector, is an insurance salesman who rails at the radio each evening over Walter Winchell’s reporting on the rise of the anti-Semitic Lindbergh (“An airplane pilot with opinions”), while wife Bess (Zoe Kazan) is a hyper-alert homemaker who keeps sounding the warning that “Maybe it’s too early to leave, but it’s not too early to have a backup plan” (to move to Canada).
The New York Times aptly captures the theme of Plot:
Plot asks the audience to imagine the outlandish idea that the presidency might have been won by a celebrity demagogue new to politics who appeals to bigotry and fear, who ran on the slogan of “America First,” who boasts of having “taken our country back,” who sees fine people on the most reprehensible side of history, who cozies up to despots and behaves as if he were their puppet.
Sound familiar?
What makes many nervous — both in the series and today — is a perception that American democracy is failing, that the country is drifting toward fascist rule. My wife, for example, was raised on accounts by her parents and many others of the brutal Nazi occupation of her homeland during World War II. Europeans tend to be more reflexively anxious about right-wing extremism because of their 20th century suffering under it than their insulated American friends. After all, they experienced it up close and personal. Compound this anxiety by a factor of 10 for Jewish people.
Rising concern that our current political travails may not be transitory but rather are taking us down the road to perdition include the following:
One in five adults in the United States would be willing to condone acts of political violence, according to a recent Ipsos poll on behalf of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis,
Nearly 12 percent of those surveyed thought it was at least “sometimes justified” to use violence to return Donald Trump to the presidency.
More than 40 percent of respondents said they agreed “somewhat” or “very strongly” with the proposition that “having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.”
Up to 20 percent of Americans believe the QAnon fabrication that government, media and finance are controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles.
Add to the above all the hair-raising revelations coming out of the House January 6 Committee, painting a picture of a sprawling, orchestrated, Trump-led conspiracy to overturn American democracy, replacing it with an Il Duce-esque regime populated with cranks, nutcases and fanatics like Mike Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Peter Navarro, Sydney Powell, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and a host of other characters from the cutting room floor of Dr. Strangelove.
A new CNN poll shows that only 42 percent of Americans have some confidence, and 16 percent are very confident, that U.S. elections reflect the will of the people — down from 59 percent and 36 percent, respectively, just after the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The GOP’s ongoing ground game for imposing authoritarian rule is more methodical and devilishly cunning compared to Trump’s hamfisted approach, entailing replacing officials who manage elections at the state and municipal levels with obedient MAGA-troopers. These include poll “watchers,” precinct judges, county clerks, secretaries of state and state attorneys general who would rig election outcomes to favor Trump and his zombie acolytes. Moreover, indications are that much of law enforcement is being co-opted as well. They’re even targeting county and municipal councils and school boards. Libraries are under attack for promoting free thought.
Election law scholar Richard Hasen describes the GOP’s strategy as one of foisting a “respectable bloodless coup,” one “dependent upon technical legal arguments overcoming valid election results.”
Add to all this an aggressively reactionary Supreme Court bent on turning back reproductive rights, gun control, election security, minority rights, same sex marriage and, well, most of the 20th century for that matter.
Historian Richard Hofstadter, in his seminal 1964 essay on The Paranoid Style in American Politics, presciently wrote, “in a populistic culture like ours...a highly organized, vocal, active, and well-financed minority could create a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”
The lesson portrayed in The Plot Against America is: It’s not that it couldn’t happen here; it already is happening. And the very same assertion can be made today. The only difference is that in Plot it’s fictional. In 2022 America, it’s fact.
The final Plot episode features a disturbing scene in which voters flock to the polls as Frank Sinatra sings a saccharine “That’s America to Me.” Herman and Bess are glued to the radio to hear the results as the camera pans in on ballots being burned and voters turned away from polling stations. Then the announcer reports “some conflicting results early on.” That the story ends on an ambiguous note is almost irrelevant — we all know how it ends.
So, back to parachute packing.
When it comes to fight or flight, I, for one, choose the former. A sentimental fool, I take heart in my hero Winston Churchill’s signature declaration: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing-grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender!”
While my wife is consulting Dutch realtors on home prices in Gouda and Haarlem, I’m frenetically dashing off these rants in the wee hours, driven by an innate instinct to fight any way I can to save my country (which I proudly served for 25 years). My pen is my sword. And I’m staying put.
(P.S. A word for those taking out foreign citizenship: you risk losing your U.S. citizenship through “expatriation.” Consult a knowledgeable attorney before taking the leap.)