Photo: Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux
These are dark times for Americans who care about civil liberties — but heady ones, once more, for those who want to performatively resist the MAGA stranglehold on the federal government.
Three prominent Yale professors, including the historian Timothy Snyder, recently announced they were decamping the United States for positions at the University of Toronto. They took pains to broadcast their decisions in a splashy New York Times video. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” said Jason Stanley, an expert on authoritarianism.
Marci Shore, who has spent two decades studying the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, said she is departing because American democracy is sharply regressing. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”
Ironically, Snyder, who has become a celebrity academic in the long Trump era, was the least stentorian about dumping Yale. He told the Times he is leaving to support his wife and children as well as get the opportunity to teach at a large public university. (There are many of those in the U.S., of course.) “I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to head to Canada.
It’s true that the Trump administration has been launching disturbing attacks on academic freedom in the name of combating antisemitism on college campuses. Trump has attempted to withhold large tranches of federal aid to elite universities in a bid to crush the pro-Palestinian movement. He has ordered the arrests and deportations of legal residents who were involved in the protests or voiced criticism of Israel; this is all to be taken extraordinarily seriously and resisted at all costs. Trump has, in a few short months, run roughshod over the First Amendment.
But fleeing the U.S. isn’t the answer. This is not the Vietnam War, when young men of draft age fled to Canada to avoid dying in an unpopular conflict thousands of miles away. If Trump has tormented Yale, among other Ivy League institutions, these widely celebrated academics would be able to carry on just fine for the rest of this decade and beyond. For all the ways Trump has upended American life, democracy persists: We continue to hold local elections, and the media publishes freely. I and many others write critically on Trump every single week; we are not being shuttled off to prison camps.
Trump, however, has ordered the arrests of green-card holders, and American citizens must recognize their privilege. I certainly do. Fleeing is a cheap, ego-flattering maneuver; it helps no one. This is not the late Weimar period or Nazi Germany. Death camps are not being constructed, and opposition political parties are not being outlawed. This isn’t Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, or Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. America is, for all its flaws, a republic that has lasted more than 200 years. In nations bereft of any genuine democratic traditions — or those, like Hungary, that are quite small in population — versions of fascism are possible. But it’s very hard, despite the claims made by these histrionic academics, for it to actually happen here.
Or, perhaps, it has happened here: in bursts, over and over again. What was more fascist, after all, than Franklin Roosevelt throwing Japanese Americans into internment camps? Or Abraham Lincoln suspending habeas corpus? Or Woodrow Wilson ordering the arrests of thousands of left-wing immigrants? Or the House Un-American Activities Committee? Or J. Edgar Hoover’s long reign at the FBI? Or George W. Bush’s surveillance state? None of these examples are meant to excuse or justify what Trump is doing now. They do exist, though, to offer crucial context for the uncertainty of today. If every left-leaning American adopted the posture of the Yale academics and trundled abroad, the nation would be hollowed out, with MAGA left to pick over its carcass. That’s just peachy, it seems, for the ex-Yalies in Toronto. They can keep blasting out their op-eds and best-selling books and playact heroism. They can collect large checks bloviating about the backsliding of American democracy. It’s a nice hustle — very American, funnily enough.
For the rest of us who do not have the means to flee abroad, this is our home. The U.S. is larger than MAGA and Trump and will outlast him. Trump is unpopular, and his party will not control the federal government in perpetuity. There are more elections to come, and Republicans could very well lose many of them. And the destruction Trump has wrought on the federal bureaucracy can eventually be undone: Executive orders, unlike legislation, are easy enough to reverse.
That rebuilding, of course, is years away, with Trump-Vance guaranteed the White House through 2028. More chaos is on the horizon. It’s vital, though, to meet it head-on and not slink away like a coward.
