Why We Left the US According to Nic - Part 4

REMINDER OF OUR PREVIOUS INTRO:

It has been on Nic's radar for months that I was coming after him for this blog.  He finally felt ready and we forced a few hours to ourselves over the weekend to talk - yes, I said hours.  My transcription of our conversation is almost word for word, so it's quite lengthy and I'm going to break it down into his specific points.

This section is made up of follow-up questions to our original conversation.

PART 4

Alex:  So, a few other questions. You came downstairs after putting the kids to bed on whatever day it was, January 3rd maybe, of 2021 and you just looked at me and you said “How do you feel about leaving the country?”  What made that your moment?

 

Nic:  My professor, my advisor.  It’s when I was chatting on Facebook with him.  Going back a number of years, I've been engaging in frequent conversations with my advisor from college, U.S. government professor now retired.  We would exchange thoughts on the breakdown of norms and what we saw happening next and every year our predictions came true.  We generally didn't disagree too much in terms of what we saw happening, though he's maybe a little bit more optimistic and has a theory about this escape hatch of basically a new federalism, but I don't think… I don’t know, he thinks we're on track.  But it was Trump's election denialism and the rallies that he was having between November and January, the last stand of American intellectualism… where it died at Four Seasons Total Landscaping with Rudy Giuliani’s final speech…

 

Alex: … it was a beautiful death.

 

Nic:  Oh yeah.  So, I just sent him a message and I said “You know, honestly, my partner and I are kind of debating between reconciling ourselves to living in a post democratic United States or leaving” and he just replied, really quickly, he said “Nic, if I was your age I would just go”.  And that was it, that was kind of just that little push that I needed.  There was no great revelation.  I don't mean to sound arrogant, I know I do, but it's just been clear as day for a decade, it was clear as day during the Obama administration, frankly, that we were going to end up somewhere like where we are.  Anyone who paid close attention and thought critically and impartially, removed themselves and their own political preferences and persuasions from it, could see the breakdown in the system.  Not just in the conflict between the two parties.  And then of course January 6th happened it was like “Okay, it’s time to go”. 

 

Alex:  Regardless of whether that was an exact quote on your end, that we had been talking about it or contemplating it… I recall us talking about the problems, I recall, for my own part, really just following your lead because you are so much better at seeing things as they will fall ahead of time.  One of the things we've talked about ourselves as in our 14-year relationship is how you are much better at seeing the forest and I'm much better at seeing the individual trees.  So, it felt very sudden to me when you came downstairs that day and said “Let's leave the country”.  I don't remember there being a direct conversation specifically about leaving, but I also don't ever remember feeling like I wanted to stay or that I belonged in the United States.  At what point before that early January 2021 moment when you came downstairs, at what point before then were you really starting to look at leaving?  Rather than, what I tend to do, just seeing the problems and feeling desperate without solutions.

 

Nic:  One, I am comically bad at picking up a conversation, seeming to say something completely out of the blue that relates to something that was from a conversation that we'd had a couple years prior.  So, to me it was very much a continuation of our conversation that we had going back a decade (Alex internally: omg typical Nic).  I remember chatting with you and our friend at a bar back in 2014 and I said, “I don't know how this is going to unfold, but I think we as humans, and perhaps especially as Americans, have vastly too high of confidence in the stability of the status quo.  I'll bet you guys anything that in the next 50 years, America won't be something we recognize as a democracy anymore.”  At that time in 2014, I was definitely cognizant of these breakdowns of norms even if I lacked the language to describe it. 

 

So, there was no clear one moment of revelation, but in terms of moving, specifically, there are a couple of things related to that.  During the 2016 election – when it was obvious that Trump was an authoritarian and was going to be advocating for political violence as a means to an ends – we had our house with the spacious attic and we started thinking “Okay, so if Trump starts rounding up Muslims or Latinos in our community, can we provide a safe space for people?  Can we hide and shelter people who are more likely to be victims of the authoritarian regime than we are?  Ultimately that's not the way that happened (they were rounded up at the border and put in cages), but during that time some friends and I looked up plan B's, some escape hatches.  If shit hits the fan in November, and not only that Trump perhaps wins but that Trump just tosses the constitution and this becomes an unsafe place to live or if the election is highly contested and there's violence or civil war, etc. – my friend found the Dutch American Friendship Treaty, which allows entrepreneurs to move to the Netherlands with €4500.  That was in my back pocket from 2016.  

 

I know this is ridiculous because I'm sitting here in Leiden, but I am a deeply patriotic person. I love my country and I didn't want to give up on the United States.  I work in politics because politics is the way you fight for your country.  Politics is how you transform your values into shaping the country you want to be proud of.  We’ve accomplished a lot of good stuff through politics, I'm fundamentally a lot less pessimistic about the grand sweep of American history.  But, obviously, we are a deeply racist country and we've always been a racist country, but I think it's undeniable we've made an incredible amount of progress in 250 years.  More people have more rights and individual liberty in America compared to where they did 250 years ago than in many or most countries and I and I think that's a lot to be proud of.  The paradox of America is that it is a country built with very progressive ideas and very conservative means.  This is something Dr. King really effectively used and understood, that America can better itself (in policy outcomes) simply by holding a mirror because America's idea of itself is always going to be better than America's reality of itself.  That is an engine for forward progress.  That depends on a functional political system which I believe is breaking down and is going to decrease the ability for that that forward momentum to happen, but it doesn't change the fact that there's been a lot in America to be proud of even while America has a lot of problems that continue to need to be worked on.

 

So, I didn't want to leave because I’m patriotic, because I wanted to continue working to make America better.  The moment when it was… I guess the extent to which I had an epiphany moment was that I'm not fighting against inertia.  America's been fighting against inertia for 250 years… I'm not fighting against a small minority of neo-Nazis.  I'm fighting against my neighbors, I'm fighting against people who don't want the same kind of country that I want.  A majority of Americans are authoritarian in some capacity or other, perhaps a plurality, so who exactly am I fighting against in order to save what?  I don't want to fight people to save them from themselves, I'd rather just go to a place where I don't have to fight.

 

Alex:  So all that being said – and I suspect I know your answer, but I haven't actually asked you this before –do you think we still would have left if we didn't have kids?  I also want to clarify, this sounds extremely passive, like Nic made the entire decision for our family and we upped and moved because he said so, which was absolutely not the case.

 

Nic:  Right, yeah.  For what it’s worth, because you’ve been pessimistic for so long, you have always wanted to move and I have been the thing holding us back from doing that.  So my change in opinion is what put us all on the same page, not that I dictated the direction.

 

I think we still probably would have left, yeah.  I've had a number of conversations with people who literally say “No, I will pick up a gun and fight to protect America if it comes to that.”  I don't want to die in a civil war, but more than that I don't want to kill anyone in a civil war.  I assume that all of my neighbors have guns in Tacoma.  Some of them are very conservative and some of them are very liberal (maybe the right word is “very left”), and I don't want to stand next to my neighbors on the left and murder our neighbors on the right.  When it comes down to it, that's what a war is.  I don't want to murder my neighbors on the right because they are so scared of losing their social worth as old white guys, that's not worth killing someone for, for me.  I realize that's not what it's about, it's about protecting yourself from Them, who believe that you should die or not have rights.  I understand that.  Would I have left if I didn't have kids and would I have left if I hadn't had kids are two slightly different questions, but I have taught my kids that you can always walk away.  And why would I fight, where I could kill someone, when I could just walk away?