The Atlantic

04/10/2025

How will you know when it’s time to go? When Trump deports an inconvenient American citizen and ignores a court order to bring him or her back home? Or when Yale is intimidated into firing a law professor for teaching civil rights? Or the Justice Department invents a pretext for FBI agents to confiscate computers in the offices of an independent publication and take down its website? Or the 2026 midterms seem certain to be unfree and unfair? Or when none of these extreme possibilities happens, but life in America becomes so rotten with injustice and corruption, so colorlessly orthodox, so unavoidably compromising, so impoverished, so shitty, that you lose the will to stay here? When your children plead with you to move abroad?

What if you decide the time has come to leave and find that it’s too late?

I can’t answer these questions for myself, let alone for anyone else. But I don’t believe the time has come—not even close. Americans are just beginning to find their voices against the destruction of our democracy. They’re raising them in town halls, city streets, schools, media, courts, Congress, and conversations across the country. The awakening is slow and incoherent because the assault is coming so fast and on so many fronts: constitutional, legal, bureaucratic, economic, cultural, moral. Above all, moral. Trump’s greatest weapon is his power to convince Americans that their country isn’t worth saving. Some public intellectuals already seem persuaded.

The belief that America stands for an idea beyond blood and soil makes its identity fragile, because an idea lives in people’s minds, where it is subject to lies, hatred, ignorance, despair, even extinction. But for this very reason, as long as enough Americans continue to believe in the idea with enough conviction to stick it out here and fight, the country that you and I once lived in will still exist for the generation after us. Even with Trump memes, tariff charts, Signal chats, and masked police, America will remain my desecrated home. Snyder’s Lesson 19 is this command: “Be a patriot.”