This is beautifully written and I strongly empathize with the author's grief and sense of loss. That said, a lot of people were feeling much the same way well before November 2024 between the censorship regime, weaponization of Covid mandates, essentially open borders, student loan lawlessness, etc. It's been decades at least since the U.S. could quite be described as a republic, and I'd argue that dates back to well before the author entered public service. Wishing him the best in his next chapter.
I suppose I'd say the writing was starting to be on the wall by Ike's military-industrial complex speech, but maybe sometime in the Reagan Administration? I've read that he was never quite the same after the assassination attempt, and the presidency was increasingly by committee after that. Or maybe when Bill Clinton pushed through NAFTA after having explicitly campaigned against it in the primary? By the time China got welcomed into the WTO it seems that the interests and convictions of ordinary Americans had definitively been relegated to second or third fiddle, while on the domestic front the EPA was more and more relying on "sue and settle" schemes to extend its authority far beyond what Congress had envisioned. Personally, I found it very troubling when Obama unilaterally instituted DACA in 2012 after repeatedly acknowledging that doing so would be illegal -- something snapped in our system of government that day, if it hadn't already.
As a former conservative, I’d say we lost the plot in 2016 — but the fuse was lit long before. For me, the prologue starts around 1984 and accelerates through 2008. I’ve written about this extensively at The Long Memo, but we’re living through the end result of three major systemic shifts — a slow-motion cascade failure.
The first was the triumph of neoliberal institutionalism — the moment we decoupled capitalism from democratic accountability and lit the fuse on the rise of the billionaire oligarchy. In Democracy’s Long Goodbye (https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/democracys-long-goodbye-neoliberals), I walk through how shareholder value theory, trade liberalization, and deregulation dismantled the guardrails that once made middle-class prosperity and liberal democracy mutually reinforcing. At the time, it sounded like modernization. In hindsight, it was a controlled demolition.
The second was the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended, so did the external threat that helped maintain internal cohesion. As we transitioned into a unipolar world — and then a fragile multipolar one — U.S. leadership became both dominant and brittle. Global order increasingly depended on American stability, just as domestic inequality was tearing that stability apart. I unpack this more in Europe Is Preparing for a World Without Us (https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/europe-is-preparing-for-a-world-without) — but the point is: our supremacy became a liability the moment we stopped managing it responsibly. Thus, I don't think it matters if the President walks back his cockamamie tariff scheme. We've put the world on notice - we're a kleptocracy run by imbeciles, drunks, sycophants, and opportunists.
Then came the third shift: the rise of anocracy, where partisanship fuses with identity and democratic institutions can no longer mediate conflict. Barbara Walter writes about this, and I studied state failure before I went into government. One of the most consistent warning signs is when political competition ceases to be about policy and becomes a zero-sum identity struggle. That’s where we are now. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yilgr2SJ3xQ)
To me, 2012 was the point of no return. Moderates didn’t just lose — they were delegitimized. Compromise became betrayal. The Tea Party swallowed the GOP, Mitch McConnell torpedoed norms with the Garland blockade, and DACA marked the beginning of normalized executive governance by decree. That same year, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act — and the courts, far from serving as a check, began functioning as partisan accelerators.
The black swan event that lit the accelerant was Obama’s election, not because of anything he did, but because of what it symbolized. A multiracial democracy rising to national power triggered something primal in a significant portion of the country. REDMAP and the gerrymandering it enabled locked that reaction into place, making it structurally impossible to reverse through normal politics.
And underlying all this was a fatal belief in American exceptionalism — the idea that “it can’t happen here.” That myth acted like a tranquilizer. It numbed the political class into thinking the system could absorb infinite stress. We could hollow out our institutions, replace consensus with culture war, treat government like a brand — and it would all hold. But it didn’t. It broke. And we’re only just beginning to admit it. This piece, The Erasure of America, was the hardest to write for me, because accepting Lewis Sinclair's premise of "it can happen here," what would that look like? Something all to eeriely familiar and unfolding before us. (https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/the-erasure-of-america-democracy)
People keep talking about saving the republic as if the patient is still on the table. But the bomb went off over a decade ago. What we’re living through now isn’t a countdown. It’s the aftermath. The question isn’t if the system can be saved — it’s whether we can survive what comes after it.
That's how I'm seeing it. That's what I've been writing about. That's why this piece for Persuasion, as well as the others I've written, are so difficult.
This isn't "Man in the High Castle," this isn't a novel. This is real, happening now, here in America. There is no denying or hiding it.
To say I feel the same pain would be a gross understatement. Like you, I have spent my life--a long life--in service to the ideals of our country, and it is alternately heart-breaking and maddening to see Trump (and those who made and make him possible) shatter those ideals. I also agree wholeheartedly when you say: "belief is not a plan. And hope is not a strategy." What's more, the strategies and tactics we are now deploying--traditional fund raising campaigns, tit-for-tat ad hominem attacks on MAGA, demonstrations, etc--will not get us past this moment, at least not by by themselves.
Still, I think it is premature to give up, especially on hope and belief. Scores of citizens before us have clung to hope and belief to see them through in the face of grueling odds during the Revolutionary War, efforts to abolish slavery, the Civil War, during Jim Crow and the gilded age, the Great Depression, two world wars, Viet Nam, and the Civil Rights movement.
You are right, though, that hope and belief are insufficient. We need to wed them to hard-headed, clear-eyed, creative strategies for mobilizing enough people--3.5% of the population according to Erica Chenoweth's research--to overcome the forces dismantling the ideals that founded this nation. But it's early innings yet and way too soon to declare defeat.
I empathize with the decision to give up or even leave, and I have been sorely tempted to do so myself. But I implore those reading this post not to join in despair and defeat but to stay and fight until the fat lady sings and the fat man is defeated.
For us, the conversation started in early July, in the van during our annual long summer road trip, after lunch somewhere outside Moab, UT. My husband broached it. What do we do if Trump wins again? It seemed abstract and unlikely, but I agreed that it seemed important to have a plan.
Besides, we both knew instantly what the answer was. We would leave.
Like this author, we've spent long decades in the trenches. In my case, I was on the political and advocacy side. I wrote passionately for years about the possibility of a US fascist future, starting in 2006. I advised any number of Democratic institutions about this, spent my time in DC, won a fairly large audience, warned people as loudly as I could for as long as I could. When that failed, and Trump was elected anyway, I spent the next few years working with groups that were trying to preserve what seemed possible to save.
But in 2024, an America that would gleefully, knowingly re-elect an impeached insurrectionist who was obviously an agent of the Russian state was not an America that we understood or wanted to be a part of any more. We'd read Project 2025, and understood the plan. When I woke up at 12:30 am on November 6 and confirmed the election results, I knew: my fellow Americans had, with their eyes wide open this time, deliberately chosen a fascist future. That left us with an equally clear choice: it was time for us to choose something else for ourselves.
We were fortunate to have established legal status and existing family in Canada. Rolling out of bed into the November dark, I opened my laptop to a window of already-open tabs -- a window I hoped I'd be able to close for good that morning, because it would no longer be needed. Instead, I started clicking through. By dawn, I'd reached out to real estate agents, international movers, the immigration attorney, a vendor of global health insurance, several rental agencies in Vancouver, and about a dozen other resources that would organize us for a move. By noon, I was signing contracts. Seventy days later, purged of most of our earthly goods, we left the country for good. We will not be returning for any reason for the foreseeable future.
It's heartbreaking. But the heartbreak is greatly eased by being somewhere that the social contract still holds, where people are still capable of big collective actions on their own behalf, where despair does not reign and the most damaged people don't control the discourse. Being in Canada these past few months, as Trump has taken aim at the country, has been tonic: it's astonishing to watch a nation rise with one will to its own defense, commit to change its own priorities, and meet the threat by planning an entirely new future for itself.
America hasn't been capable of that for a long time. You don't realize how mean and tense it is down there until you go somewhere else, and hang out among people who aren't marinating in rage, and being traumatized daily by their own leaders. It feels good -- humane and decent and often genuinely pleasant in a way America hasn't been for decades.
Godspeed on your transition. The grief over this loss can be crippling; but taking proactive steps toward something better -- and it really IS better out here -- goes a very long way toward salving it.
Absolutely beautiful and totally felt. I wonder, when you say you are writing the next chapter--how are you writing it? So many of us despair and long for a cohesive, elegant resistance. For a plan for the next chapter, even if the levers are power are un-maneuverable now. Yes there's heart-ache--but there has to be hope. I have four young sons. I have no other option.
The demonstrations are growing. The “wealth class” — the architects and enablers of this collapse — are finally feeling some heat. When the social costs of complicity rise, the power structure starts to wobble. That’s how dictatorships fall. Not all at once, but in fractals — pressure, fracture, retreat.
But if you’re looking at the future from a different angle — if you’re asking how to write the next chapter outside the confines of the nation-state — that’s exactly why I started Borderless Living.
Because the future belongs to the free.
Not just the brave. Not just the defiant. But those willing to decouple their identities from nationalism, and reimagine the world as it really is: interconnected, accessible, alive with possibility.
You can live in Spain and run a business in the U.S.
You can live in Thailand and sell into Europe.
You can raise children in peace while still building wealth, impact, and purpose — without pledging allegiance to systems that have stopped serving us.
For Americans, I know that’s a hard truth. We’ve been raised to believe the flag and the future were the same thing. But that illusion is fading. And what’s left isn’t just fear — it’s freedom. We get to choose again.
So yes, there’s heartache. But there’s also a map. And we don’t have to stay lost.
I don’t know writer’s age or state of health, but I think he should stay and fight. Of course, hope is not a strategy; but last weekend’s demonstration are inspiring and there are elections next year
I would never abandon my country unless I believed my life or my children’s lives were in danger - as in Nazi Germany
I teach US history and civics to immigrants preparing for US naturalization exam — and every one of them grasps separation of powers and Bill of Rights better than the incumbent President !
"I would never abandon my country unless I believed my life or my children’s lives were in danger — as in Nazi Germany."
(Pause)
In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway has this great line. One character asks another, “How did you go bankrupt?”
The reply: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
It’s deceptively simple — but it captures collapse in every form: personal, financial, societal. Things erode slowly. You adapt. You ignore the cracks. You convince yourself it’s manageable.
And then one day, it tips. It feels sudden — but it isn’t. The rot just finally outran the denial.
When I wrote The Erasure of America, it was speculative fiction. Every day, it moves closer to fact.
This afternoon, the Justice Department petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — the man who was unlawfully seized and transferred to El Salvador, now imprisoned in CECOT.
And now, the Supreme Court is being forced to hear the case — even though there’s no clear constitutional question, no circuit split, no national emergency that warrants its intervention.
So why is the Court inserting itself?
Because within hours, a federal judge will face an impossible choice:
Hold the U.S. Government in contempt when Pam Bondi inevitably says, “Go screw yourself,” and refuses to comply.
Or pretend the rule of law still functions, even as the DOJ blatantly defies a federal court order.
This isn’t judicial review.
It’s judicial damage control — a desperate attempt to spare the system the humiliation of admitting that its own executive branch has gone rogue.
If the Court takes the case, we already know how this plays out:
Roberts will do what he always does: nothing. Alito will dig up a clay tablet from 2934 BC that somehow says, “Always obey Donald Trump.” Barrett? This isn’t Roe — she might break from the pack, maybe by accident. Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown? Likely to hold the last legal line.
And then we’ll get a 5–4 decision that may as well declare: “Presidentia Sunt Servanda.” Presidents must always be obeyed. (For the Latin purists: Praesides obediendi sunt is accurate. Or better yet: Auctoritas praesidis servanda est — the president’s authority must be preserved.)
Because of course — national security. Executive deference. Loyalty over legality.
This Court has already done this three times since Trump’s first term. Why should this time be any different?
And yet — I’m still supposed to believe this regime isn’t a threat?
A man was taken off the street. Denied due process — not just as a human being, but even under the limited protections afforded to undocumented immigrants.
No hearings. No court. No legal avenue.
Then, in violation of both U.S. law and binding international treaties, he was deported — not “removed” under lawful procedure, but rendered to a foreign prison, with no oversight, no retained jurisdiction, no legal remedy.
Let me tell you something about me: I worked GWOT detention. You remember that, I’m guessing. When the world called us torturers?
We gave more due process to Al Qaeda fighters than we’re giving these people.
And these aren’t unlawful enemy combatants. They’re just people. Most with a legal right not to be imprisoned, even if they’re here without legal status.
By law, deportation is not supposed to be punitive. But here we are — shipping human beings to gulags in El Salvador. To CECOT. A gulag by every measure of the word.
And now Trump casually muses: “Maybe we’ll send Americans there too.”
Just four days ago, he stood on a stage and shattered 80 years of American soft power. We’ve already erased over $7 trillion in global market value. We told every nation on Earth: the United States is no longer a stable democracy. It’s a kleptocracy — run by a vengeful strongman, enabled by drunks, grifters, and cowards.
And still — I’m expected to believe this isn’t authoritarian?
If Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia…
If Rumeysa Öztürk…
If hundreds of others can be disappeared from our streets —
and no court in the land can reach them —
If the President of the United States can cripple the world economy on a whim, backed by an imbecile economist and his alter ego, and supported by a Treasury Secretary who glibly states that everything is fine because “the market is operatingly efficiently" (at destroying wealth.)
If Congress stands there — like ducks in thunder — and does nothing...
...and all this happened in just the last four days, on top of what’s happened over the last seven weeks...
Then tell me again:
How is this not Nazi Germany? Or at least the preface to it?
I don’t mean to come down on you like an anvil. But I want to make clear why I’ve decided that fighting is no longer relevant.
And reading the comments of others — people similarly situated to me — I can tell you this: they’re also looking for the door.
As Billy Wilder famously said about leaving Germany: “The optimists died in the gas chambers; the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.”
The idea is to depart before it gets ugly and collapses,
lol. :) France is wonderful... mais, je peux seulement lire le français, et le parler est, au mieux, une source d'embarras. :) I can only imagine myself facing conversational replies of rapid-fire in slang-heavy Parisian and I stand there blinking like, “Pardon… mais… j’ai lu ça quelque part…” 😂
Now, if we want to talk about the baker. The train? School? Where I live and what's my name? All the other stuff I studied endlessly with "Mon Cahier" and "Tout Le Monde," textbooks... we're golden. :)
I speak enough French and Italian to get around... kinda. I speak enough Latin to generally understand inscriptions, and have an idea of what someone may be saying to me in another language. By American standards, I'm damn near an idiot savant... outside of the diplomatic corp circles. But I can't imagine surviving on my French in France or my Italian in Italy. I'm just good enough to get that patient smile from the local who happens to be dual lingua. :D
But France is lovely. And I do believe France is about to emerge as the new leader of the coalition of "the free world," at the rate we are descending. :)
One of the great privileges of being in Canada right now is getting to be here for this moment, which may turn out to be historic for them. Mark Carney is showing this sleepy backwater country an image of a new future in which they forge with Europe, and fulfill the promise of being the world's second-largest territory, and the world's strongest remaining democracy.
It's hard to overstate the level of patriotism, as well as the determination to seize a different non-US-affiliated future for themselves. It's balm for my cynical, traumatized American soul to see that there are still nations capable of rising to a situation with an all-hands commitment to creating something better.
That used to be us. It hasn't been for a long, long time.
A country (Canada) where a hoax (mass graves) causes flags to fly at half-mast isn't going to lead the world. Of course, we have hoaxes in the US. Remember the Trump collusion hoax?
To say I feel the same pain would be a gross understatement. Like you, I have spent my life--a long life--in service to the ideals of our country, and it is alternately heart-breaking and maddening to see Trump (and those who made and make him possible) shatter those ideals. I also agree wholeheartedly when you say: "belief is not a plan. And hope is not a strategy." What's more, the strategies and tactics we are now deploying--traditional fund raising campaigns, tit-for-tat ad hominem attacks on MAGA, demonstrations, etc--will not get us past this moment, at least not by themselves.
Still, I think it is premature to give up, especially on hope and belief. Scores of citizens before us have clung to hope and belief to see them through in the face of grueling odds during the Revolutionary War, efforts to abolish slavery, the Civil War, during Jim Crow and the gilded age, the Great Depression, two world wars, Viet Nam, and the Civil Rights movement.
You are right, though, that hope and belief are insufficient. We need to wed them to hard-headed, clear-eyed, creative strategies for mobilizing enough people--3.5% of the population according to Erica Chenoweth's research--to overcome the forces dismantling the ideals that founded this nation. But it's early innings yet and way too soon to declare defeat.
I empathize with the decision to give up or even leave, and I have been sorely tempted to do so myself. But I implore those reading this post not to join in despair and defeat but to stay and fight until the fat lady sings and the fat man is defeated.
This coincides with words I wrote in my “letters to the Goddess” yesterday in which I link my grief in the loss of my best friend and spouse, Bernie, and my grief in the loss of my country.
I’m leaving neither. Nor can I blame them for leaving me. There is no blame or shame in my portfolio. But the consequences are so heavy. I expressed my grief yesterday at the Washington monument at which in earlier days Bernie would have been walking with me—better, I with her
Thank you for saying so well many of the things that I feel.
I am an expat. I came to Brazil in 2017 for love, not really for politics, but it was early in Trump's first administration, and that did provide some additional incentive. I became a dual citizen in 2019. My husband has had a visitor's visa for the United States for over ten years, has visited many times and has never violated his visa's terms, but I don't know when we'll visit again. Even foreigners who have followed all the rules are being mistreated and denied admission at ports of entry these days: it's just not worth the risk.
The first time I moved to Brazil was to serve in the Peace Corps, in 1973. Brazil was under a brutal military dictatorship at the time -- as memorably and accurately portrayed in the film, "I'm Still Here" -- and the Senate Watergate hearings in Washington were front page news around the world. Once day a lady I didn't know (I thought that she was elderly at the time, but she was probably younger than I am now) stopped me on the street and said, "Your people are showing the whole world how people in a democracy behave." She walked on, and I never saw her again.
That memory has warmed me for the rest of my life. These days, though, how it burns!
I share your sense of grief and worry over America, my country that I love. But I do see hope that we can now start turning it around, with a new focus on what is good for America and our own citizens, not what is good for other countries to our own detriment. However, I don't understand why you want to leave and not stay to help renew our own country. Where are you going to go that is any better? Other Western countries are farther gone than we are, and are becoming more authoritarian. Many other countries do not have stable governments, they might be reasonable now, but they are only a coup away from a much more repressive regime. I have thought about this, and I think we are still the best place to be, despite America's problems. We still have a chance to fix things.
Take heart, you are not alone in your feelings. Those of us who have lived in the U.S., those who were brought up to love and respect the U.S., we also feel sadness even though we are not Americans. Just look at history, for example, the demise of the once great British Empire (my country of birth). It took several centuries to create and build up the British Empire, reaching its zenith in the 19th century, then just a few decades from the end of WW11 to the 1990's for it to lose its power and prestige. Today, it is unrecognisable from the country I grew up in. We too believed we were invincible and eternal. Take a look at the Roman Empire, that lasted a few centuries longer but eventually rotted from within and disappeared. The political party Democrats Abroad which represents the millions of US citizens living outside the U.S., has been very busy recently, holding protests and demonstrations all over Spain, in all the major cities, and all over Europe. At the end of March, an article appeared in an English-speaking newspaper entitled, "Seeking Spanish Sanctuary", relating that so many U.S. citizens are looking to move to Europe that the consulting firms cannot keep up! Particularly the digital nomads who can work from home virtually anywhere. Check out the self-proclaimed "Trump regime refugees" on Facebook, as just one example. You, in the States, who have taken in and given refuge and sanctuary to so many over the years, now ask others to take you in and give you solace and comfort. And we are happy to do so. You have our wholehearted support. As I said, take heart, regroup. This regime will not, cannot, last forever. Then maybe when you can finally return to the U.S. if you so wish, you will be able to build up and create a truly free, accepting democracy. Maybe a little more humble, more understanding, kinder.............................................. America is not dead.
This is basically BS. If Trump is really so bad, why did the Democrats run such abysmal candidates against. The truth is the Democrats never believed a word of what they said. The reality is that 'other' issues were far more important (to them). The list is long and sad, Let me offer just a few examples. Does Gaza ring a bell? Does Imane Khelif ring a bell? How about DEI?
I swore that same oath when I was commissioned, and though I left the service decades ago, I still affirm it. I am alert to the possibility that its fulfillment may require different actions in the future than it has in the past. I’m not packing up. I’m not stockpiling ammo. But I am preparing.
Please leave. The crying of elites, especially those in government, that have caused the slow bleed of the American working class over the last 30+ years, is impossible to accept. This defense of and support of an oligarch's regime that has injected a level of social chaos to deflect from the wholesale theft of American assets to pad their Wall Street and real estate portfolio marks them as non-Americans... anti-patriots that are in it for their selfish greed and to hell with the bottom 80%.
You and your cohort have literally screwed the country with your idiotic globalist pursuits that all derive from a looter handbook. NAFTA, China in the WTO as a Most Favored Trading Partner... what in the hell were you thinking would happen? You all crashed the hell out of the global economy in 2008... we have not really recovered from that. Then you went hog wild over the global pandemic, destroyed lives and small businesses unnecessarily, put the nation more trillions in debt with most of that money going into your pockets... fomented the largest move of corporate consolidation we have every seen... caused massive inflation.
You are a hazard to the country and so it is good that you leave unless you agree to never touch another of any of the controls of the country.
This author has earned the right to his despair, by fighting for the ideals which make us Americans. I admire his service and eloquence even as I reject his despair. He comes by his pessimism honestly, and most Americans of both parties agree that our political system is badly broken.
How did we get here? Partly by having presidents of both parties lie to us about Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But since the late 1970s the greater harm came from candidates self-censoring to avoid alienating potential campaign donors.
As the fundraising arms race accelerated, one good policy idea after another was taken off the table and out of the conversation. In a death of a thousand cuts this unseen process drained the conversation of substance, asphyxiating our democracy instead of overthrowing it in a dramatic single blow.
You can’t fight what you can’t see. Across decades the money hollowed out government by the people in an insidious process that left us enervated, disoriented, and seeing Americans of the other party as our enemy - when campaign cash has been Public Enemy Number One all along.
Here’s where I push back most sharply against Finnegan. We are far from defeated. We can fix the money problem by publicly financing elections, and the best way to do this is with voter dollars, aka democracy vouchers.
I do not suggest this will be easy. Breaking through the noise, the politics of divide and conquer, and the prevailing pessimism will take time. But it is far too early to give up on the American people. We remain the only nation defined by ideals instead of by race, religion or some other group identity. Ideals make us Americans. Fighting for these ideals is what Americans do.
I hope that Finnegan will reconsider his decision to leave, that he will stay and keep fighting - not for one party or the other - but for the ideals we all stand for, which inspired his public service.
This is beautifully written and I strongly empathize with the author's grief and sense of loss. That said, a lot of people were feeling much the same way well before November 2024 between the censorship regime, weaponization of Covid mandates, essentially open borders, student loan lawlessness, etc. It's been decades at least since the U.S. could quite be described as a republic, and I'd argue that dates back to well before the author entered public service. Wishing him the best in his next chapter.
Thank you for your kind words.
As a point of reference for me, if you think it happened before 2004... then for you when is the "magic date," it all changed?
I suppose I'd say the writing was starting to be on the wall by Ike's military-industrial complex speech, but maybe sometime in the Reagan Administration? I've read that he was never quite the same after the assassination attempt, and the presidency was increasingly by committee after that. Or maybe when Bill Clinton pushed through NAFTA after having explicitly campaigned against it in the primary? By the time China got welcomed into the WTO it seems that the interests and convictions of ordinary Americans had definitively been relegated to second or third fiddle, while on the domestic front the EPA was more and more relying on "sue and settle" schemes to extend its authority far beyond what Congress had envisioned. Personally, I found it very troubling when Obama unilaterally instituted DACA in 2012 after repeatedly acknowledging that doing so would be illegal -- something snapped in our system of government that day, if it hadn't already.
As a former conservative, I’d say we lost the plot in 2016 — but the fuse was lit long before. For me, the prologue starts around 1984 and accelerates through 2008. I’ve written about this extensively at The Long Memo, but we’re living through the end result of three major systemic shifts — a slow-motion cascade failure.
The first was the triumph of neoliberal institutionalism — the moment we decoupled capitalism from democratic accountability and lit the fuse on the rise of the billionaire oligarchy. In Democracy’s Long Goodbye (https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/democracys-long-goodbye-neoliberals), I walk through how shareholder value theory, trade liberalization, and deregulation dismantled the guardrails that once made middle-class prosperity and liberal democracy mutually reinforcing. At the time, it sounded like modernization. In hindsight, it was a controlled demolition.
The second was the collapse of the Soviet Union. When the Cold War ended, so did the external threat that helped maintain internal cohesion. As we transitioned into a unipolar world — and then a fragile multipolar one — U.S. leadership became both dominant and brittle. Global order increasingly depended on American stability, just as domestic inequality was tearing that stability apart. I unpack this more in Europe Is Preparing for a World Without Us (https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/europe-is-preparing-for-a-world-without) — but the point is: our supremacy became a liability the moment we stopped managing it responsibly. Thus, I don't think it matters if the President walks back his cockamamie tariff scheme. We've put the world on notice - we're a kleptocracy run by imbeciles, drunks, sycophants, and opportunists.
Then came the third shift: the rise of anocracy, where partisanship fuses with identity and democratic institutions can no longer mediate conflict. Barbara Walter writes about this, and I studied state failure before I went into government. One of the most consistent warning signs is when political competition ceases to be about policy and becomes a zero-sum identity struggle. That’s where we are now. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yilgr2SJ3xQ)
To me, 2012 was the point of no return. Moderates didn’t just lose — they were delegitimized. Compromise became betrayal. The Tea Party swallowed the GOP, Mitch McConnell torpedoed norms with the Garland blockade, and DACA marked the beginning of normalized executive governance by decree. That same year, Shelby County v. Holder gutted the Voting Rights Act — and the courts, far from serving as a check, began functioning as partisan accelerators.
The black swan event that lit the accelerant was Obama’s election, not because of anything he did, but because of what it symbolized. A multiracial democracy rising to national power triggered something primal in a significant portion of the country. REDMAP and the gerrymandering it enabled locked that reaction into place, making it structurally impossible to reverse through normal politics.
And underlying all this was a fatal belief in American exceptionalism — the idea that “it can’t happen here.” That myth acted like a tranquilizer. It numbed the political class into thinking the system could absorb infinite stress. We could hollow out our institutions, replace consensus with culture war, treat government like a brand — and it would all hold. But it didn’t. It broke. And we’re only just beginning to admit it. This piece, The Erasure of America, was the hardest to write for me, because accepting Lewis Sinclair's premise of "it can happen here," what would that look like? Something all to eeriely familiar and unfolding before us. (https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/the-erasure-of-america-democracy)
People keep talking about saving the republic as if the patient is still on the table. But the bomb went off over a decade ago. What we’re living through now isn’t a countdown. It’s the aftermath. The question isn’t if the system can be saved — it’s whether we can survive what comes after it.
That's how I'm seeing it. That's what I've been writing about. That's why this piece for Persuasion, as well as the others I've written, are so difficult.
This isn't "Man in the High Castle," this isn't a novel. This is real, happening now, here in America. There is no denying or hiding it.
To say I feel the same pain would be a gross understatement. Like you, I have spent my life--a long life--in service to the ideals of our country, and it is alternately heart-breaking and maddening to see Trump (and those who made and make him possible) shatter those ideals. I also agree wholeheartedly when you say: "belief is not a plan. And hope is not a strategy." What's more, the strategies and tactics we are now deploying--traditional fund raising campaigns, tit-for-tat ad hominem attacks on MAGA, demonstrations, etc--will not get us past this moment, at least not by by themselves.
Still, I think it is premature to give up, especially on hope and belief. Scores of citizens before us have clung to hope and belief to see them through in the face of grueling odds during the Revolutionary War, efforts to abolish slavery, the Civil War, during Jim Crow and the gilded age, the Great Depression, two world wars, Viet Nam, and the Civil Rights movement.
You are right, though, that hope and belief are insufficient. We need to wed them to hard-headed, clear-eyed, creative strategies for mobilizing enough people--3.5% of the population according to Erica Chenoweth's research--to overcome the forces dismantling the ideals that founded this nation. But it's early innings yet and way too soon to declare defeat.
I empathize with the decision to give up or even leave, and I have been sorely tempted to do so myself. But I implore those reading this post not to join in despair and defeat but to stay and fight until the fat lady sings and the fat man is defeated.
For us, the conversation started in early July, in the van during our annual long summer road trip, after lunch somewhere outside Moab, UT. My husband broached it. What do we do if Trump wins again? It seemed abstract and unlikely, but I agreed that it seemed important to have a plan.
Besides, we both knew instantly what the answer was. We would leave.
Like this author, we've spent long decades in the trenches. In my case, I was on the political and advocacy side. I wrote passionately for years about the possibility of a US fascist future, starting in 2006. I advised any number of Democratic institutions about this, spent my time in DC, won a fairly large audience, warned people as loudly as I could for as long as I could. When that failed, and Trump was elected anyway, I spent the next few years working with groups that were trying to preserve what seemed possible to save.
But in 2024, an America that would gleefully, knowingly re-elect an impeached insurrectionist who was obviously an agent of the Russian state was not an America that we understood or wanted to be a part of any more. We'd read Project 2025, and understood the plan. When I woke up at 12:30 am on November 6 and confirmed the election results, I knew: my fellow Americans had, with their eyes wide open this time, deliberately chosen a fascist future. That left us with an equally clear choice: it was time for us to choose something else for ourselves.
We were fortunate to have established legal status and existing family in Canada. Rolling out of bed into the November dark, I opened my laptop to a window of already-open tabs -- a window I hoped I'd be able to close for good that morning, because it would no longer be needed. Instead, I started clicking through. By dawn, I'd reached out to real estate agents, international movers, the immigration attorney, a vendor of global health insurance, several rental agencies in Vancouver, and about a dozen other resources that would organize us for a move. By noon, I was signing contracts. Seventy days later, purged of most of our earthly goods, we left the country for good. We will not be returning for any reason for the foreseeable future.
It's heartbreaking. But the heartbreak is greatly eased by being somewhere that the social contract still holds, where people are still capable of big collective actions on their own behalf, where despair does not reign and the most damaged people don't control the discourse. Being in Canada these past few months, as Trump has taken aim at the country, has been tonic: it's astonishing to watch a nation rise with one will to its own defense, commit to change its own priorities, and meet the threat by planning an entirely new future for itself.
America hasn't been capable of that for a long time. You don't realize how mean and tense it is down there until you go somewhere else, and hang out among people who aren't marinating in rage, and being traumatized daily by their own leaders. It feels good -- humane and decent and often genuinely pleasant in a way America hasn't been for decades.
Godspeed on your transition. The grief over this loss can be crippling; but taking proactive steps toward something better -- and it really IS better out here -- goes a very long way toward salving it.
Absolutely beautiful and totally felt. I wonder, when you say you are writing the next chapter--how are you writing it? So many of us despair and long for a cohesive, elegant resistance. For a plan for the next chapter, even if the levers are power are un-maneuverable now. Yes there's heart-ache--but there has to be hope. I have four young sons. I have no other option.
If the choice is to stay — then yes, I actually think what happened this weekend might be a flicker of hope.
I wrote about it here:
👉 It Only Breaks If You Break It (https://www.thelongmemo.com/p/it-only-breaks-if-you-break-it)
The demonstrations are growing. The “wealth class” — the architects and enablers of this collapse — are finally feeling some heat. When the social costs of complicity rise, the power structure starts to wobble. That’s how dictatorships fall. Not all at once, but in fractals — pressure, fracture, retreat.
But if you’re looking at the future from a different angle — if you’re asking how to write the next chapter outside the confines of the nation-state — that’s exactly why I started Borderless Living.
Because the future belongs to the free.
Not just the brave. Not just the defiant. But those willing to decouple their identities from nationalism, and reimagine the world as it really is: interconnected, accessible, alive with possibility.
You can live in Spain and run a business in the U.S.
You can live in Thailand and sell into Europe.
You can raise children in peace while still building wealth, impact, and purpose — without pledging allegiance to systems that have stopped serving us.
For Americans, I know that’s a hard truth. We’ve been raised to believe the flag and the future were the same thing. But that illusion is fading. And what’s left isn’t just fear — it’s freedom. We get to choose again.
So yes, there’s heartache. But there’s also a map. And we don’t have to stay lost.
I don’t know writer’s age or state of health, but I think he should stay and fight. Of course, hope is not a strategy; but last weekend’s demonstration are inspiring and there are elections next year
I would never abandon my country unless I believed my life or my children’s lives were in danger - as in Nazi Germany
I teach US history and civics to immigrants preparing for US naturalization exam — and every one of them grasps separation of powers and Bill of Rights better than the incumbent President !
"I would never abandon my country unless I believed my life or my children’s lives were in danger — as in Nazi Germany."
(Pause)
In The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway has this great line. One character asks another, “How did you go bankrupt?”
The reply: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
It’s deceptively simple — but it captures collapse in every form: personal, financial, societal. Things erode slowly. You adapt. You ignore the cracks. You convince yourself it’s manageable.
And then one day, it tips. It feels sudden — but it isn’t. The rot just finally outran the denial.
When I wrote The Erasure of America, it was speculative fiction. Every day, it moves closer to fact.
This afternoon, the Justice Department petitioned the Supreme Court to intervene in the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — the man who was unlawfully seized and transferred to El Salvador, now imprisoned in CECOT.
And now, the Supreme Court is being forced to hear the case — even though there’s no clear constitutional question, no circuit split, no national emergency that warrants its intervention.
So why is the Court inserting itself?
Because within hours, a federal judge will face an impossible choice:
Hold the U.S. Government in contempt when Pam Bondi inevitably says, “Go screw yourself,” and refuses to comply.
Or pretend the rule of law still functions, even as the DOJ blatantly defies a federal court order.
This isn’t judicial review.
It’s judicial damage control — a desperate attempt to spare the system the humiliation of admitting that its own executive branch has gone rogue.
If the Court takes the case, we already know how this plays out:
Roberts will do what he always does: nothing. Alito will dig up a clay tablet from 2934 BC that somehow says, “Always obey Donald Trump.” Barrett? This isn’t Roe — she might break from the pack, maybe by accident. Kagan, Sotomayor, and Brown? Likely to hold the last legal line.
And then we’ll get a 5–4 decision that may as well declare: “Presidentia Sunt Servanda.” Presidents must always be obeyed. (For the Latin purists: Praesides obediendi sunt is accurate. Or better yet: Auctoritas praesidis servanda est — the president’s authority must be preserved.)
Because of course — national security. Executive deference. Loyalty over legality.
This Court has already done this three times since Trump’s first term. Why should this time be any different?
And yet — I’m still supposed to believe this regime isn’t a threat?
A man was taken off the street. Denied due process — not just as a human being, but even under the limited protections afforded to undocumented immigrants.
No hearings. No court. No legal avenue.
Then, in violation of both U.S. law and binding international treaties, he was deported — not “removed” under lawful procedure, but rendered to a foreign prison, with no oversight, no retained jurisdiction, no legal remedy.
Let me tell you something about me: I worked GWOT detention. You remember that, I’m guessing. When the world called us torturers?
We gave more due process to Al Qaeda fighters than we’re giving these people.
And these aren’t unlawful enemy combatants. They’re just people. Most with a legal right not to be imprisoned, even if they’re here without legal status.
By law, deportation is not supposed to be punitive. But here we are — shipping human beings to gulags in El Salvador. To CECOT. A gulag by every measure of the word.
And now Trump casually muses: “Maybe we’ll send Americans there too.”
Just four days ago, he stood on a stage and shattered 80 years of American soft power. We’ve already erased over $7 trillion in global market value. We told every nation on Earth: the United States is no longer a stable democracy. It’s a kleptocracy — run by a vengeful strongman, enabled by drunks, grifters, and cowards.
And still — I’m expected to believe this isn’t authoritarian?
If Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia…
If Rumeysa Öztürk…
If hundreds of others can be disappeared from our streets —
and no court in the land can reach them —
If the President of the United States can cripple the world economy on a whim, backed by an imbecile economist and his alter ego, and supported by a Treasury Secretary who glibly states that everything is fine because “the market is operatingly efficiently" (at destroying wealth.)
If Congress stands there — like ducks in thunder — and does nothing...
...and all this happened in just the last four days, on top of what’s happened over the last seven weeks...
Then tell me again:
How is this not Nazi Germany? Or at least the preface to it?
I don’t mean to come down on you like an anvil. But I want to make clear why I’ve decided that fighting is no longer relevant.
And reading the comments of others — people similarly situated to me — I can tell you this: they’re also looking for the door.
As Billy Wilder famously said about leaving Germany: “The optimists died in the gas chambers; the pessimists have pools in Beverly Hills.”
The idea is to depart before it gets ugly and collapses,
Not after.
Mr. Finnegan
Thank you
You are very kind to acknowledge my comment?
Are you in France? Macron has been splendid!
lol. :) France is wonderful... mais, je peux seulement lire le français, et le parler est, au mieux, une source d'embarras. :) I can only imagine myself facing conversational replies of rapid-fire in slang-heavy Parisian and I stand there blinking like, “Pardon… mais… j’ai lu ça quelque part…” 😂
Now, if we want to talk about the baker. The train? School? Where I live and what's my name? All the other stuff I studied endlessly with "Mon Cahier" and "Tout Le Monde," textbooks... we're golden. :)
I speak enough French and Italian to get around... kinda. I speak enough Latin to generally understand inscriptions, and have an idea of what someone may be saying to me in another language. By American standards, I'm damn near an idiot savant... outside of the diplomatic corp circles. But I can't imagine surviving on my French in France or my Italian in Italy. I'm just good enough to get that patient smile from the local who happens to be dual lingua. :D
But France is lovely. And I do believe France is about to emerge as the new leader of the coalition of "the free world," at the rate we are descending. :)
One of the great privileges of being in Canada right now is getting to be here for this moment, which may turn out to be historic for them. Mark Carney is showing this sleepy backwater country an image of a new future in which they forge with Europe, and fulfill the promise of being the world's second-largest territory, and the world's strongest remaining democracy.
It's hard to overstate the level of patriotism, as well as the determination to seize a different non-US-affiliated future for themselves. It's balm for my cynical, traumatized American soul to see that there are still nations capable of rising to a situation with an all-hands commitment to creating something better.
That used to be us. It hasn't been for a long, long time.
A country (Canada) where a hoax (mass graves) causes flags to fly at half-mast isn't going to lead the world. Of course, we have hoaxes in the US. Remember the Trump collusion hoax?
To say I feel the same pain would be a gross understatement. Like you, I have spent my life--a long life--in service to the ideals of our country, and it is alternately heart-breaking and maddening to see Trump (and those who made and make him possible) shatter those ideals. I also agree wholeheartedly when you say: "belief is not a plan. And hope is not a strategy." What's more, the strategies and tactics we are now deploying--traditional fund raising campaigns, tit-for-tat ad hominem attacks on MAGA, demonstrations, etc--will not get us past this moment, at least not by themselves.
Still, I think it is premature to give up, especially on hope and belief. Scores of citizens before us have clung to hope and belief to see them through in the face of grueling odds during the Revolutionary War, efforts to abolish slavery, the Civil War, during Jim Crow and the gilded age, the Great Depression, two world wars, Viet Nam, and the Civil Rights movement.
You are right, though, that hope and belief are insufficient. We need to wed them to hard-headed, clear-eyed, creative strategies for mobilizing enough people--3.5% of the population according to Erica Chenoweth's research--to overcome the forces dismantling the ideals that founded this nation. But it's early innings yet and way too soon to declare defeat.
I empathize with the decision to give up or even leave, and I have been sorely tempted to do so myself. But I implore those reading this post not to join in despair and defeat but to stay and fight until the fat lady sings and the fat man is defeated.
This coincides with words I wrote in my “letters to the Goddess” yesterday in which I link my grief in the loss of my best friend and spouse, Bernie, and my grief in the loss of my country.
I’m leaving neither. Nor can I blame them for leaving me. There is no blame or shame in my portfolio. But the consequences are so heavy. I expressed my grief yesterday at the Washington monument at which in earlier days Bernie would have been walking with me—better, I with her
Thank you for saying so well many of the things that I feel.
I am an expat. I came to Brazil in 2017 for love, not really for politics, but it was early in Trump's first administration, and that did provide some additional incentive. I became a dual citizen in 2019. My husband has had a visitor's visa for the United States for over ten years, has visited many times and has never violated his visa's terms, but I don't know when we'll visit again. Even foreigners who have followed all the rules are being mistreated and denied admission at ports of entry these days: it's just not worth the risk.
The first time I moved to Brazil was to serve in the Peace Corps, in 1973. Brazil was under a brutal military dictatorship at the time -- as memorably and accurately portrayed in the film, "I'm Still Here" -- and the Senate Watergate hearings in Washington were front page news around the world. Once day a lady I didn't know (I thought that she was elderly at the time, but she was probably younger than I am now) stopped me on the street and said, "Your people are showing the whole world how people in a democracy behave." She walked on, and I never saw her again.
That memory has warmed me for the rest of my life. These days, though, how it burns!
I share your sense of grief and worry over America, my country that I love. But I do see hope that we can now start turning it around, with a new focus on what is good for America and our own citizens, not what is good for other countries to our own detriment. However, I don't understand why you want to leave and not stay to help renew our own country. Where are you going to go that is any better? Other Western countries are farther gone than we are, and are becoming more authoritarian. Many other countries do not have stable governments, they might be reasonable now, but they are only a coup away from a much more repressive regime. I have thought about this, and I think we are still the best place to be, despite America's problems. We still have a chance to fix things.
Take heart, you are not alone in your feelings. Those of us who have lived in the U.S., those who were brought up to love and respect the U.S., we also feel sadness even though we are not Americans. Just look at history, for example, the demise of the once great British Empire (my country of birth). It took several centuries to create and build up the British Empire, reaching its zenith in the 19th century, then just a few decades from the end of WW11 to the 1990's for it to lose its power and prestige. Today, it is unrecognisable from the country I grew up in. We too believed we were invincible and eternal. Take a look at the Roman Empire, that lasted a few centuries longer but eventually rotted from within and disappeared. The political party Democrats Abroad which represents the millions of US citizens living outside the U.S., has been very busy recently, holding protests and demonstrations all over Spain, in all the major cities, and all over Europe. At the end of March, an article appeared in an English-speaking newspaper entitled, "Seeking Spanish Sanctuary", relating that so many U.S. citizens are looking to move to Europe that the consulting firms cannot keep up! Particularly the digital nomads who can work from home virtually anywhere. Check out the self-proclaimed "Trump regime refugees" on Facebook, as just one example. You, in the States, who have taken in and given refuge and sanctuary to so many over the years, now ask others to take you in and give you solace and comfort. And we are happy to do so. You have our wholehearted support. As I said, take heart, regroup. This regime will not, cannot, last forever. Then maybe when you can finally return to the U.S. if you so wish, you will be able to build up and create a truly free, accepting democracy. Maybe a little more humble, more understanding, kinder.............................................. America is not dead.
Many Americans are appalled by males in female sports. They vote accordingly.
Many Americans are against racism (the PC acronym is DEI. They vote accordingly.
Many Americans think America should have secure borders. They vote accordingly.
Many Americans think that merit is more important than race/sex. They vote accordingly.
Many Americans are appalled by lawlessness on college campuses. They vote accordingly.
Many Americans don’t think that murder and rape should be applauded. They vote accordingly.
Many Americans have noticed that the professions have been captured. They vote accordingly.
Many Americans are anti-woke. They vote accordingly
The list goes on and on and on…
This is basically BS. If Trump is really so bad, why did the Democrats run such abysmal candidates against. The truth is the Democrats never believed a word of what they said. The reality is that 'other' issues were far more important (to them). The list is long and sad, Let me offer just a few examples. Does Gaza ring a bell? Does Imane Khelif ring a bell? How about DEI?
I swore that same oath when I was commissioned, and though I left the service decades ago, I still affirm it. I am alert to the possibility that its fulfillment may require different actions in the future than it has in the past. I’m not packing up. I’m not stockpiling ammo. But I am preparing.
Please leave. The crying of elites, especially those in government, that have caused the slow bleed of the American working class over the last 30+ years, is impossible to accept. This defense of and support of an oligarch's regime that has injected a level of social chaos to deflect from the wholesale theft of American assets to pad their Wall Street and real estate portfolio marks them as non-Americans... anti-patriots that are in it for their selfish greed and to hell with the bottom 80%.
You and your cohort have literally screwed the country with your idiotic globalist pursuits that all derive from a looter handbook. NAFTA, China in the WTO as a Most Favored Trading Partner... what in the hell were you thinking would happen? You all crashed the hell out of the global economy in 2008... we have not really recovered from that. Then you went hog wild over the global pandemic, destroyed lives and small businesses unnecessarily, put the nation more trillions in debt with most of that money going into your pockets... fomented the largest move of corporate consolidation we have every seen... caused massive inflation.
You are a hazard to the country and so it is good that you leave unless you agree to never touch another of any of the controls of the country.
Time to reimagine the republic
This author has earned the right to his despair, by fighting for the ideals which make us Americans. I admire his service and eloquence even as I reject his despair. He comes by his pessimism honestly, and most Americans of both parties agree that our political system is badly broken.
How did we get here? Partly by having presidents of both parties lie to us about Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. But since the late 1970s the greater harm came from candidates self-censoring to avoid alienating potential campaign donors.
As the fundraising arms race accelerated, one good policy idea after another was taken off the table and out of the conversation. In a death of a thousand cuts this unseen process drained the conversation of substance, asphyxiating our democracy instead of overthrowing it in a dramatic single blow.
You can’t fight what you can’t see. Across decades the money hollowed out government by the people in an insidious process that left us enervated, disoriented, and seeing Americans of the other party as our enemy - when campaign cash has been Public Enemy Number One all along.
Here’s where I push back most sharply against Finnegan. We are far from defeated. We can fix the money problem by publicly financing elections, and the best way to do this is with voter dollars, aka democracy vouchers.
I do not suggest this will be easy. Breaking through the noise, the politics of divide and conquer, and the prevailing pessimism will take time. But it is far too early to give up on the American people. We remain the only nation defined by ideals instead of by race, religion or some other group identity. Ideals make us Americans. Fighting for these ideals is what Americans do.
I hope that Finnegan will reconsider his decision to leave, that he will stay and keep fighting - not for one party or the other - but for the ideals we all stand for, which inspired his public service.
www.savedemocracyinamerica.org